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They also shut down comments on the elgg blog.
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About a week and a half ago, I uploaded three plugins to elgg.org. In a few days, I had a huge number of comments from people who had not read the documentation, aggressively demanded that I add new features immediately and for free, pleaded with me to help them write their own plugins, or asked me to help them install Elgg or to fix Elgg installations that they had managed to break.
I patiently responded to almost every message. However, when Dave asked me what I thought about the way the community at elgg.org was evolving, I honestly told him that I thought that it been over-run by idiots.
So, Steve, this is not just about Dave or Curverider. This is about hobbyists and wanna-be developers who are way, way out of their depths and are besieging people actually contributing to the software.
I do hope that some point in the future when things have cooled off that Curverider will open up some official discussion areas for real developers and Elgg users, but for now I don’t blame them at all for taking the steps they have.
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@Kevin I have experienced much the same thing. Just a couple days ago somebody started in saying there was something wrong with the zip (it was fine), and proceeded to comment with issue after issue. Clearly, if he couldn’t deal with unzipping a file, he wasn’t going to have much success with anything subsequently.
I too have been asked to install sites, build plugins, etc. etc. I know how you feel and I know how the developers feel.
There is clearly a mismatch between the developers’ intended audience and users that expect to use Elgg. I could see that within a couple days of the launch of Elgg 1.0 in August with all the installation issues. Clearly, they did not intend this software be used by every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a $5 shared hosting account.
My problem is that a lot of knowledge that many people who have obviously spent putting together, such as front page modifications, are now no longer available. The same goes with plugins that were pulled from the Google groups.
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Steve, I think that you really hit the nail on the head when you said that Curverider “did not intend this software be used by every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a $5 shared hosting account”.
People are installing a sophisticated piece of social networking software intended for creating sites with hundreds or thousands of members and they are treating it like WordPress. If you want a simple easy to use piece of software, then use WordPress!
The trouble is that far too many people are attacking Curverider staff and developers when they have problems using the software. And they are wasting the time of a lot of other people as well.
For quite a bit of time in the last 6 months, I’ve spent hours each week helping people out with Elgg issues. But my patience is coming to an end.
Basically, I’m saying to people: if you can’t get the software to work, use something else. Don’t waste our time posting long rants. Because the people who *are* actually using the software don’t have the time to read them.
How to filter out the noise is a serious problem that I can’t claim right now that I know how to solve.
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Send ‘em all to Boonex, it’s probably closer to what they’re looking for.
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I should add however, Doliphin is much more buggy!
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Unfortunately, by shutting down the only means of communication among members, those folks that are genuinely interesting in learning the software and helping the general knowledgebase are left in the dark. Trolls are an intrinsic part of the internet, and anyone that wants to do business on the ‘net has to learn how to deal with them – plugging your ears won’t make the problem better.
My initial dealing with Elgg have been fairly good. I *have* been extremely frustrated though – not with the LACK of documentation, but the lack of ORGANIZATION. A proper install of phpBB or an open Wiki for documentation would make things much better, IMHO.
The reason newbies are asking established members to help them do simple things, is because the simple things either AREN’T DOCUMENTED or the documentation is VERY HARD TO FIND. Poor documentation and poor organization reflect badly on the developers and the software they’re developing. Ultimately, I think a reaction like Curverider took will be the death of Elgg as any sort of viable OS project.
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@William
Your points are well stated. Not only did we lose means of communication, but we lost a large part of the knowledge base. Discussion forums and wikis are pretty standard means of support that would serve Elgg well. They would certainly reduce requests for help, but there will always be those who ask without searching. You see the same pattern everywhere. You deal with it.
I certainly hope Curverider restores Groups and comments. I want Elgg to work. I have invested countless hours testing, creating plugins and themes, and writing blog posts.
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I have heard of these people being called “help vampires” – they suck the life out of an OS project. It seems to me there are plenty of successful OS projects out there and they must have the same type of “help vampires”. How do they deal with them while still developing the software? The Elgg community (or Curverider) should be able to learn from them.
