AFP548.com – some critique

[filipp]

Hi all,

I’ve been a loyal fan of this site for quite a while. OS X sysadmins are a minority in a minority and every active community around it is worth it’s weight in gold (I dunno what that means on the WWW, but never-mind…)
With all due respect, there are a couple of things that trouble me deeply:
1) How long does it take to get an article published here? It seems more than several weeks. Why? Is there some rigorous revision process involved that I don’t know of? Shouldn’t that be the community’s job? Isn’t one of the great advantages of the online medium it’s immediacy – you get an idea, write it down, check your facts (make sure everything works), publish it and then learn from others’ comments, while you start working on the next thing. You shouldn’t have to wait for weeks for someone to approve something. Sorry if I sound angry but I think I have two articles somewhere in a backlog now.
It’s kind of understandable with macosxhints.com, with about 6 hints being published every day and 1 person going through them and actually adding comments, but here? If you ask me, with this level of specialization, all articles should just be posted right away, with of-course the obvious measures taken to prevent random spamming.
2) Why is there a 293 x 257px “hole” in the place where an article editor should be? This isn’t 1998 anymore. May I suggest replacing it with TinyMCE (for example) that’s actually used (in WordPress for example) and usable. You shouldn’t make generating content painful on a site that lives on user generated content!
3) Why is there spam all over the forums? I know this isn’t the mod’s “fault”, but it leaves a very poor impression of a forum. Considering there’s many easy ways to protect yourself from it, *including* manual labor.
If the moderators/admins are overwhelmed with duties, please, hire more people! I’m pretty sure there’s quite a few people out there (myself included) who’d love to help out. You don’t have to pay them – a simple Thank You can go a long way for an opportunity to work on a high profile site like this.
4) Why is there still no IRC channel dedicated to OS X Server? It takes like 2 minutes to set one up. Here. I realize this isn’t your “duty” per se, but still.
These are not hard problems. Most of them could be fixed in less than a day.

[filipp]

Hi Joel, thanks for your reply, greatly appreciated!
[QUOTE]
Both have been approved and are published. 😀
You’re right that it takes longer than it should, and that’s a bad thing. The main reason for this being our volunteer workforce. As the site has grown so have the actual jobs of the 5 admins that run the site. Two of us have had children in the last 12 mos. I’m on track for over 100k miles on American Airlines alone this year. And we’re a bit head down doing some Leopard prep for our respective employeers.
It shouldn’t be that way, but right now it is.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, the first one was published today. There’s actually a 9 page article I wrote on using iChat server with MSN that I couldn’t squeeze through the textarea (getting XML through that thing is like pulling teeth) so I just exported it as PDF and sent a link to Josh asking if it would be possible to post it somehow. I know, my bad. 🙂
[QUOTE]
We like to have a bit of a collective think on them. I have serious issues with the quality that goes through macosxhints.com and it’s usefullness anymore. I really don’t want this site to be that. However, as I mentioned above, we are certainly much longer to post than we should be.
[/QUOTE]
I understand. I’m not crazy about the content either, but that’s besides the point. As a community, they seem to work smoothly. Even though they probably generate an order of magnitude more traffic than afp548.com – 300k+ posts in the forum and no spam in sight.
[QUOTE]
Geeklog uses the fcuk editor, but last time I looked it really didn’t play well with Safari. None of the admins here are very versed in php so it’s not been high on our list to graft in another edit.
[/QUOTE]
None of the WYSIWYG JavaScript editors support WebKit. FCKEditor is actually the first one to make strides in that direction. However they work just fine with Camino or Firefox and if I was to choose between firing up another browser for 15 minutes or wrestling for hours with a text area, then I’d choose the former. And if an author’s still adamant about using Safari, they can still use a text area.
I’ve done a fair bit of web development so I think I could help out in this area.
[QUOTE]
We manually remove about 50-100 forum spam a day. With another 300-500 caught be the spam filters.
[/QUOTE]
It’s not good enough!! 🙂 We’ll just have to look at this problem more closely. This one is the reason I said “MOST of the problems could be fixed in less than a day”!
[QUOTE]
I’ll drop you an e-mail, happy for the help.
[/QUOTE]
Great, thanks!
[QUOTE]
I don’t think any of us have much of an IRC habit… In fact I’ve never used IRC in my life. Not that we’re against it, just something we don’t do.
[/QUOTE]
Of-course, I don’t know everybody here (or anyone for that matter) but speaking for myself, I’ve had plenty of situations when a realtime venue would’ve been invaluable. Anyways, you have a channel now, whether You like it or not. 😉 I actually tried this once with the macos-x-server mailinglist and it died pretty quickly, but who knows maybe it’ll catch on this time…

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