This forum - please can we have immediate visibility?

[John Smith]

Hello

Can anyone tell me whether it is technically possible on Google Groups (assuming we must stay using it) to have our posts be visible immediately? And if so is it technically possible that we can EDIT our forum contributions. (As can be done on most modern forums including David Allen's official one here: http://gettingthingsdone.com/forum/, http://forum.gtdnext.com/ etc)

I don't mind (much!) having my posts moderated and removed afterwards if they are in any way inappropriate. But I am trying hard to help, believe me. And having a "stop-start" discussion on any topic where you can't even see what you said yourself for 24 hour is deeply frustrating. 

If we get junkmail and/or trolling surely it is better to remove those post afterwards rather than have all of us unable to have a fast-flowing conversation.

So, if it is technically possible, MLO, please, please, PLEASE can you change the settings so that we can see our posts immediately and not 24 hours later.

Thanx

J

[Lisa Stroyan]

New members are only moderated until it's obvious they are not trolling and someone gets around to manually unmoderating them as it's not supported through the email system (or in the very rare case that a moderator feels a discussion is getting too personal or vitriolic).  That usually takes time. 

One note: 95% of the attention on this list is by users; it's much more of a peer support group than a customer input mechanism. You might want to adjust your vinegar to honey ratio accordingly...

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[John Smith]

> You might want to adjust your vinegar to honey ratio accordingly...

Yes, I confess that I did rather come charging in shooting from hip!

I my defence, I do think most of my vinegar-ish points still stand even if I possibly didn't take time to phrase them with much tact. And in truth, for quite a long time, I was on the very point of leaving MLO due to the issues raised. Plus if nothing else though, through  my fresh eyes, I was if nothing else being entirely honest and hopefully constructive. Also I was coming from GTDNext who have a very different culture and are hugely good a communicating with their customers in an open, rapid and enormously friendly manner (and who have made remarkable process for quite a small team as a result).  I have now invested quite a lot of person time in MLO and am now not likely to jump ship immediately. So yes, fair point - I promise to be perhaps more polite & measured going forward. 

J

Lisa

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Lisa Stroyan, mailto: ...@gmail.com

[pottster]

You might want to adjust your vinegar to honey ratio accordingly...

Love that expression! Have I your permission to borrow? 

[Lisa Stroyan]

Ken: definitely. I enjoy having it appreciated so steal away :-)

John: here's the thing. In the opinion of many of us here, MLO is an amazingly powerful, very carefully designed task management platform. (it's not really a task management system, in my opinion, but a platform. More on that in a sec) It's certainly not bug free, nor is it consistently the same level of sophistication in all areas. ( for example, rich text, documentation, etc) . No one is arguing that it's perfect. Honest.

But some things that you are vehemently calling bugs are intentional and appropriate design decisions, and have had a lot of smart people thinking in much detail about the best way to implement them cohesively with other features. This is not defensiveness or "because it's always been this way" which I think you will be able to see as time goes by....there are real design trade-offs in complicated software systems as I'm sure you know.

However, some of the points you bring up are valid - but you can't really know which ones until you understand the system as it is. so coming in and saying "this is a stupid way to do things" takes people aback. So I ask you to come in with an attitude of, "explain what I'm not understanding ." And to realize that the people replying to your questions are other users, so you may not always get answers.

I think one area of confusion is that MLO is not really an out-of-the-box wysiwyg task system, and should not be,  when you get into the complexity that we are talking about. It's designed to support many methodologies robustly, and even though it uses GTD terminology and can be implemented as a GTD management system, it is not hardwired that way.  My experience, even people that want a "pure" GTD system (which I moved away from years ago) implement it radically differently in MLO.

so I guess that is my answer to a question you raised in another thread about do you really have to set up your MLO structure and why it doesn't just work intuitively. Yes. You do. It's the curse and the beauty of MLO , take it or leave it. then after you've explored it more, you will be better equipped to advocate for missing and unintuitive features. I can tell you will be good at that :-) let's see… I'm guessing you will be wanting a calendar view?(Sorry, inside joke).

The good news is that you don't have to design your system all perfectly the first time because it's not that hard to change later. ( I've switched from context to flags to tree structure , for example, for my areas of focus. I just created a view that selected all tasks with a particular context or flag and edit them as a group ).

I have actually begun to look at my task management system as something that has a natural evolution . I energize myself to organize my life by reviewing my processes and adjusting my MLO structure to match. thinking about my task management system organization is part of my review process and helps me organize myself as well. I used to be on my own case about always changing it, but you know? I think my brain just needs to keep it interesting.

I hope you give MLO a chance to show off its amazing features as well as its quirks, rather than trying to line it up with the picture you have of what it ought to be. Be curious. (You might want to choose your on-list curiosities based on which ones you most want an answer for ).

By the way, welcome to the crowd.

On Dec 4, 2014 9:27 AM, "pottster" <kenwar...@gmail.com> wrote:

You might want to adjust your vinegar to honey ratio accordingly...

Love that expression! Have I your permission to borrow? 

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[John Smith]

Lisa

Your comment that MLO is more "task management platform" than "task management system" is, IMHO,  absolutely spot on.

That said, I notice that there are various different "Templates" that you can choose when creating a new MLO file and this in theory ought to go a long way to helping the "mainstream" user (i.e. the vast majority of potential users out there) who will of course want a system that they can use "out of the box". And given unquestionably huge the power of the MLO platform, I think that is something that MLO would do well to address, if significantly improving their sales is something that they interested in.

