Controversial ideas for changes (Freetext)

#1

Ok, I'm going to make a suggestion that I know might not be very popular.

How about we get rid of all the sub categories all together?

Seriously, bear with me a minute. What we want when we press that "submit" button is to start writing our idea down. Right now, we're presented with an intimidating two page wizard.

http://brice.dyndns.org/~brice/screen1_thumb.png

http://brice.dyndns.org/~brice/screen2_thumb.png

http://brice.dyndns.org/~brice/screen3_thumb.png

Instead of all this sections and subsections, why not move it to a tag only system? Why not have Only Freetext?

You'll say that it's hard to find stuff. Rubbish, I say. Search is easy, and search by tag is easier still. If you want to keep a "post taxonomy", have expending tags. Ie: when you click on one tag, you're sent to that tag's subcloud. (or through some script wizardry, the current tag cloud gets smoothly replaced.)

Submission should be simple, distraction free. Try to edit a www.posterous.com post to see what I mean:

http://brice.dyndns.org/~brice/posterous2_thumb.png

Using an existing tag javascript widget could be good, or you could just commas or spaces to separate them. Having an AJAX search through existing tags to provide suggestions would be fantastic. The posterous interface is great for this.

Have a look at www.superuser.com too. They do tags really well, and they show how a large body of information can easily be accessible through tags and searching only. (pretty useful site to boot)

Right now, the interface complexity is really high throughout Strolen.com, especially on the fron page and when you want to contribute a sub. Through the roof in fact. It's an intimidating sites for newbies, and the complexity is exactly where you do not want it: the front page and the contribution page.

I think that moving to a tag based system would reduced perceived complexity when contributing, and make doing the things that keep the site alive a lot easier. We could also pare down the front page to make it KISS. If you keep reminding me via vigorous poking, I could get some mockups up for both the front page and the post page if you'd like.

[EDIT:] I don't know what the code is like behind the scenes, so I have no idea of the coding complexity of these ideas. Have you considered putting up Lockmor 3.0c on something like bitbucket or github?

[EDIT:] I love this site, and I think you're doing an ace job Strolen.

Re: Controversial ideas for changes.

#2

Actually, I'd be good with that.

We'd need to be attentive to make sure things are properly tagged.

Re: Controversial ideas for changes.

#3

Makes sense. MoonHunter and Strolens tags could be put in a taxonomy database, and users could add their own freetext. In SharePoint 2010 they have a folksonomy section, which is freetext as we know it, and a taxonomy database of predefined keywords that can be added as well.

Note that those two are separate methods of tagging.

I agree that the two page post a sub is intimidating.

Sorry Strolen, I know you and Moon put a lot of work into 2.0. But d_d is dead on right. Users want ease of use, and easily consumed material. Guess that excludes my subs from most users as well. ;)

Re: Controversial ideas for changes.

#4

The only two catches to that, and I understand where you are comming from, are as follows.

New people to the site have a hard enough time finding ideas and things on the site. This will add a layer of complexity beyond that. It could weed out the stupid, but a lot of people will look at the complexity and just "dodge the site".

Two, and this is the killer, is the Freetext Police Notion. We would have to monitor freetext tags more closely. This does not seem so bad. Until you realized, it will come down to you. One to three times a week. For the next three years.

Think about that. No matter what you are doing in real life, you will have to do it for 3 years. (In 3 years you might find some other sod to do it, who won't be as good at it as you are, and really you feel won't stick to it.)

Everyone says they will help. (Trust me, I have heard that often enough here on the site.) You might get a handful of accounts helped, but it will come down to you. If you leave, probably nobody else will do it. Then it will go all to heck.

So the system was designed to be as automated as possible. This way we did not have to count on someone dedicating that much time to the site. I know what I say. I was "that guy" for a while. People said they would help with the coding and transfer. Two people did. They did eight accounts. I did the other 1200. I policed every other post (until about 4000).

Really, the system needs to be able to float on autopilot. Your idea, though wonderful and something we thought of, requires too much attention. (Unless we restrict the creation of freetexts, and allow people of the 7th level or less not to make any new ones and just use the existing ones.)

My two cents worth.

Re: Controversial ideas for changes.

#5

I am pondering.

Superuser has 82 pages of text links, 5740 tags. That scares the hell out of me. ;)

The code is probably manageable. There will be more joins and a little more complex but nothing insane.

