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[VanHalen]

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shambler wrote:
The old forum was better except that most of the time it didn't work

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True. But they didn't have to completely change the format to create a new working version. That is a fact. They could have told the programmers to emulate the old forum look and feel as much as possible, and that would not have had anything to do with the coding performance. But someone probably higher-up made the decision to create a new look and feel. He is the Decider. Blame Him. Either that or they just told the programmers "build us a new forum" and walked away. I've seen that done before many times.

With programmers, you cannot take anything for granted. You have to give them blueprints on exactly what you want to have developed, otherwise it will most likely turn out completely different than what you had expected. Don't just assume that the programmers working on rebuilding these forums have ever even visited a popular forum before they started coding on this project. They are probably 22 years old and have been isolated playing video games all their lives.

Why do I know this? In my job, I give projects to programmers for development. I have learned the hard way not to assume that a programmer has a clue about graphic design and smooth layout, because most of them do not. In fact, when you show them a good project format and design that the average Joe likes, they usually hate it. Most programmers think in terms of logic, and do not like to waste mental energy on trivial matters such as proper placement of features, graphic appeal, or ease of use.

So go figure... somebody probably was unaware of this when they assumed that the programmers would make the new forum resemble the functionality and feel of the old forum - they were just desperate to get it fixed. Rule #1 when working with programmers... never assume that they think like the other 99% of the population. Once you learn this, it gets much easier to work with them.

Don't hack me bro. I'm just stating the obvious. 

[baob]

I too am involved in website creation. I think I've spotted aa few hidden assumptions in your post ... lets see ...

The new site look and feel was created from scratch by programmers directed by HC

I think that's fairly unlikely. I've not researched it myself but the consensus seems to be that the new forum was an off the shelf product. If so, it would have come with a lot of fixed functionality, some tweakable functionality and some default page templates that have been tweaked for HC (colours, backgrounds, maybe a bit of navigation etc)

So look and feel would have started off a certain way, which was almost certainly not like the old HC, and moved in what somebody thought was the right direction, so far as they were able to make those changes, in the time available to them  before the rushed launch. I suspect that one feature I miss is not coming back simply because it's not available in the new platform, not because someone decided it should be different.

To create a new website you hire programmers

If all you have have working for you is experts in programming languages, yes you have a potential disaster on you hands. There are ways to mitigate this:

• If you employ only a few people make sure you hire people with with proven user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) and graphic design skills in addition to programming
• If you employ a sizeable team make sure you have a UI/UX/graphic design specalist, or one of each
• Ensure the setup is such that there is the shortest possible feedback loop between the people using the website and the people creating it. The Lean Startup approach is awesome. I speak from experience. The results are very different from handing projects over to programmers for development.

[VanHalen]

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baob wrote:

I've not researched it myself but the consensus seems to be that the new forum was an off the shelf product. 

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This does NOT look like an off-the-shelf product at all. It seems to me like they developed it from scratch. If it was an off-the-shelf product, the HC folks picked the freaking lamest forum software on the market.

[baob]

This thread "Other forums that use Lithium Brand Nation software" suggests it's at the very least based on a pre-existing package with some HC-specific customisation.

If you visit the HC 'My Settings' section and the Skype Community 'My Settings' section you can see the underlying similarities.

It does look to me like they've bought a package (+ customisation) that comes from the 'customer support' perspective (hence 'kudos' and 'this message is a solution') and not a 'community forum' perspective. 

[Potts]

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VanHalen wrote:

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baob wrote:

I've not researched it myself but the consensus seems to be that the new forum was an off the shelf product. 

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This does NOT look like an off-the-shelf product at all. It seems to me like they developed it from scratch. If it was an off-the-shelf product, the HC folks picked the freaking lamest forum software on the market.

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If you can't tell this is an off the shelf product I doubt I'd be hiring you to do any work for me.

[1001gear]

How does FB work?

[baob]

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1001gear wrote:

How does FB work?

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FB meaning Facebook ? I'm sure whole websites have been devoted to that subject, you may want to narrow the focus of your question a bit

But  for starters ... it's not an off-the-shelf package, if that's what you meant. (And I'm sure they have armies of UI/UX/design specialists in addition to programmers too )

It's about as different an organisation to HC as you could possibly imagine.

[VanHalen]

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Potts wrote:

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VanHalen wrote:

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baob wrote:

I've not researched it myself but the consensus seems to be that the new forum was an off the shelf product. 

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This does NOT look like an off-the-shelf product at all. It seems to me like they developed it from scratch. If it was an off-the-shelf product, the HC folks picked the freaking lamest forum software on the market.

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If you can't tell this is an off the shelf product I doubt I'd be hiring you to do any work for me.