I do agree with William that the documentation is very disorganized and hard to find. I think the following would help:
1. add a help tab to elgg.org that points to their wiki2. open up the wiki – maybe not to everyone – but to more than the core 4 devs. At least they should add more user level help to it.
3. add a google search box to elgg – the current search capabilities are very poor and a lot of users don’t know they can query google with site:community.elgg.org (oh, and all the comments and groups are still in the google cache)
4. start giving some control to the community developers. It’s probably a heavy load on the four Curverider guys to moderate the google groups, write up documentation on the wiki, manage elgg.org, etc.
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I remember when with 0.9 there was a problem with “ugly” user interface, for me personally there was also another issue right from the begining, not giving users proper tool to communicate around elgg product (Vanilla forum is not a good solution). Ugly interface was definitly overcomed, but the other issue remained.
With 1.0, you have pack of groups in Elgg Community Tab, each forum can be accessed via special link inside group, …uhhh.. this is simply too complex for such a basic task. Next to these scattered forums, you have Google mailing list (Developers tab). Where should I make my post finally??? this is simply confusing, not straightforward, not intuitive in overall
I understand that Curvrider would like actually use Elgg installation to gather discussions around the product, but it could be so much simplier with one simple phpBB forum.
Imagine u have phpBB forum separated into “Newbies”, “Advanced”, “installation”, etc.. all knowledge in one place.
Actually I wouldnt be suprised if some users would start it in following weeks, actually maybe we should do it
Although I really appriciate Curverider hard work, I suspect that some people there have still this business protective attitude which was taken along with decision of going open source path (Elgg 1.0, initially was planned for commercial market). They might not fully understand why they took this path and how they should use it and maintain it. This in turn causes little commitment to interaction with users&developers…
In open source, community is a key.. and if u think something like “ok u are right but if product is awesome we’ll be ok”… well, u are right, but you could do soooo much better with properly handling community input and this is exactly what lacks here.
This is naturally just my opinion.
Kevin, your input to 0.9 and 1.0 versions was so visible and proffesional. Thanks.
Marcin
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Thanks for shining light on the situation. I’ve read the above comments and have to agree that much of my time spent AWAY from elgg, is/was in part due to the overwhelming DEMAND for help, feature requests, and the overall lack of appreciation for all the work it takes to develop an application.
I think its also important to note that most “newbies” coming to elgg can not be helped in the way they expect to be helped. For example a simple question such as “how do i change the front page” can not be simply answered. You have to understand the view system and the directory structure first, and lots of elements on the page are dynamically included so it just becomes so overwhelming to try and answer these questions. I get attacked with questions myself and sadly I just stopped logging on as much as I used to, because I can’t teach every single person how the elgg engine works from a-z
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“I can’t teach every single person how the elgg engine works from a-z”
Jade, I fully agree with you. However, the point I’m trying to make is that the reason there are repeated requests for this information is because IT ISN’T PROPERLY DOCUMENTED elsewhere. Sure, there’s going to be “help vampires” (I love that name), but the majority of people will put in some due diligence and read the docs.
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First i want to thanks Kevin Jardine to his excellent mod., yes your right they didn’t read the documentation that’s my problem before to much excited installation the software without reading the documents but that’s the sad things ever happened., i think we better to wait to the elgg developers team to solve the problem that we encountered today., cheers to all!
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and i want to thanks also Jade to his excellent mod (TIDYPICS).
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Hi William,
I’m a bit puzzled by your statement that “Elgg isn’t properly documented”.
There is a huge amount of documentation here:
http://community.elgg.org/pg/pages/owned/group:7
plus many very clearly written and commented example plugins to study.
Elgg 1.x is way, way better documented than “classic” Elgg ever was.
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Now this is interesting. For one reason or another, conversation shuts down on the official Elgg avenues and what happens? The community members who are consistently contributing to the site and have some idea of what’s really going on naturally redirect the conversation to an independent location.
