OK, well here's my tuppence worth. Big post, covering a lot of stuff... Sorry.
On not answering before now: forgive me, but got a bit annoyed by the way some of this stuff was asked for (not by all of you). (That and being in London, and having food poisoning and stuff). This request wasn’t like other feature requests, which have on the whole, been asked for politely. Comments like "less broken bookmarks, more admin log", seem to be in one half of the sentence slagging off quit big pieces of work I've already done, and in another half making a request that I do more voluntary work. There have been additional similar comments and I didn't want to post whilst I was annoyed. Some of the comments made to Stet have annoyed me too, and in many ways the disrespect to other people who used to do this difficult job. I think they did a great job, including Andrew, Graham and anyone else. I do put a lot of time and effort into trying to make this as good as it can be, and I am also aware that as Churchill said: "you can't please all of the people, all of the time". This is inevitable. I do my best to let this stuff wash over me, but I’m only human, and it can get to me from time to time.
Specific point for you, Ailsa: you bring up the "paid for ILX" thing, as you have a couple of times before. Please don't take any of this the wrong way, but this always has the habit of getting on my nerves, because it implies that you think I, or others somehow owe you something, because they've paid a donation. However, I know you won't know the detail, so just so as you do, as far as I know, the money went on the computer alone. It didn't go on bandwidth costs, and it didn't go on Stet's time or my time, or Libcrypt's time or anyone else's. I don't want anything from ILX, ever, no thanks are necessary, no anything is necessary, but just to be clear that I don’t ‘owe’ anyone anything, if this were done commercially (in time alone, if not amount of code), then at my work's rates, the donations would have needed to have been at least 100 times what they were. If it were done on lines of code (sorry to sound like a twat, but the average programmer writes a lot less per day than I do), then it would have been more like 500 times. It's a bunch of work for sure.
Personally, I think I have probably spent around 400 hours’ work on ILX over the past seven or eight months, or one solid month, out of work, so I do think from my point of view that it is nice to have a good understanding of why things might have to be done, rather than just dropping everything whenever a user makes a request. You seem to have implied on a couple of occasions that I deliberately don't do stuff people want. All work I have done has been in response to users’ requests. Where it seems to have caused some friction is in trying to find the best compromise between the board actually working and getting back the features people want; and this takes time, and sometimes the compromise cannot be made. As far as I can see, most people are now happy with it; they weren't at first, but I was kind of forced into putting it in before it was ready. If there are things you think are missing, please let me know. Just for an example of the difficulty in judging what people see as important, clearly there are people who see admin log as more important than bookmarks; however, just shy of 1,000 people are currently using bookmarks, so I do think I guessed right here. Also, some features people ask for contradict things other people ask for - you complained about the size of the new answers page, and I made it bigger for you, but I am aware that I screwed over the guy who asked for it to be made smaller, so it would fit on to his mobile phone. I am aware it's a big site, with a lot of people wanting a lot of things from it, but it's a bloody tricky job trying to work out what people's priorities are. Someone volunteered to do this months ago, but they didn't actually do it. If you want to discuss this further some time, let’s do it in the pub, because it is a big subject, and being someone in the middle of it, I do think it’s a good bit more complicated than you think.
As regards admin log, yes it's a bunch of work, but it's not insurmountable, but the point Matt makes is my major concern (it came from me). No-one had discussed the rights of the moderators and I think it's extremely important that their rights are protected. I will not have on my conscience the situation Matt describes. This is really the clincher for me. Ailsa, you’re right that no-one has objected, but also, as far as I can see, only a couple have agreed. At the beginning of the thread, people are saying it’s basically because they want to get on the case of mods, which would suggest that having an anonymous admin log isn’t good enough. I don’t think that some of the moderators are using pseudonyms is good enough for privacy. Lots of people know their real names, as do others use their real names. IP addresses are irrelevant, as users are able to use anonymous proxies, if they want.
(As a small/jokey point, I have a bunch of time for you, John Justen on the grounds that in an argument about accountability, you're the only guy here posting with what appears to be your full real name!)
