Ad Terras Per Aspera

John Reeves Hall died September 17th at 9:40 PM. I’ll miss him.

I just found this post by a AboveTopSecret Forum administrator detailing how FEMA detention camps are no different than what the Nazi’s used in World War 2.

I’m extremely depressed to report that things seem to only be getting sadder concerning the people so devastatingly affected by Katrina last week. Two car loads of us headed over to Falls Creek, a youth camp for Southern Baptist churches in Oklahoma that agreed to have its facilities used to house Louisiana refugees. I’m afraid the camp is not going to be used as the kind people of the churches who own the cabins believe it was going to be used.

Jesse Jackson was right when he said “refugees” was not the appropriate word for the poor souls dislocated due to Katrina. But he was wrong about why it is not appropriate. It’s not appropriate because they are detainees, not refugees.

This is bullshit, and it needs to stop. These are people, not prisoners.

Kris Chapman over at the SF.Net Engineering Blog is asking what the community thinks works and doesn’t work. This is what I think.

What doesn’t work:

• The lack of a clean CSS layout means it is hard for users to use the website in diverse environments. Many users who have special needs (such as using audio readers who depend on clean website layout), or simply users who want to access the website from a low resolution device (640×480 screens, cell phones, PSP, etc) cannot deal with the lack of a clean layout.
• The lack of good XHTML. The current SF.Net tag soup is the equivalent of a 14 year old script kiddy hopping on an AOL chatroom, and saying, “Y0 m4ng!1, w4ts upz0r!!!lolone!!eleven!” Welcome to the year 2005, where people use validating XHTML, and quit making poor Firefox use quirks mode.
• God forsaken <iframe> ads. I don’t really minds ads, people have to pay for their website somehow, but please! Drop those iframes! If you really need to support HTML layouts for ads, do something cool like dynamically insert the HTML using AJAX.
• The really backwards setup of SF.Net tracker. As much as people hate Bugzilla, and bitch about it’s usability bugs, its still lightyears ahead of the tracker. The tracker needs to match Bugzilla feature for feature, and I wouldn’t be against the cloning of the Bugzilla interface.
• Doodad Box bloat in the layout. I agree that Most Active and Top Downloads are useful, but they do not belong on most pages. IMHO, they belong two places, the front page, and My SF; nowhere else, its a waste of space.
• Lack of bandwidth/server power. Its not related to the design itself (actually, it is, if the layout would use half the images, I’d use half the bandwidth, because no client is properly caching the images anyhow), but the site is also slow because too many users are hitting the servers.
• Lack of forum/mailing list/whatever else integration. Too many projects have a huge disconnect between the ‘web user’ and the ‘clueful user’ groups. Web users typically use forums, the actual users we care about use mailing lists and/or news groups. For projects that have both enabled (which most do), the two groups have a hard time communicating with each other. What we really need is to get rid of forums, mailing lists, and the previously existing news groups, and fold them all into a single system. Someone can post from an email client, a news client, or a web client, and it all goes to the same place and talks to the same users.
• Get rid of comments on news items for both SF.Net news items and project news items. This is another case of communication method overload. Whatever users want to say using the comment system, it needs to be said somewhere else, commenting on the news entries is not the way. No one is using them anyhow.
• Get rid of project news items altogether. You know what? Quite a few projects aren’t even using them, or are using them improperly, or just aren’t keeping them up to date. The only place a project has to report news is their website space given to them by SF.Net.
• Project’s DB sucks. Yes, another thing not related to the SF.Net website itself, but it still reflects on the user experience. I don’t personally use the server myself, but I’ve been told its often slow, crash happy, unresponsive, and way overloaded. This should be the next thing to get loving from Santa. (CVS has been a naughty child, and it got two or three new overpowered boxen, how sad.)
• The download system.

