Subject: Discuss the new Freshmeat.net UI
First of all, please let this be a discussion. It is NOT a support request. Please do not ever mark it "resolved" thus closing it to future comments.
Patrick, Jeff, etc -- please explain to us why, after a year of complaints by your user community, that you continue to hold onto this new CMS. We've shouted again and again that the new site is vastly unusable compared tot he old UI, but you continue to coddle it like your own child.
When I first chimed in about this, I was answering your own discussion asking for opinions on the new look and feel. I answered you honestly, citing both aesthetics and functional usability issues, but you replied with something along the lines of "complaining isn't useful". Then the topic got rolling and my opinions were agreed upon and supported by many others, so you closed the topic.
Again, I used to come here to find useful code, but every time I've visited in the past 10 months I given up after 5 minutes because most of the UI features are so utterly unusable. For example, why do you sort by popularity or number? When I use Browse by desktop environment, the secondary tags are sorted by number of matches. That is ridiculous. What if I want to next add "email" as a filter? Well, I have to look down through the list for "email" rather than find it alphabetically.
I think what you folks are missing is that you chose a blogging engine to replace the GUI. But Freshmeat is not a blog -- it's a catalog and database. And tho I speak for myself when I say that I'll never be happy with this new CMS, I suspect that a large percentage of your community shares that feeling.
I also realize that my post will come off as preachy and complaining, and well, I suppose you'd be right. But it's my reaction to my continual frustration with what was once a very useful site but is now only ever a quick unsatisfying stop.
Finally, I ask that you let this be a discussion and never "Resolve" it.
Regards
Support Staff 2 Posted by Patrick Lenz on 18 Oct, 2009 08:33 PM
Hi,
I'd greet you by name but you didn't leave any. For a similar reason and since you seem to be using a different email address from the one you've been using for all the other topics you created (which we supposedly closed without doing anything about them). So I cannot do any research about what all those topics were, that were so uniformly agreed upon.
Also, since you claim this is not a support request, I'm moving it out of the Problems category, which is for support requests.
Anyway.
I coddle this new system like my own child because that's exactly what it is. Contrary to what you may believe (and state later in your rant), this is not a hacked version of WordPress. I built it from the ground up, only basing it on code and concepts that have powered freshmeat.net since it's inception in 1997.
You're also off in your timing. We've been online with the new system since March 15, so there really wasn't a year full of complaints, let alone 10 months (claimed later in your rant). We haven't purposely closed any topics that contained valuable feedback or even concrete criticism or suggestions. We did close inflammatory posts and broad statements like "It sucks.". And even that has been stated multiple times by both Jeff and myself. (Not that it sucks, but which topics were closed.)
The popularity sorting was one of the most highly requested features after the new site went live with a default sort of "relevance". It's also a highly effective way of sorting and I use it myself all the time. If you don't like it, there's plenty of other options available for sorting. If we're missing one, please request it by actually letting us know what you want to sort by. (Even taking a wild guess I have no idea what meaningful options we're missing.)
Regarding the secondary tag sorting: This part was published and ran by the group of users that complained to us about the inability to apply filters in an AND fashion (as opposed to an OR fashion, which was the only way to filter when the site relaunched). Everyone preferred the way it is now. I did suggest that adding filters by name (actually entering them manually, with auto-completion) would be possible, too, but that didn't generate a lot of interest, hence it was left out to keep UI as clean and straightforward as possible. We did also come to a very clean solution regarding the negative filtering UI (to exclude projects matching a certain filter), which shows that we do indeed cooperate very directly with our users leaving valuable feedback.
Regarding your statement that we used a blogging engine or a CMS for our site, I can't find any reason to even consider this being true let alone any concrete criticism what we can change in our homegrown software to address your concerns, which are totally not clear to me. (Besides maybe the filtering point, addressed above.)
So, I need to ask you directly because I have no other means to find out myself (for the reasons outlined above): What is it that you want us to change? We've implemented a boatload of feature requests and bug reports over the past half year working together closely with our audience, and even letting people beta test the features before we're launching them to make sure we get things right. The same applies to you, should you discuss your issues concretely instead of ranting in such a generalized way that no clear way to extract any points that we could work on exists.
Thanks for reading.
-Patrick
3 Posted by meat on 20 Oct, 2009 03:43 AM
Patrick,
Thanks for replying.
I'm not sure what you mean about "all the other topics [I've] created". I think I've only ever created one (the one I cited), but I can't find it. I don't use my name because I'm adamantly against creating a historical record of my point-in-time opinions on the WWW. As for March -- sorry, I must have visited after being away a long while and assumed that you'd been online with the new UI for many months. Oops.
My favorite FM act was to browse based on some loose criteria. So, visiting from the home page I see a list like I used used to (pre March, 2009), but what are the dates? Are they last updated or last added?
Next, let say I want to see what programs are available to burn data cd compilations. If I click "Browse Projects by Tag" I get a mishmash of terms in no particular order (or so it seems). In the old UI I would start at my Operating system, then perhaps License, then enter search terms. I guess this new UI works reverse of that -- enter terms and then click tags as filters.
It just seems to me that the old UI offered a clearer understanding of the tags -- like "License: GPL" and "Operating System: POSIX", and in a table format, and maybe this gave me an idea of more data presented. I guess this new look and feel does remind me of WordPress. Sorry, didn't realize you'd built it from scratch. May I suggest you make the format wider, and perhaps bring back a table list of the primary tags (OS, License, Language, etc) in addition to the loose tags?
As for the discussions -- sorry I meant to post this in Suggestions. I wasn't aware I'd put it in Problems. Also, I've never seen a discussion board that had topics closed like this. Back in March there were a slew of threads criticizing the new site and many/most were "Resolved" within a day or two, so I thought it might wind up like this thread: http://help.freshmeat.net/discussions/suggestions/82-account-removal. This post is in Suggestions but it's marked Resolved. I don't understand the point -- are you going to add this feature? Not going to? Did you? And nobody else can comment.
Anyway, I guess I'm just an old nostalgic dog, and apt to spout on kneejerk reactions. Sorry.
Support Staff 4 Posted by Patrick Lenz on 01 Nov, 2009 09:20 AM
Sorry for the late reply. Your comment was marked as spam.
To address your points:
The dates on the front page are just as ever the date/time on which that particular release was approved by our staff.
The "mishmash" is, as indicated by the headline, a list of our most popular tags, ordered alphabetically. Below that list is a link to all available tags, also ordered alphabetically.
I can see how hunting down a start for browsing a particular tag can be a drag and I'm open to suggestions on how to improve that part of the site. Would a search specifically geared towards searching in the tag pool only help in this case?
First of all, in the old UI you could only pick one category as a starting point, then search, then add additional categories from the awkward dropdown list as you go.
In the new UI, once you start browsing (by clicking any tag in any part of the site) or enter a search term, you're back to being able to add additional filters like licenses or operating systems by using the filter boxes to the right of the results page (see attached screenshot).
This post was indeed resolved without action on our part. We're not perfect and may have resolved a discussion or two that was not a hatred like the many that we closed rightfully because people were just flaming without substance.
Thanks again.
-Patrick