Steve’s site was not previously identified as “official” in any sense, but was visible enough on the elgg site to draw the attention of people looking for something more than handouts. It’s nothing special: a blog with comments enabled. But its simplicity combined with its limited audience allow for the right people to continue the right conversation.
The un-choreographed migration to an independant location with focused content illustrates what is missing and critically necessary in Elgg. The problem on Elgg at the moment is not users and it’s not the information they are posting. Any community needs both of these to be successful. Elgg already provides information grouping via tools and groups but clearly this isn’t enough either.
What we need is information management, preferably built in rather than administrator dependent.
I see three key features missing in the standard elgg package that could easily have averted the present problems: user roles and permissions, tool:function clarification, and presentation of featured information.
1. Multiple calls have been made for site-wide user grouping of some sort (Jade hacked this on her own site I think) and apparently, user roles and permissions can be easily implemented using existing elgg programming. Such capabilities on bulletin boards allow for identification of trustworthy voices, quality filtering of posted information, and access to various conversations. Implementing these kinds of quality controls avoid the need to make unilateral administrative decisions like the one we’ve just witnessed on the Elgg site.
Theoretically, such a system ought to be controlled by the community in order to relieve administrators of the need to police every item of information and every user. Such self policing could happen in the same way content reporting is currently set up or could be based on an up/down or 5 star user recommendation system. Once a user reaches a certain threshold of positive votes, they would be invited to join the next role with access to additional tools and permissions. Some top level roles could be assigned by administrators in order to ensure continuity in the site.
I think that given the potential for information glut like we’ve seen on the Elgg community, this ought to be a standard opt-out feature rather than an opt-in plugin.
2. You’ll notice that there is enormous redundancy on the Elgg Community site with nearly identical information showing up in pages, comments, discussions … the list goes on. My first time on the Elgg site, I did a lot of playing with various tools to figure out what they were meant to accomplish. In so doing, I contributed to the redundancy and information glut. It would be much better if there was either a visually clear sense of workflow in the use of tools (rather than simply an alphabetically organized dropdown list) OR the ability to associate tool use with roles. The latter would be more heavy handed but would ensure that people know a bit more about the way a site works before they start shotgun posting.
In the “Collaborative Coding” group I tried to suggest ways we could use the Elgg group tools to best accomplish the goals of the group and avoid information glut. I think the visual structure of the group pages lends itself to a little more clarity in this regard than the Dashboard or Profile pages do. But even so, there needs to be a clearer delineation between tool types and their functions site wide to keep redundancies to a minimum.
3. Because the dashboard collects recent activity without any sense of priorty (save for hard coded blocks like “Featured Groups”), you get a trainwreck where you were hoping for a parking lot. There is certainly a place for recent activity on the dashboard, but far more important, especially on a development site like the Elgg Community, we need to see valued and pertinent information.
If I want to see plugin activity, I’ll check the site plugins page. But what I want to see on the front page is Kevin Jardine’s latest plugin (eg) since he and others like him are recognized as quality contributers. I want to see pages of quality information from the developers and other trusted sources not “My test page for the Elgg Community”.
The Elgg admins have been forced by limitations in the site’s functionality to throttle back on interaction: the one thing that defines and gives purpose to the community. But because the core community exists apart from the tool (cf Steve’s earlier post), we have simply assumed another existing avenue to continue the discussion. I imagine that this move will separate some of the wheat from the chaff but while that happens, we need to keep in mind that it is a weakness in the tool, not the community that caused the problem. Users in this community and any other need to be able to develop as they interact with other users on the site. But the site needs to be able to manage their growth so that it doesn’t hamper the natural growth of the community itself.
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Hi Matt,
I agree with a lot of your suggestions and expect some of the rating and filtering ideas you suggest will eventually be added to Elgg as plugins.
I actually made some similar suggestions in an article I posted on my own website last week:
http://radagast.biz/managing-discussions
At this point my main concern is that Curverider, which consists of four very busy staff, keeps its focus on the software and does not become completely distracted by the community issue.