What does work:

• Anything I haven’t bitched about. If I don’t bitch about it, I probably haven’t even noticed it. The more transparent a service is, the better designed it is. The perfect sf.net setup would involve a system that could accommodate any user’s work flow. And I really mean any, not most, and not half. Any.
• The new stats system. It works quite well, its a little glitchy, but its a clear step up from what we had before.
• The donation system. This is another useful service. Its always been hard to properly recognize our generous friends in the audience, mainly because we could not automate the system, but now we can. However, a lot of projects are not using the system, and giving users their Paypal address directly to avoid paying the “SF.Net tax”. Now, I agree with SF.Net’s assessment of the situation (“If you make money, so should we, especially since we are effectively hosting your stuff for free, and this costs a lot of money”), but for projects to do this, they are not helping their users, their generous donators, themselves, SF.Net, or the whole FOSS community. So, please, keep the Eeny-Weeny Wrenches and Gears.

Now, I understand you wanted us (the community) to nitpick things, but we can’t even nitpick things until the biggest issues are fixed yet. Sure, dark green is easier to read than light green, but whats the point if the whole system is designed wrong? Kris, come by #sourceforge on irc.slashnet.org sometime, and talk to the people there. You’ll find out what you need to know.

Jeremy Zawodny decided today to declare trackbacks dead. Excuse me while I stifle a giggle. With all the services that support trackback now (including Yahoo! News), and third party services to add trackback easily (such as Haloscan, like I use), trackback is far from dead.

Though, theres a few people who agree with Jeremy: “Trackbacks are a good distributed system similar to fallout shelters of the 50′s. At the time, we really needed them, but now with the rise of Technorati, Feedster and PubSub, we have something much better than trackback.” says Steve Kirks.

For those that aren’t versed in the ways of Blog-fu, a trackback is, according to Wikipedia, “a mechanism used in a blog that shows a list of entries in other blogs that refer to a post on the first blog.” In other words, its a method to reply to blogs by using your own blog.

Trackbacks are not without problem, of course. There is the vicious scourge of trackback spam, where spammers send a trackback back to your blog, and try to convince your readers to buy their product. See this entry Alden Bates’ Weblog for an example of what people have to do to stop spamming, its quite simple.

If trackback dead, why would Haloscan have more than 100,000 users*? Or why would Yahoo!, C|Net, and other big name sites support trackback? And I certainly wouldn’t have added trackback to my own blog if I didn’t think it was useful.

Supporters of alternate systems often say Technorati, PubSub, or other systems are the answer. They are simply part of the answer. Technorati simply tracks links mentioned from blogs, as to be able to see who is linking to who/what; problem is, you can’t display how many links are linked to your blog entry itself, unlike comments or trackbacks.

PubSub, on the other hand, is sorta like a Google for information sources, and you get all your results in an RSS feed. Amazingly useful, yes, but its only part of the answer. Neither PubSub nor Technorati allow your readers to be informed of further information contained on other blogs; said further information is written by your readers. In other words, your readers communicate with each other and form a community.

“Why is a community important?”, you ask. Communities are what power blogs, or really, all websites. Comments, trackbacks, forums, and message boards all allow users to communicate with each other. Then you also have websites and blogs about communication forms themselves, such as IRC channels and Usenet groups, or mailing lists, or just stuff for people who know each other in real life.

Just to prove trackback isn’t dead, I’m going to trackback to Jeremy’s article.

_{* 100,000 is quite a lot when you realise Movable Type and WordPress both natively support trackback, and a vast majority of active blogs use MT or WP.}

Update: The Net Is Dead has a few good comments on why trackback isn’t dead, and Temple of the Screaming Penguin explains why Pingback, an alternative to Trackback, doesn’t work either.

Every day, cell phones get stolen. Well, apparently this one moron didn’t get away with it, and was stupid enough to take pictures of himself using the cell phone, and the owner setup the phone to log all pictures taken. Said owner emails crook:

Like to steal cell phones and use them to take pics of yourself and make videos…. HA! guess what pal… i have every pic you took and the videos…. I will be plastering the town with pics of your face, that %!$#*& face and the childs face…. wow thieves really are dumb…. good day pal

oh yeah by the way…. the phone is now just a paperweight and can never be used again…

Fucktard replies:

yOoOo pimp tell sabrina i said hi ima b bangin her like i did my gurl n save on ur phone n dont b madd my dick betta den urz

Good bye, fucktard. Have a nice time in federal bang-you-in-the-ass prison.