The problem really stands on the management of it as Moon says. Really, I could beef up the current freetext system and give it a try. I don't mind giving it some attention and see what we come up with. But the current posts would have to have a mass review and update to make freetext as important as our main categories. When you can browse and find what you are looking for only through freetext we might be close. But that is going to have to be some extreme labor to get to that point.

Concern has been stated about the crazy submission page before too and I see it. I could get some hide action going in there so it is just a list, maybe put the two lists next to each other with hover messages to give the explanation. Additionally, I could move the summary and main text post straight to the top. Title, Summary, Text and then once you are done you can fill in the rest of it. Maybe compact it more? Combo box instead of a list? Give me some thoughts on that.

Rebuild of pages, shoot away. I have been struggling on those forever. Ideas in whatever form I would be willing to try. If you want to get more freetext attention on the front, lets give it a try.

Not discounting the freetext and beefing up sounds like a fun 3.0c challenge among others things I would love to do (need some heavy work on the regions too). So give me some baby steps to working towards a stronger freetext and I will jump all over it. I am not married to any system and if there is a better way, I am happy to change it as long as it makes sense and can be done.

As far as the code sharing, I am not opposed to that at all actually. Never had anybody interested enough to want to get into the weeds with me on it. Manfred has done some great bug fixing and some updates and still has access but we have never really needed to make that step. Although I did try it for a little at one point. You can look up lockmor on sourceforge and probably find it. That site doesn't make me happy though, then subversion came out, now there is Mercurial. If you are familiar with any of those, lets give it a try or you can work direct off the server and break it like me. :)

Re: Controversial ideas for changes.

#6

When you can browse and find what you are looking for only through freetext we might be close. But that is going to have to be some extreme labor to get to that point.

Could you use the categories/subcats as new freetexts?

Concern has been stated about the crazy submission page before too and I see it. (...) Give me some thoughts on that.

A quick and dirty change that would help make the submit pages less intimidating would be to replace the combo boxes by dropdown menus.

Rebuild of pages, shoot away.

Well, time to put my money where my mouth is. I've had some ideas for the submission page:

[img width=400 height=240]http://brice.dyndns.org/~brice/stro-edit.png
[img width=400 height=240]http://brice.dyndns.org/~brice/stro-opt.png
[img width=400 height=240]http://brice.dyndns.org/~brice/stro-tips.png
[img width=400 height=240]http://brice.dyndns.org/~brice/stro-both.png
[img width=400 height=240]http://brice.dyndns.org/~brice/stro-prev.png

I have another round of exams, so for at least another six weeks I'll not be able to get those together properly.

If you are familiar with any of those, lets give it a try or you can work direct off the server and break it like me. :)

Mercurial is lovely, but it was more about curiosity than anything else - I don't think I'd be much help at all! I haven't written a line of PHP in over 3 1/2 years, and even then I never went beyond the very basic. Just enough to tell if a change I'm suggesting is impossible or merely ridiculous. :P

Re: Controversial ideas for changes.

#7

Made some reorganization changes.

Love your setups. Not sure if the site is ready for the ajax magic but I will definitely take them into account as we progress! Thanks for taking the time to demo this up for us!

The autofreetext update isn't a bad thought. All the current ones are self categorized, just need it changed into freetext.

Everybody, any issues with doing that regardless? Update freetext with all the main and sub categories?

Re: Controversial ideas for changes.

#8

I really do like the concept...a lot.

(Any thoughts on the rest of the site. ;) )

Re: Controversial ideas for changes.

#9

I don't see any problem with adding the existing categories as freetexts.

Re: Controversial ideas for changes.

#10

Not perfect but first iteration of a sleeker, more manageable Submission Page.

Thanks for the push dark!

Re: Controversial ideas for changes.

#11

I'm going to be the opposition here, and state that I much prefer the separation of Category and Free-text. While they both help to organize and bind together submissions, in my mind free-text is a way to let you group together submissions broad and varied, whereas categories help to group very similar submissions together. I see their usage and purposes as completely different.

All that said, the real reason is because merging them just doesn't feel right, dangit! :D

Re: Controversial ideas for changes.

#12

Hey Strolen! Nice one, that's already far more manageable. :up:

(clicking on "explain categories" gets me an error page though. separate bug report posted here)

I have an idea to condense both pages into one. Let me get back to you when I've clarified it in my own brain.

As for you, Chaosmark: Dissident! Dissident! Burn the traitor! :D

No, seriously. Changing the categories into freetext is a fairly big change, and probably needs more thinking time. I hadn't really considered the need for a "Freetext Police", and I can already see similar freetexts, like "spell book" and "spellbook".