Maybe some other people should take responsibility for the community? Not sure.
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All respect for Curverider for what they did so far…but there is no excuse to shut down without any notice on the home page. The community needs confidence and communication helps.
@Kevin: did you see on …/group:7 the last change dates; most like 2 months ago? This is where it goes wrong… how can we contribute? Organise? Concentrate? Moderate?
In a normal community, newbies(like myself) would help newbies while experts like Kevin and Jade would help each other. Good tools allow cross fertilisation and newbies becoming experts soon… Also, different people, different expertise: I am no PHP coding expert but highly trained in marketing…where can I participate???? Is this expertise not wanted??
I see two issues we quickly need to solve:
1- the founders to clarify their position so we understand what their intentions are, how they make money and what they like to achieve and how good willing people can contribute
at the same time, not waiting for 1:
2- the community needs good tools, superb forum, concentrated documentation and a truly open environment: we just need what is on Google Code, Launchpad and Sourceforge….
I would vote to let this week decide and then get back to business…
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Hi Tom,
Elgg 1.x is a new piece of software released on August 18 and still in very heavy development.
What is needed currently is detailed bug reports and patches submitted to http://trac.elgg.org and plugins submitted to http://community.elgg.org/mod/plugins/search.php
These will make Elgg a more stable and feature-rich application.
If you are not a PHP developer, then I suggest that you consider coming back to the community in a few months when the application is less of a construction zone.
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@Kevin, we have 3 PHP/Javascript developers in Eastern Europe to work on this project. Since last week they are full time on this …
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I didn’t realize the situation was so bad in the Elgg community because I have been away from it for a while working on other projects. Nevertheless, here are my thoughts in the form of a rant followed by 4 suggestions for what Curverider might do about the situation.
First of all, I don’t see why inexperienced people should be encouraged to install things like wordpress rather than elgg. It is not actually any harder to install elgg, and there are many types of project for which a vanilla install of elgg is much more useful than a vanilla install of wordpress. Just because it can handle thousands of users does not mean that it should not be used on projects with ten or a hundred users. In my view, it is the documentation that needs to be improved. Of course, documentation is a problem in many open source projects because developers don’t enjoy writing it, but it should be a priority.
Secondly, whilst I admire the decision to use Elgg itself for the elgg community, I do think it has been done to early. Certain design decisions need to be thought out more carefully to avoid redundancy and difficulty finding information. Also, plugins need to be developed to allow sourceforge, launchpad, etc. functionality and better forums. However, now that the decision has been made, I think it might be counterproductive to switch from elgg to other platforms, especially if this means having to deal with multiple sites. Instead, we need to create an environment in which the community site can be improved rapidly.
Thirdly, if Elgg is to be used for the community site then the community site should not also be used as a testing ground for new features and plugins. It needs to be stable and should be updated with care, just like any other site that people rely on. We do not need every feature and plugin available in the elgg core to be turned on, but only those that are actually useful for the site’s purpose. Do we really need the wire, messageboards, user profiles, friends, etc.? or are these just a distraction from the main purpose, which should be discussion forums, documentation, and file repositories?
Having finished the rant, here are 4 concrete suggestions for Curverider:
- Curverider should make available a publicly accessible sandpit installation of elgg for testing out new core plugins and features. This should be separate from the community site, which should have unnecessary features turned off.
- Curverider should hire a “community manager”. All the hip startups have one these days. It allows the community to get a rapid response from the company, so that we do not feel like we are being ignored and prevents negative feelings building up in the community. It also allows developers to concentrate on coding, rather than updating blogs and commenting on the community site.
- Curverider should hire a technical writer to clean up and extend the documentation. Although there is currently quite a bit of useful documentation, there are clearly things missing (e.g. language overrides). It is also clearly written by developers, so it is very confusing for newbies. Clearly, some of us could work on documentation as well, but it would be much better if it were done by someone who could talk directly to the developers.
- Curverider should dedicate a developer to work on plugins that would make the community site more functional.