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That is ridiculous. I actually paid a programmer to add a user forum module to a CMS application that we developed, and it works better than this one. The quote button is in the right place and you can read the content of a thread by hovering over it. It only took a few months to code, and we got all the feature ideas from exisiting popular forum software.

If this started out as an off-the-shelf forum software, it was a piece of shit.

[1001gear]

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baob wrote:

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1001gear wrote:

How does FB work?

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FB meaning Facebook ? I'm sure whole websites have been devoted to that subject, you may want to narrow the focus of your question a bit

But  for starters ... it's not an off-the-shelf package, if that's what you meant. (And I'm sure they have armies of UI/UX/design specialists in addition to programmers too )

It's about as different an organisation to HC as you could possibly imagine.

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Just seems to handle a gob of traffic AND national intel with no hitches.  \_o_/

Isn't Lithium a customer support deal? Q/A with minimal interaction/pics/video and flame wars?

[baob]

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1001gear wrote:

Just seems to handle a gob of traffic [...] with no hitches.  \_o_/

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 It's one of the most-visited websites in the world so it has to. And it does that because everything it does is custom made by facebook,and that goes way beyond the programs, into how the new software releases are deployed (and rolled back) and how the load is distributed across multiple server (computer) farms ... yada, yada.

It's so different in scale to HC it's hard to make comparisons. Same thing applies to google, twitter, amazon, youtube and a few others ...even working in the industry myself, I find their scale of operations gob-smacking.

Whereas you will most likely find that HC is running on a single server (computer), a microscopic budget by comparison, probably minimal resilience (outages that could last hours) with a handful of web specialists  in-house (if any), and a few more on an as-need basis at Lithium. (This paragraph is speculation on my part, anyone who knows better please correct me).

However ... it's true that makes very little difference at all to the fact that we expect HC to get it right. It does give some clues as to how it could easily go wrong though. 

[VanHalen]

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baob wrote:

Whereas you will most likely find that HC is running on a single server (computer), a microscopic budget by comparison, probably minimal resilience (outages that could last hours) with a handful of web specialists  in-house (if any), and a few more on an as-need basis at Lithium. 

Most forums could run on one web server and one database server, but I highly doubt this one can. In fact, we saw with the last version of HC that even though you have the best forum software, you need to span it across multiple servers and databases to make it run efficiently when you have millions of records in your database that are being accessed potentially thousands of times per minute.

What we have here now is not an out-of-the box solution, but rather, a very custom solution with new features being added daily. Consider this the beta version, and yes, we are the guinea pigs. And I can assure you that the company doing the custom programming has already done the spanning work ahead of time. If they wouldn' have, this whole forum would have bit the dust when they imported the old threads.

Welcome to the jungle baby.

[baob]

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VanHalen wrote:

We saw with the last version of HC that even though you have the best forum software, you need to span it across multiple servers and databases to make it run efficiently when you have millions of records in your database that are being accessed potentially thousands of times per minute,

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Fair enough, I didn't know that. Still leaves HC as a massively different scale to Facebook, though, and susceptible to very different problems.

[VanHalen]

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baob wrote:

Fair enough, I didn't know that. Still leaves HC as a massively different scale to Facebook, though, and susceptible to very different problems.

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I think the idea they have adopted is to build a customized scalable system, similar to Facebook in precept, but nowhere near as many features. However, they still need every bit as much security as Facebook has, or the hackers would take this baby down in the first 24 hours it was online.

I have to give the developers some credit... they know WTF they are doing. They just obviously have not spent any time on forums.

[blue2blue · Accepted solution]

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VanHalen wrote:

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baob wrote:

I've not researched it myself but the consensus seems to be that the new forum was an off the shelf product. 

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This does NOT look like an off-the-shelf product at all. It seems to me like they developed it from scratch. If it was an off-the-shelf product, the HC folks picked the freaking lamest forum software on the market.

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Appearances can be deceiving.

I think a lot of folks don't have much of a clue how incredibly complex a bulletin board system is.  No one designs a bulletin board system just for one site, really. There's simply way too much wheel reinvention. It would be an enormous burden to little benefit.

This bulletin board is from the company Lithium, who supply customer service forums for a number of large companies like Intel. Of course, just designing such systems for large companies is no guarantee of competence or success. The company behind the software in the HC2.0 debacle had done forums for Apple, Intel, and others. Lithium currently does systems for HP, Best Buy, Research In Motion, Sony, Comcast, Symantec, and AT&T.

As has been explained a number of times before -- one problem with the old system was that it was poorly scalable on the hardware dedicated to it -- but a perhaps more crushing problem was that HC had become over the years one of the most attractive targets for spammers.

