It is just a little ironic that a thread intended to include the community on a decision in *advance* is now being used to discuss the ill feelings that failing to give advance notice before has generated! Oh well, I'm a big boy, I can handle that.
My complaint isn't about the advance discussion. I thought it was very unique to be involved in the decision making process at all. Normally we find out that there was even a discussion after we log into the new system and ask ourselves what happened and facepalm. I know I about threw up when I saw the new forum back in May. We took something that was broke and broke a whole bunch of new stuff. Just for fun, of course!
Yes, promises have evidently been made and been broken concerning this forum - you're not the first to let me know about that particular mine field I inherited when I took the CTO job at iXSystems. I'm still discovering where the mines are. I didn't even know until just now that there had been a "promise spreadsheet" made, nor are the existing Forum bugs particularly easy to find (I just looked, and if there's a logical system there, I don't see it - I rather hoped there would be a component called "Forum" but no such luck!).
There is a "Staff Area" that is only available for mods and admins. That's where the spreadsheet is. Something tells me you don't have access to it. Don't feel too bad.. I didn't have permissions to edit my own signature when it was broken for almost 3 weeks. I didn't have permissions to start a PM with anyone for 3 weeks, and my color scheme was broken for about 10 days. For almost a month after the new forum upgrade the forum was more usable when I was a "guest" than logged in as myself. Yes, it was THAT broken. Even now, I have no clue what settings may or may not be screwed up with my account that I don't even know about and just assume that its just as broken for everyone else.
The fact that things went down that way does indeed suck, and I wish I had a time machine so I could go back to before my hire date and do lots of things differently, but I don't have one of those and can only play the hand I've been dealt from this point forward. I hope that when people read my forum postings, they'll at least take that fact into account. I also hope they'll take into account the fact that I'm here at all, and if I was at all inclined to duck responsibility for the infrastructure now that it was on my plate, I'd probably be hiding away from the public like most senior managers are inclined to do. I'm not. Hi.
Don't you love being handed the keys to dad's new automobile, then you turn around and find out the car's parked in the middle of the street and there's a nice friendly policeman writing YOU a ticket for not parking it in your driveway? LOL. You aren't the first person that's gotten the keys to the forum and realized how broken it is. At least you're getting paid for the BS and I donate my time and get the BS as a free bonus! It's like a "buy one get one free", but better!
I'll make you all a deal, and you can either take it on faith that my promises are better than those you've had before or you can just cynically decide it's more of the same and I suck without even giving me a shot - I can't make that decision for you.
Ok. Just be forwarned that the proverbial bank account is already in the negative. I really have no opinion of you personally. Never really saw you post until this thread, and I was more than surprised that you were even soliciting feedback from the community. But the problems that many people have aren't with a single person. Its that the forum has been neglected by iXsystems. If "iXsystems" is a euphemism for you, then fine. I really have no clue of the hierarchy in iXsystems, who does or doesn't make choices, if I'm happy with their choice, etc. I just look at it from the point of view of your typical user that sees the all-powerful iXsystems make promises and then break them over and over without remorse. I can't exactly fault James(or insert any other name you want) if he's being told not to work on the forum and he's the one that's supposed to be working on it. So I choose not to fault James(again, insert any other name you want) and instead fault "iXsystems" in general. I know some people that aren't responsible at all for the forum problems. William, dlavigne and dwhite come to mind. But I can't point the finger at who I should blame for the screwups. And it really doesn't change anything even if I could blame someone by name. The stuff is still broken. And that's what
really matters to me.
Let's first get the bug tracking system transitioned to something that doesn't make some of my engineers puke (and where I can't even find anything myself), a process which will also involve portaging all of the bugs across so I don't want to waste any effort on something that's in the process of departing.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to find the useful posts in this forum now? The signal to noise ratio is very poor and has been for quite a long time. This is why there was discussion with having topic #12 added a very long time ago. You guys took so long to implement it(hint: it's still not implemented) that many of the experienced FreeBSD users have already left(and good luck trying to build that bridge again). The few of us that are left are running out of patience with answering the same posts day in and day out. In fact, I can't remember the last time I had a post that was actually thought provoking. It has been this way for quite some time because we aren't filtering out the rif-raff in the forum. At this point, I feel like there's no hope for the forum without just wiping the whole thing clean and starting over with enforced rules for duplicate posts, cross posting, and searching. Right now someone makes a post with a problem on Monday, then Wednesday the same question is asked again by someone else, then Thursday by someone else, then Friday by someone else. Then, for the next 3 months we'll see the same question show up 3 times a week because nobody can search and find that one post in 100 that has the long detailed explanation. No, I'm not exagerating this either. It really is that frequently. I've told people "look down 2 posts" more than once.