Of course, I realize that Curverider may not have enough funding for all these ideas, but I think they would pay off in the long term.
Finally, Steve I think you should email the developers with a link to this post. I think they need to be aware of what is going on here and I don’t know if they follow your blog, twitter, etc.
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Hi Matt,
I know for a fact that Curverider staff have been reading this thread.
I’m still puzzled by remarks from you and others that the main barrier to installing Elgg is the documentation. I personally find it easy to install Elgg. It takes about 10 minutes. Configuring various plugins takes a bit longer.
Many others seem to have problems installing the application. In my view this is because they do not have the appropriate server environment or they do not know how to create MySQL databases etc. In any case, this has nothing to do with Elgg documentation.
After helping people out for several months with this, my conclusion is that some people should not be installing Elgg, period.
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@Kevin
“If you are not a PHP developer, then I suggest that you consider coming back to the community in a few months when the application is less of a construction zone.”You as a developer can make a suggestion like this, but Elgg cant afford that after stating on front page.
“Create your own social network, quickly and easily. “
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Hi Marcin,
Why not? As a PHP developer, I can use Elgg now to create social networks for my clients, quickly and easily if they want to use the existing feature set …
I think that certain people are assuming that non-developers can use Elgg as it currently exists out of the box to create their own Facebook clones.
That isn’t what Curverider is promising.
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@Kevin
Naturally, I couldn’t agree more, that for me as PHP developer Elgg is a brilliant tool.
But reasonably thinking, if u state on front page
“Create your own social network, quickly and easily. “
All the non PHP developers will come and ask all these unecessary questions which elgg site simply cannot handle.As Matt wrote in his post. Timing of some of the decisions was not well thought. This looks like a simple financial issue.
Decisions were made, community definitely wants to help. Curverider should give us practical, usable tool to communicate so that we can offload some work from them and everything should be fine.
Elgg, u have chosen open source path, make use of community around you.
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@Kevin
Your plugins are amazing and I’ve been reading through your code to understand Elgg better. I’m not trying to insult you, but hindsight is 20-20.
I’ve been messing with Elgg for one week. It took me at least 60 minutes and two visits on the Elgg site before I found the first set of example plugins (http://community.elgg.org/pg/pages/owned/group:7). ONE WEEK LATER I finally found the Wiki (http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Main_Page) and I’ve been reading through that. Though, to my knowledge, neither has a complete list of all the core functions, what inputs they take, in what form, and what outputs they generate. Also, just now, from reading this thread did I find the bug tracking system (http://trac.elgg.org). I tried running through the tutorial on plugin development, but I found that there’s a whole section missing from it on how to actually get the plugin to display something and where to navigate to on your site to see it. It appears that section is listed on the Wiki, but not the community site. Why?The holy grail of good docs (in my mimd) is the online PHP docs. Each function is listed, and example code given. At lot of work, yes, but crowdsourcing it to the community makes it much easier.
So, yes, there ARE some docs. Are they easy to access? NO. Are they fleshed out? NO. Are they well connected? NO.
That said, I’ve been using Elgg for one week and I’m very impressed and excited about what it can do. I’m worried though that once I figure everything out, that the community will go stale because of these barriers. I can’t take the risk of launching a large project based on a OS project that’s doomed to failure. I care about this project.
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Hi Marcin,
I completely agree with you, and I think so do the Curverider staff. They’re just trying to figure out the best way to do that now.
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Kevin/Marcin… the answer is in the middle, I think. I installed Elgg without any issue myself…but needed only one hint to get GD working; I am no expert remember.
Good organised community tools will automatically direct the right users in the direction. Like our case: I tried Ellg myself, saw enough promise to invest and got some real experts on it as that is needed given our clients wishes and Elgg’s status of dev.
I do see this opic as: does the community -we- accept the shut down/moderation, even if it only appears to be temporally, without proper explanation? Now it feels like we are treated as 2nd grade people… and I am sure that is not the intention of it all…
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One reaction to the situation we ought to consider is to make our own low level “stabilizing comments” on the elgg site to reassure both the existing user base and the developers that we are patiently and confidently waiting for a resolution.