Stet’s point about code: I think all Stet is trying to point out here is not that I have some sort of iron grip on the code, which I don’t want to have, but just that code is an incredibly fragile beast, and if you don’t understand it, then it’s dead easy to make a mistake that suddenly makes it ‘poxy fule’, for want of a better term, all over the place. Some of you noticed I even managed to do this myself just a few days ago and the site was down for five hours. All he means is that it’s good that I understand how good others are at doing what they do, and maybe checking what they do before shoving it into production. It is a professional job, and you wouldn’t let a bloke from the street start doing a bit of brain surgery just because they fancied it.
Is this really the issue? Is it a case of noise board politics? Noticeably, most of the posters here are noise board people. What I was looking into, before this question came up, was an attempt to keep happy another big group of ILX users, which has significantly different requirements from the rest of ILX (as far as I can see, a much bigger group than those currently asking for admin log), that's the noise board. It's actually dead easy to give them back what they had, but basically impossible under the current setup, to stop it spilling over onto the rest of ILX, which isn't fair to them. However, it might be possible to set it up in such a way that noise board people are able to mess with HTML and make everyone admins and so on, with no impact on the rest of ILX. This is a whole load of work; months, probably, but I'm quite keen to do it, because it seems to be the biggest group of ILXors at the moment, who don't have what they once had.
-- Keith, Monday, June 11, 2007 5:44 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Link
― Curt1s Stephens, Friday, 29 June 2007 17:39 (eighteen years ago)
Rendering is a process that converts waste animal tissue into stable, value-added materials. Rendering can refer generally to any processing of animal byproducts into more useful materials, or more narrowly to the rendering of whole animal fatty tissue into purified fats like lard or suet. Rendering can be carried out on an industrial, farm, or kitchen scale.
The majority of tissue processed comes from slaughterhouses but also includes restaurant grease and butcher shop trimmings, expired meat from grocery stores, the carcasses of euthanized and dead animals from animal shelters, zoos and veterinarians. This material can include the fatty tissue, bones, and offal, as well as entire carcasses of animals condemned at slaughterhouses, and those that have died on farms (deadstock), in transit, etc. The most common animal sources are beef, pork, sheep, cats and dogs just to name a few.
The rendering process simultaneously dries the material and separates the fat from the bone and protein. A rendering process yields a fat commodity (yellow grease, choice white grease, bleachable fancy tallow, etc.) and a protein meal (meat & bone meal, poultry byproduct meal, etc.).
Rendering plants often also handle other materials, such as slaughterhouse blood, feathers and hair, but do so using processes distinct from true rendering.
― gershy, Saturday, 30 June 2007 17:24 (eighteen years ago)
Rendering is a process that converts waste animal tissue into stable, value-added materials. Rendering can refer generally to any processing of animal byproducts into more useful materials, or more narrowly to the rendering of whole animal fatty tissue into purified fats like lard or suet. Rendering can be carried out on an industrial, farm, or kitchen scale.
The majority of tissue processed comes from slaughterhouses but also includes restaurant grease and butcher shop trimmings, expired meat from grocery stores, the carcasses of euthanized and dead animals from animal shelters, zoos and veterinarians. This material can include the fatty tissue, bones, and offal, as well as entire carcasses of animals condemned at slaughterhouses, and those that have died on farms (deadstock), in transit, etc. The most common animal sources are beef, pork, sheep, cats and dogs just to name a few.
The rendering process simultaneously dries the material and separates the fat from the bone and protein. A rendering process yields a fat commodity (yellow grease, choice white grease, bleachable fancy tallow, etc.) and a protein meal (meat & bone meal, poultry byproduct meal, etc.).
Rendering plants often also handle other materials, such as slaughterhouse blood, feathers and hair, but do so using processes distinct from true rendering.
-- gershy, Saturday, 30 June 2007 17:24 (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Link
qft
― Dom Passantino, Saturday, 30 June 2007 17:42 (eighteen years ago)