Many posts that were created (some that I spent
hours putting instructions together for) aren't even legible now because of the forum software upgrade. Many links don't work at all since the forum upgrade. I can't even find the link right now because I can't even search for it. But, as far as I know, it hasn't been fixed. When I posted wherever/whenever I found the problem the answer I was given(not sure if I'm getting it 100%) was something to the effect of "the migration from the old database to the new database wasn't quite as through as we had thought". No additional information was provided that I'm aware of, but I don't bother tracking them anymore because I don't really expect them to be fixed. Reporting them just doesn't do much good except add a bullet to someone's "todo in 2029" clipboard.
So pardon me if I don't feel too bad for the engineers that are upset with their bug tracking system. From my (albeit limited) experience with FreeNAS' bug tracking system, I have yet to see tickets that randomly disappear and are no longer available to view, have the same bug reported 3 times a week for months(even after you've fixed it 2 releases ago) and a lot of the information people tried to provide to help find the bug is now trashed illegible text but you are still expected to know what it said.
I will then personally join the moderators, or anyone else who wants to help, in the process of reviewing the forum-related bugs and sticking them into a taxonomy that can be easily found and prioritized.
There was a push to get someone to volunteer to help with the forums months and months ago(2012? I forget the exact time frame now). Do you know what happened? Everyone laughed and said "yeah.. I don't want to be part of that". The mods all discussed amongst ourselves how badly it would go for the poor soul that was crazy enough to accept the challenge. Holykiller then was inducted into the position of "forum admin". I PMed him with something like "I don't know if I should congratulate you or say i'm sorry." We all know how that went. He had no clue a software upgrade was even coming until it was implemented. LOL.
I can't do that alone since I've only been using the forum software for a few weeks - you need to tell me what's most important to you. If anyone also wants to send me a list of bug numbers in that system (a post-transition task since those #s are about to be changed into redmine equivalents) that they personally care about, I will respond by setting the appropriate priority on them (since I'll know the original bug filer hasn't simply died and/or gone away) AND by finding someone to work on them in priority order, even if it takes a new hire or consultant to make it happen. All of you will be in a position to either applaud or call BS on me because you'll also be able to see the bugs being closed and the forums evolve in real-time.
Enough said. This is the best that I can do!
Honestly, I think my brain just exploded. The fact that any of the bugs could be prioritized for fixing is something that I can't even grasp. In all honesty, I don't even know where I'd start to categorize them. At this point I think we're to the point of almost having to wipe the slate clean and start over with the forums. For example, my issue with the date/time of a post being at the bottom of every post instead of the top(like the forum used to be and every other technical forum I read regularly) is probably my biggest gripe, personally. But the fact that the forum search feature is broken in multiple ways (again/still ....) is probably more important to the masses.
It's nothing personal Mr. Hubbard, but I don't think you really understand how many broken promises have been handed to the mods. As the story goes more than 20 have left the forums since FreeNAS 8 began because they got tired of it. And after those bridges are burned I don't think you're going to convince people to come back. I'm really glad that gpsguy and one or two other people have started posting and replying to the duplicates that we see daily. Because with the gaping hole that was left due to the mass exodus of experienced users thanks to the botched forum upgrade in May, I'd have quit the forums already over the incessant posting of the same question every day.
And quite a few people with more forum knowledge than myself have said that XenForo was perhaps the worst choice for forum software in a technical-oriented forum. I have limited knowledge, but those individuals(I can't remember who they were, when they said it, or what they recommended instead) said that it will take so much time to fix XenForo to really be as useful as the old software was that it would be better to just switch to something else than spend the resources trying to make XenForo work for us. Several moderators even commented back in May that the forums should have been rolled back to the old software because this "upgrade" was no upgrade at all.
One person said that this new software uses flash heavily. I don't know about other people, but come August 31 I'm removing flash from my desktops. I just don't trust Flash anymore. If the forum isn't functional without Flash, then I guess it'll be my time to move on. I've been going without Flash for a few months on my laptop and I have no intention of keeping it around just for this forum.
Anyway, this has gotten way off the topic that was originally intended. (Where's a mod to moderate when you need one!). If this needs to be discussed further we should probably take it to the Staff Area. (Mr. Hubbard, you should give that section a read. There isn't much there, but it would definitely be enlightening.)
Regarding the forum ticket system, I've never seen a forum as broken as this one. Talking to a few other forum owners on other technical websites I have been a member of have said that the software typically manages itself once its setup properly. They did forum upgrades by doing testing for weeks/months, then rolled it out after it was up and working. Few small issues here and there, but nothing requiring a checklist, bug tracking system, etc.
More commonly the issue on forums is with personality conflicts, which are few and far between. Mostly people just stop posting in the thread because they decide its not worth their time to even bother with a response. Most commonly I'd say that the personality conflicts are from people that show up in the forum with no knowledge of what they are doing, aren't willing to read the manual and figure it out for themselves, and practically expect a moderator to do a teamviewer session and setup their FreeNAS server for them with hardware that doesn't meet the minimum requirements by a decade. They get upset when they are provided a link to a thread with instructions for setting up whatever feature they want, and then accuse you of having a bad attitude when your answer isn't dumbed down to the point that your senile grandma could do it. But you can't fix those kinds of people and they usually leave because they don't like the "attitude" of the forum.