I’m sure this decision was not something the developers anticipated having to make and that they are readjusting as necessary. The project will get back up and running I’m sure. In the meantime, there are two dangers. 1) Those who fly the coop pull the good press with them and 2) the developers get overwhelmed by the setback.
A good dose of patience and “team spirit” might provide some needed ballast as this hickup gets itself sorted out.
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@Matt, I see the last eruption as result of the tools and organisation issues and not so much the cause… still patience and team-spirit indeed are key ingredients for a stable future
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If you look at the documentation for other open source web apps like WordPress, Drupal, etc. then you will find guides for newbies who don’t know how to ftp into a server, create a MySQL database, etc. You’ll also find a number of books and tutorial sites that cover the basics, which we obviously don’t have for Elgg1 yet. These guides were probably created because those project communities got a lot of basic questions about installation/administration. I agree that these things are fairly simple and that you can find out how to do them in various places, but if you create an open source system like Elgg you have to expect that people with various backgrounds are going to try to install it.
The main problem with the documentation as I see it is that it is far too terse. There is almost no detail about everyday site administration, so if you haven’t got experience with other CMSs then things will seem very confusing. Also, if you want to get involved in any nontrivial plugin development then you have to read through a lot of the engine reference in order to even get started. Trying to take on information like this is in one big chunk is not the easiest way of learning. Personally, I have completed a course in php/MySQL, including object oriented php, but still had trouble getting to grips with the Elgg framework at first. There needs to be more step-by-step tutorials that illustrate every aspect of elgg, rather than just the simple blog, TinyMCE tutorials that we have at the moment.
There is a big difference between a reference manual and a manual that you actually learn a system from, and I’m saying that we don’t really have the latter at the moment. All this is fine if you enjoy working stuff out for yourself by looking at the source, but that is not for everyone and so it is not really surprising that people ask a lot of simple questions.
None of this is meant to be a criticism of Elgg or the developers, who have done a fantastic job on the coding, and I’m not saying that it is necessarily their job to improve the documentation (there is a reason why technical writing is a separate profession from coding). However, experience with other open source projects suggests that the documentation won’t improve unless someone is paid to do it and until then you can expect a lot of basic questions on any community site.
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Great post Matt. I’ve been developing CMS packages since the late 1990′s and user management is extremely lacking. IMHO.
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I agree with Matt about documentation for newbies. I think a “how to install Elgg for dummies” with requirements, install instructions, and troubleshooting all in one place would be great. Then we could respond to these basic questions by pointing people there. Some of this exists, but it is not organized or necessarily easy to find. I’m not sure what can be done about helping people write plugins because many of the people asking for help don’t know anything about php.
I think developer documentation is good, but the organization is lacking. There are pages on the community, there is the wiki, and there are the class references (which I find the most useful). The wiki and the community pages overlap in what they cover. I haven’t been able to find a link to the class reference off the main elgg.org site. It’s also not clear whether to post things on the google groups or on the community site. I think some of this reflects the way the documentation evolved, but it does make it difficult for a new developer to get started.
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@Steve: the issue with corrupt zip files is due to a bug in Internet Explorer with webservers that support gzip compression. All the zip files on the Elgg community site fail to download correctly via Internet Explorer.
So if you get those comments again, just tell them to download it again with Firefox.
It is possible to reconfigure the webserver so it doesn’t send gzipped content to IE clients, but it sounds like the Elgg developers have enough on their plates at the moment!
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I think Matt Edminster’s thoughts on the matter are quite insightful and well formulated. I do agree that elgg is not stable for “consumers” to use and certainly not in a production setting like the elgg knowledge base.
It does seem to make more sense to use “tried and tested” tools such as forums, wikis, etc than to use an in-development product like elgg.Now that I realize it, I’ve recently learned and adopted the http://codeigniter.com/ framework and using their simple forums, knowledge base, and wikis proves very helpful! So maybe we do need more solidified yet basic tools.
