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Pastimes : Classic SI Customization Option -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BryanB who wrote (428)	1/6/2000 3:07:00 PM
From: mr.mark	Respond to of 644

"The fact is that 85% or better of our total traffic comes from the new site, not the old." you told everyone that you were closing down classic, so they'd better switch. then you come on and say that most of the people are using the new site. is there any flaw in that reporting?

To: BryanB who wrote (428)	1/6/2000 4:03:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 644

>Most people (members included) prefer the new site. I can almost hear some of you cussing and swearing at me as I write this, and you may never believe me no matter what I say. <g> The fact is that 85% or better of our total traffic comes from the new site, not the old. Plus, traffic on the new site is growing rapidly. If you don't believe that, then you can definitely believe this...if it were the other way around, I would have canned the new site a long time ago. As I indicated above, we are not in this to "force our will" on anyone. We're in this to attract, engage and please as many customers as possible. Period. < Please don't equate traffic with preference. I am using the new site, and I am on record for having an emphatically strong preference for the old site. Why am I doing this, you may wonder? Because I received the mass private message in December advising me that the old site was being killed over the weekend. It is the operational equivalent of a Soviet election - there is only one candidate on the ballot. There never was an open, undistorted effort to ask the members which interface they prefer. The only polls run were the samizdat efforts put together by me and Neenny and CheekyKid - efforts which did not receive support or acknowledgement by anyone at Go2Net. In fact, we were in for a fair bit of ridicule, almost exclusively by GNET shareholders, as Luddites and obstructionists. Do not make the mistake of deriving a sense of legitimacy from eyeball counts. The new site and the old site were never put on an equal basis from the moment the Beta gates were opened. I find it very revealing that with the technology and the will to send mass PMs having been demonstrated, no mass opinion audit was sent to all SI members, containing simple, uncharged questions like which look and features they preferred. Now I'm only guessing here because I'm an outsider, but this transition has been consistently managed from day one as a matter of directive. GNET/SI management decided that the GNET-branded New Look was going in. Period. All else was image management guided by the decision that New SI was gonna be the only game in town, baby. I contend that the majority of users prefer the look and feel of the old site. I further contend that there was no open opinion-gathering process to test this supposition objectively. I have seen that the member-initiated petition and poll were effectively ignored by those in charge ... because the inertia of the average user worked in their favor. We will never ever get to the bottom of things because the game was fixed from day one. GNET acquired SI and decided to brand it. This required a total retooling of the old site - especially in ergonomics. The addition of new features like tenatatime was used as a carrot to lure especially the traders and power users into the new environment. I consider this to be a simple conflict between an autonomous user community (the Dryers' original cybervillage) and a corporate technocracy. The technocrats won and came bearing writs and Caterpillars. But do not insult us by trying to sell the idea that the user came first. And do not forget that you ducked my earlier points by fabricating a perceived insult from my substantive complaints. You, BryanB, are GNET first and SI second. Have the grace to admit it. You won. But do not delude yourself into believing your own BS: that you did it fair and sqare under the "old rules".

To: BryanB who wrote (428)	1/6/2000 5:57:00 PM
From: jbe	Respond to of 644

BryanB, I am VERY disappointed! Where is the search box on the personal profiles? And where is my Clubhouse? Granted, I don't have the right to complain, because I was unable to participate in the "guardians' review," although I promised to. But the fact is that I was not the only person to insist, from the outset, that what was of primary concern was function, not format. I didn't really give a hang whether the "new SI" had borders around the messages or not; what really bothered me was the fact that important functions -- the search function, primarily -- were not only not "improved," but dropped. 1) You have restored the "search this thread only" button. But I have to say it does not always work. Could be a minor bug. What happened several times, as I was experimenting with it, was that after entering a word/phrase and then selecting the "this thread only" option, I would nevertheless get references from other threads as well. 2) You have not restored the box that used to follow the personal profile (before the messages). To refresh your memory: it had written across the top: Discussion/People/MetaCrawler. And the buttons, lined up on the right, read: Personal Profiles/Aliases Only/Posts by this Person (new). Interesting, that you should drop a new feature!! The advantage of it was that you could go to say, Joe Blow's profile, knowing that Joe was an Intel expert, enter the word "Intel", hit "posts by this person," and then get all of Joe's recent posts on Intel, at one fell swoop. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe you have just put that little box somewhere else. I hope so. Otherwise I will have to conclude that somebody over in your office just does not get the point! 3) Now, Bryan, you remember you promised you would save my "Grammar and Spelling Lab" Clubhouse! So where is it? Sorry to sound cross. But I am. I spent a lot of time talking about the importance of these features, which are content- not cosmetic-related. Please don't tell me it was all for naught. Joan

To: BryanB who wrote (428)	1/6/2000 6:52:00 PM
From: Cheeky Kid	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 644