I was just suggesting the move because a) I can already see some overlap. For example, "Library", "Dungeon" and "ring" are all freetexts that can be covered by categories. and b) A lot of subs (and a lot of the great ones) completely trash the categories by being something not covered, or ruthlessly crossing the boundaries. We also have 104 categories. Which is a lot.

A freetext only system must take into consideration that we do not want to do the administration manually, I can see two way out of this:
- Only allow skilled users to add freetext (level cap)
- Suggest freetext live to the poster with some script magic. Like google suggest.

There are some other, wackier options, like
- Separating the "new freetext" procedure from the "new post" procedure, creating a usability barrier to freetext creation.
- Have a new, automatically peer-reviewed procedure to adding freetexts, for example, when someone proposes a new freetext, have a forum poll open automagically, and the freetext is only added if a certain proportion of the votes are in favour, and closes itself after a certain number of votes.
- Create a freetext taxonomy, where all freetexts are nodes on a freetext tree. (categories are essentially a shallow (three levels deep), taxonomy)

Re: Controversial ideas for changes.

#13

Many of your points are why we decided to go with the categories. I think you successfully argued the categories with your points, mostly. :)

Overlap: that is a current miss of the current freetext police (which we don't really have right now). Honestly, if the freetext is of a set category (unless it serves to cross pollinate, main submission isn't directly in that freetext's cat but it still fits - that is good use of freetext) then that freetext should be removed from that sub for the good of the Horde.

104 Categories is a lot and we debated and thrashed about that, but they are organized and make sense when they are broken down under their main type. If they turned into 104 random words, many wouldn't make sense without the type (Item, Plot) to support them. The straight category to freetext transition won't work because of this. 104 is perfectly manageable compared to limitless freetext however. Currently we have 771 unique freetexts.

Level cap was attempted to be implemented for the current freetext (will have to experiment after this post to see if it is still in affect) I think I removed it.

Google Suggest. We had it for a bit but it is problematic. Only accepts a single freetext. Once you start adding more than one then the suggest doesn't work. Can't separately look up multiples, not even with the actual google select. Other option for this was to make like gmail attachments, keep adding boxes and do each freetext separate. Didn't like that either and was much extra work and complication so scrapped the google select.

Separate new freetext goes back to the google select issue on how to find "approved" freetext when writing a post. Simplicity is gone then unfortunately.

Peer reviewed freetext is an interesting idea. Very interesting

Freetext taxonomy = categories.....no? And we voted on two levels deep to keep it a little more simple. How would you navigate that taxonomy with 1000s of freetext 3 levels deep.

Not shooting down the idea, for sure, but Moon and many others had put a lot of thought and argument into the category system for all around simplicity and a way to have some solid structure to build around. Now that we are all web 2.0 things have shifted a bit and there are many more ideas on how to do stuff out there that I am more than happy to discuss and see what we come up with.

I don't defend the categories because they are perfect, they aren't, but because we couldn't come up with a way that was easier or more logical....yet.

Re: Controversial ideas for changes.

#14

*coughs* My brain is working overtime on the suggest option, and while it would require a bit of circular coding, I'm not sure that it couldn't work with multiple freetext. Since we already require them to be comma separated, why not just do something like:



$freetext_array = explode(',', $freetext_string);

$newest_freetext = $freetext_array[len($freetext_array) - 1];

suggest($newest_freetext);

After all, we only really care about the last/newest freetext being entered into the textbox. The rest can just be stored and then re-inserted into the options with the suggestion appended to the end.

Of course, that code would need to be Javascript or something similarly interactive (no clue what you're actually using here). My brain is just in PHP mode at the moment. I've done roughly similar things before in Javascript, though, so while I've never dealt with a suggest functionality per-se, I have dealt with dynamically ripping strings apart and sending them server-side via Ajax, so I know it can be done.

Thoughts?

Re: Controversial ideas for changes.

#15

Freetext instead of categories, not so yummy in my mind anymore.

Getting some jquery action going to autoselect freetext on the submission page, definitely want to fight that Liger.

Re: Controversial ideas for changes (Freetext)

#16

Got the javascript freetext suggestion working!!

Can put in any number of words, comma separated just as we need. Will find you exact matches for each word you type in there.

Mighty damn handy and hopefully will fix a lot of the extraneous freetexts that get added when they will get match suggestions!!!

I take no real credit for it either, all part of the updated jquery ui which I really much read about and see what other goodies they added for us. :)