I agree with the statement that elgg is not for beginners. Whether or not users fumble with installing or merely “changing my front page” is not the issue. The issue is that the entire elgg project is still in development. You can’t have consumers using a product that is not ready to be consumed. This is why we have so much “complaining”. Obviously we need users/consumers, but I’m thinking, at this stage, the exposure might actually hurt elgg rather than help it. You can’t have a bunch of angry dissatisfied customers spreading negative feedback. I think elgg should to go-key and attract developers only , until a more usable product can be released.
I hear a lot of sentiment about how “open source needs users”. That may be the case, but I feel the users only start to pull their weight when the project starts approaching numbers in millions.
Consider the tidypics plugin example. Elgg did not a have basic image gallery. (file plugin is not good enough). So as a developer I took on the challenge. The entire purpose of tidypics is/was to create a FRAMEWORK plugin based entirely on compliant elgg processes.
That job is now done. I think in my (humble) opinion, tidypics has been the most successfully adopted 3rd-party plugin to date. The group has over 100 users (more than any other 3rd party group), and yet, we’ve only gotten help from about 3 developers. One for translation, one to point out short key instances, and one giving conceptual “advice”. Everything else happening in that group is how it does not work, how it is not good enough, how it “should have this”. These are consumer comments that accomplish nothing. I await the day when a person that wants lightbox integration, takes the time to do it themselves and submit it back, and the only people that are going to do that are developers. I’m very new to open source, but being more business oriented, I conclude that it is a marketing problem. Elgg has to market to developers more, and consumers less (at this stage at least) -
hi to all! i think the most important problem is that there are to many groups and many and many discussion are always the same (like how to do a custom frontpage)…if elgg continue to give to everyone possibility to create a group, above all new elgg people or not coder like me
, and they or we start new discussion without to know that they just exit… there will be only confusion and then many people think that there isn’t support from elgg.
so only the features group, in this early time of elgg 1.0, were and are the best choose to evolve better in the next future. when all we are more muture …we will can return how we are now with all this groups. -
Some excellent comments in this thread.
I hope the Curverider team ignore the troll muppets and don’t take them too personally, you get them anywhere and they are very selfish.
I don’t know why the groups were taken down, but it could work out for the better, if it evolves into something with more control around who can post comments.
Maybe there should be a “trusted users” option for adding comments around the DEV aspects of Elgg.
It must be hard to document everything, as there is a lot of wet paint with such rapid development.
Keep up the great work folks, please.
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This is just weird. All OS software must go through a phase of users requiring more info and fixes than can be currently supplied.
The fact that people are demanding these things must surely be a sign of optimism that the script has great potential and there are people desperately wanting it to succeed and become more feature rich. Maybe this desperation has led to frustration, but nonetheless, it is a great sign that users are wanting this to work well.
Instead of closing down comments I think that we should all be communicating and any barbed comments be managed properly. Shutting down the comments seems to be just a little immature.
Let’s face it – if there were no comments or interest at all then that would be a far worse scenario.
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There’s a lot of very good feedback here.
The core of elgg is curverider and if the devs are becoming overwhelmed with administering new user requests then they have every right to squash it and concentrate ontheir core business.
Without that most likely elgg will cease to progress at the moment.The help from other parties, i.e. the people here, is clearly available to a degree. In it’s current state it is impossible to know how much of that help can be channeled into relieving some of the pressure from the devs.
It needs organising and above all a real structure that people can use to get help and give in an efficient and nonrepetitive way.Yes documentation needs improving/formatting/collating.
Yes users need a clearer idea of how much skill is required to install and administer the software and precisely whoa and where they can consult for help appropriate to their skills.
Yes people that can assist need to be able to do so without becoming overwhelmed.Since the release of elgg1 what was a well knit community effort has grown into a monster. It seems that so much of the community effort and work prior to elgg1 has become irrelevant and that’s a shame.