Most of the spam assault was caught in HC's anti-spam moderation queues -- but that just meant that human moderators had to weed through the stuff waiting in moderation in order to not nuke any non-spam posts, and then had to go and ban the particular 'user' (often a robot) before "he" could spam another couple hundred messages. 

This was an endless cycle for moderators and it meant that they were spending most of their time playing a losing game of catch-up with high powered offshore servers spewing spam at us.

The Lithium system is hosted on their server farm, maintained by their IT guys, and their spam mitigation appears excellent, at least at this juncture. And one of the reasons is that their anti-spam efforts are engaged across all their client base, so when an IP number is blacklisted as a spammer on one companies boards, it's blacklisted across all boards, a presumed huge reduction in manpower overhead. Anyhow, we ain't had any spam that I've seen -- except that posted by some 'legit' forum members, of course.  =/

[blue2blue]

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1001gear wrote:

How does FB work?

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It's a bit shakey at times...

I'm presuming you don't want an explanation of their core technologies. If so, you can look it up. Volumes have been written on them and they are in a continual development process.

They do their own coding, of course. And they have an army of developers and support staff. It is, after all, a huge enterprise with hundreds of millions of users  and an enormous amount of money riding on it. It's bigger than most countries, depending on what you measure.

[baob]

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VanHalen wrote:

I have to give the developers some credit... they know WTF they are doing. They just obviously have not spent any time on forums.

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 The supplier of the sofware certainly missed some essential (to me) features, and it could be the developers lack of experience of forums was an issue. I can imagine other organisational dysfunctions that would have the same result, too (for instance, an unhealthy short-term interest in making money rather than delivering long-term customer satisfaction, or a complete disinterest in user testing). Hard to say which of those alternatives, or potentially many others, is most likely without investgating a bit more.

[lefort_1]

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blue2blue wrote:

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 Anyhow, we ain't had any spam that I've seen -- except that posted by some 'legit' forum members, of course.  =/

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well, there have been a couple spammers who've snuck in.... ask Phil about that cutie, ol Number 51.

[baob]

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blue2blue wrote:

The Lithium system is hosted on their server farm, maintained by their IT guys, and their spam mitigation appears excellent, at least at this juncture. And one of the reasons is that their anti-spam efforts are engaged across all their client base, so when an IP number is blacklisted as a spammer on one companies boards, it's blacklisted across all boards, a presumed huge reduction in manpower overhead. Anyhow, we ain't had any spam that I've seen -- except that posted by some 'legit' forum members, of course.  =/

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 That's interesting, so the user experience has suffered a little (or a lot depending your perspective) as a trade off for a site that's less of a burden for HC to run, and a site that actually stays up.

[lefort_1]

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baob wrote:

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VanHalen wrote:

I have to give the developers some credit... they know WTF they are doing. They just obviously have not spent any time on forums.

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 The supplier of the sofware certainly missed some essential (to me) features, and it could be the developers lack of experience of forums was an issue. I can imagine other organisational dysfunctions that would have the same result, too (for instance, an unhealthy short-term interest in making money rather than delivering long-term customer satisfaction, or a complete disinterest in user testing). Hard to say which of those alternatives, or potentially many others, is most likely without investgating a bit more.

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This really does feel like the early rollout of a ponderously complex (needlessly so) website, long before it was ready. The sad part is, the site's "vision" of what it should be is so flawed (due to a lack of, pr perhaps due to GC corporate guidance) that it just may not recover.

I realize they want this big, one-site-fits all answer. But someone, somewhere, lacks the vision to create it as a one-touch site.... Flatten the hierachy by having one page to navigate to any/all forums (they can keep their hierarchy of Communities, but no one really cares about those artificial barriers...we are all musicians) . One-button nav to User Reviews, Pro Reviews, Articles, the GC Sales Site, etc.

[blue2blue]

Well, clearly, if one can't even get a page to load without timing out, traffic will suffer.  = )

So, for sure, the fundamental job was getting a system that could handle the traffic -- and offer a solution for the untenable spam problem that had been dragging down both the cybernetics and the admins and unpaid volunteer moderators.

Here's a bit more about Lithium:

The Lithium Social Customer Experience Management Platform combines online customer community applications such as forums, blogs, innovation management, live chat, and tribal knowledge bases with the broader social Web and traditional CRM business processes, resulting in a wide range of online customer interaction methods.[5][6] Lithium's SaaS-based platform delivers products on-demand in a hosted environment rather than as traditional, packaged software. Stemming from its gaming roots, the platform incorporates elaborate rating systems for contributors, with ranks, badges, and “kudos counts.”[7]