Dear Bryan: Remember this post? Message 12223449 (Can't find the original post) We were supposed to have a WWF style battle. The stakes: Cheeky wins - Classic SI would remain. BryanB wins - Classic SI would have been closed. I really looked forward to giving you a few good drop kicks as it would have made me popular with the ladies, plus it would have been a lot of fun <VBG>. Well, maybe not popular with Sarkie Bug and Carolyn F, besides you would have had those lovely ladies tending to your bruised body. However, since the Classic Option on the new SI came into effect, I have been using it and liking it! It needs a few "tweaks" but I was really pleased with the look and feel. Now weeks after using the Classic Option I would never go back to the old SI. As you remember, I voiced my concerns quite loudly when it was first brought to members attention in July 99 that the Classic SI would be replaced by the New SI. Since I like the New SI with Classic Inside unicus.com I cannot enter the WWF contest with you. I will have to find another way to get popular with the babes, and besides, I like you and didn't really want to hurt you in the ring anyway. <g>

To: BryanB who wrote (428)	1/6/2000 10:46:00 PM
From: IEarnedIt	Respond to of 644

OK so I like the new features and just waiting for the rest. Still think the colors could be jazzed up a bit. :-) JD

To: BryanB who wrote (428)	1/7/2000 9:45:00 AM
From: kaydee	Respond to of 644

<<< Which leads me to the final factor. Most people (members included) prefer the new site. I can almost hear some of you cussing and swearing at me as I write this, and you may never believe me no matter what I say. <g> The fact is that 85% or better of our total traffic comes from the new site, not the old. >>> That is because, you made sure users are unaware of the classic site. Ignorance is bliss, if you succeed in your plans to keep the public totally out of sight of classic-SI. To repeat, what we (I) are asking is not what database, software you are using, but the user interface. The majority of users, are used to the color/font of Yahoo/old-SI, not the dull looks of GNET, please keep this in mind. In the long run, you will lose traffic... If you had the guts to face the truth, you would have conducted an open poll, IMO this would have given you an opportunity to keep your conscience clear for all the troubles you have taken. Already you have forced a lot users to switch to dull looking new SI. As LRR says it is like an forced election with only one candidate... But being an optimist as I am, I still have hopes by the time you make additional changes based on BM, in the end we all will be very happy. DB

To: BryanB who wrote (428)	1/10/2000 8:47:00 AM
From: terri acey	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 644

Bryan in reference to your post, <<Most people (members included) prefer the new site.>> Is this just a blanket statement? What kind of measurements have you taken to substantiate your claim? I have been a member since 1996 and I don't ever recall any polls or surveys being conducted either publicly or privately (pms)... << The fact is that 85% or better of our total traffic comes from the new site, not the old. Plus, traffic on the new site is growing rapidly.>> Of course new members are logging into the new site..they don't have a choice..

To: BryanB who wrote (428)	1/14/2000 2:52:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 644

Bryan, I still await an explanation for the disappearance of search functions from your "updated" version of Classic SI! (And for disappearance of the Clubhouses, which you also said would be retained.) In case you missed my post: Message 12490340 Joan

To: BryanB who wrote (428)	1/25/2000 11:03:00 AM
From: jbe	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 644

Bryan, marauding Vandals (surely not you guys!)have smashed up the SI Grammar and Spelling Lab Clubhouse <https://www.siliconinvestor.com/subject.aspx?subjectid=18306>. Please go back to the "old SI site" and see whether you can open our Clubhouse posts. I can't. And I wasn't as clever as I thought I was when I stashed the posts on my zip drive; they can't be opened from there, either. Drat! I put a lot of time into collecting all that information! And now I don't even have a record of it! 1) What the heck happened? 2) What do you mean when you say, in the following PM to us all, that "we can (and will) leave the old Clubhouses [no apostrophe, BTW] up and running, even after we shut down the old SI site"? Ours is already down and definitely not running, even before you have shut down the old SI site." Clubhouses Earlier, I had indicated that we would replace the Clubhouse feature with a similar or better feature on the new SI. Bad news: The Clubhouse replacement feature is not yet complete. Good news: Since the Clubhouses actually run off a database that is separate from the core SI message database, we can (and will) leave the old Clubhouse's up and running, even after we shut down the old SI site. This is of particular concern to me, because I was the one who raised the hue-and-cry about keeping the Clubhouses in the first place! There is something else in your "private" message to all SI members that troubles me, for some reason, and I hope I am just being paranoid. That is the passage where you speak of changes you will make, including "over a dozen user interface enhancements." These "enhancements" allegedly include 'Ability to search "Posts by this Person" and "This Subject Only" included on all* appropriate pages.'* Excu-u-u-se me, but that search ability is not a "user interface enhancement", on a level with "changing the 'visited links' color" (my! ain't that somethin'!), but an essential feature that was LOST when you switched from the "old" SI to the "new." It was the loss of that feature that made me support staying with the Old SI. Enhancement, my foot; we're talking restoration here. May I suggest, therefore, that you put restoration of the search function ahead of the 11 other items on your list, all of which seem to be of a purely cosmetic nature, anyway. I am responding to your mass "PM" publicly, Bryan, so that if there are any other people out there who share my views, they can say so. Joan