None of that is of use now and that seems unusual.Looking to the future it seems there are two distinct possibilities.
First that the elgg team are putting something together that will pull more of what is already there into a structured site that forms a better framework for taking theproject forward by being less of a free for all.
Second is that they are not doing that.Should that be the case a lot of people will make a choice to go elsewhere, some of us will not.
I for one am quite willing to work with other people here, first we get some space and build a simple forum website. Collate everything that’s available from plugins to docs and get it all organised.
Then we open up again and encourage people to work on what is there. That will give curverider the freedom to continue doing what they need to do instead of what a lot of people think they should do.
Any independent site such as that can carry its own ads and contribution system to stand on its own feet and it simply takes what cureverider gives it as and when curverider sees fit.
Thus again, allowing them to concentrate on what is their core business and relieve them of a lot of the pressure and ear ache.I think for now we can just try to think constructively, be optimistic and wait a short while.
Thank you to many of the people here for the work you have done so far, it is all verymuch appreciated.
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Phil – nice idea. I’d be happy to give some server space towards this end.
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Well, well, there was a comparable discussion like this one on ellg.org but believe it just got deleted this morning… I seems that we indeed have to get something additional in place to ensure we keep the momentum…!
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Hi Tom,
I notice that similar discussions that contain attacks on Curverider remain linked to the front page of community.elgg.org.
I believe that the person who owned the page that the discussion you refer to was taking place on had pleaded previously with people to stop launching emotional attacks on Curverider staff and had found that his plea was being ignored. So it seems possible that he himself simply deleted the page.
As I recommend here:
http://radagast.biz/managing-discussions
I think that it is important that every discussion have an owner and that the owner can do his or her moderation if necessary.
It may be that this is what has happened in this case.
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Hmm, I think that perhaps one little word could have prevented a lot of the negative discussion, and that is BETA!
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@Kevin: perhaps…, do you have insight info we do not have or are we all speculating?
@Matt: simple front page notes explaining actions are essential …maybe even more in Beta… The issue has never been what happened, but that we did not know why it happened.
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I didn’t mean the shutting down of comments and groups. I was talking about the negative discussion that led to them doing so.
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Hi kevin,
Are you referring to me too?
When you released a plugin of yours I nicely asked you a suggestion, and you answered me not so kindly.
I know there are a lot of newbies on Elgg but how long are you working at elgg? I’m from before the summer, I was a Beta Tester and helped the guys with some reportings before the launch.
This is the Open Source, you’re working on something, I’m working on something different -> Share.
I’m working on the improvement of the PM system, there are a lot of things wrong on that important plugin. First of all there was no pagination in the inbox folder: guess displaing 1000 messages on a single page.
Then the system checks just in last 10 messages if there are new messages, and I’m fixing this now.
I fixed rivers and helped ppl want to fix them too, so don’t be too aggressive, let’s help ourself… is not the basics of the Open Source?
Bye
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Let’s avoid finger pointing. Mistakes have been made. I’ve made mistakes. Misperceptions have obviously occurred.
We have various different credentials here. Let’s just bring what we have to the table here in terms of moving Elgg forward.
This has been a thoughtful deliberation! I have morethoughts, but I need to sit down and put it together.
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Well, this indeed this is how we could grow with great speed and more harmony.
So suppose: a one group taking charge of *one* plugin. The group has one or two group leaders (“heroes”) . They manage the forum, code and doc.:
– PM
– registration
– profiles
– chaching
– video’s
– etc.With good grouping and knowledgeable heroes we can get harmony and speed. Maybe, Curverider might love the idea, as it would be only the heroes funnelling core feedback/requests to them and no longer the whole ‘loose’ community…
Thoughts?
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Looks good tom but I suggest we wait for word from curverider first.
When the opportunity arises then it may be appropriate to let them know we want to help, if they don’t already know.For the time being though perhaps we can wait and follow their lead, on their OS project. Diplomacy is important at this time I think.
But the idea looks a good one, please keep it there
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