In fact I now wonder if maybe there could be some sort of secondary market for selling task management systems that are good to go and are based on the MLO 'platform' ??

I find your comments about my moaning about "bugs" surprising. I have found MLO to be remarkably stable and bug free. I only recall one time when I nearly accused MLO of having a bug and even then I said it was "effectively" a bug due to the fact that there was extremely information (on the Next Action by Project view) that might have been extremely useful to the user that was simply not being shown in the view. This was one of the reports that resisted showing the Importance & Urgency to the user at the Project level for no apparent reason. Can you cite any other examples?

I have tried searching Google Groups but
a) I could not find the text in question within thread in question and
b) Iin all 3 of my browsers including Google Chrome very often (yes, despite clearing out my cache with CCleaner) certain pages on GG simply refuse to load. This certainly did not help. [Aside: The bug here was a Google Groups bug if anything! ]

So no, I do not find MLO "buggy" and I never say it had an actual bug. I said it was "effectively a bug" which is different.

I find your comments about my moaning about stupid features surprising too. The only comment I can remember or find about something being "stupid" was my accusation that many of the hotkeys where not standard and yes I do regard that to be a significant lost opportunity for MLO ... which some people would call "stupid", in as much as that the learning curve for new users is being significantly added to for no clear reason.  I didn't say the word stupid in order to be offensive, I said it because losing easy chances to have a much improved learning curve for new users is in my options "stupid" design.  

And even though MLO may like to think of itself as a platform not a system, it seems to me as a new user to be clear that not enough trials of new users have been done on MLO. A simple example would be Shift/Alt/arrow Left and Right. To me this is one of the most useful pairs of hotkeys on MLO. Personally, had I not discovered it within a couple of hours of use, I would very likely have abandoned MLO - it's that important and useful to me at least. But can anyone name me any other application(s) that use that particular combinations of keys to move items around the screen? I mean shift/arrow... control/arrow... alt/arrow, yes maybe. But shift/alt/arrow? How likely is a new user to be to find that out without looking it up?  

So "read the manual" I hear you all say. But you know what for an system that is an out of date response. Take all that Apple iPhone & iPad stuff. Nowadays the manual is mostly an after thought. The intelligent user should be able to work it out for him/herself. The manual is not something to be read. It is something to be used as a last resort.

But what's actually wrong with using keys and hotkeys that mainstream users are already used to? What's wrong with just plain old Tab and Shift/Tab? (which is what is already used used by various competitors, btw)... Now, I made these points to express my opinion that it would be a trivial 'quick win' for the developers to change. Afterall  if they want new mainstream users, why make it unnecessarily hard for them?

OK I now get that the readership of this forum is mostly other users. But clearly MLO do read the forums, at least a bit. And believe me, if they didnt do so then they would be living in the wrong century and I would fear for their long term future, because let me tell you, the developers of new competing products (like GTDNext) are exceedingly interested to hear as much feedback as possible from users. Yes I am totally aware the my opinions are just my opinions and may well not get acted upon - of course I do.  But a forum provides and opportunity for other users to chip in and agree or disagree - exchange of information is what they are there for.

Apologies for length - I didn't have time to reply in fewer words.

[Dwight Arthur]

John, developer readership of the user forum is intermittent. Notwithstanding all of the fine reasons you gave as to why this should not be true, it remains true. If you have a message for the developer you could try emailing them at the support address, but try not to over-use it.
Dwight
-Dwight
Mlo betazoid on Android sgn2

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[Lisa]

I was paraphrasing what I heard, rather than quoting you directly. Sorry not to be more clear. You did not say stupid in so many words.

 

Lisa /  lstr...@gmail.com

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[Dwight Arthur]

I would just like to note that the past week or so has probably produced more apologies on the mlo forums than those that appeared in the entire previous history of the forums. I, for one, would like to see any further apologies taken offline and exchanged as private messages.

And please don't apologize to me for apologizing. If anyone tries that I shall be forced to scream and tear out my little remaining hair.

-Dwight
Mlo betazoid on Android sgn2

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[Richard C]

Just to add that I think  you can directly edit your posts if you post to the forum via the web interface rather than by email.

[Richard C]

Actully having posted that, it seems that there is an option to delete but not edit.

[John Smith]

Yes I just discovered that. Frustrating not to be able to edit but better than nothing.
But how long do you have to deleted before it generates and email to everyone who has subscribed? Only a few milliseconds on this group it seems... !

[MrCricket]

Hi, I agree with a machanism of moderation, but I would like to propose to put moderated posts at the end of the thread (with 'now' date, which will advance thread's mtime), else it is being inserted somewhere in the middle of the thread (due to earlier original post time), so nobody sees it.

I've posted on this forum two messages, for both took about 1-2 days for moderation and got no answers. I think the above is the reason. 10x

[Lisa Stroyan]

Apologies for that. But it's a Google group with volunteers doing much of the moderation. Not only does that mean we have no control over the features, but it also means it's not so much a feature problem, just a resources problem.

As someone that has been on communication platform search committees and has looked into what it might take for organizations to switch between types, there is no platform that is perfect and free and even if there was, people complain because they are more used to other ways because that is what they know. There are big advantages to email groups (but the web interface might not be one). This is not a forum, it's an email group with a not-great web interface. It's not changing anytime soon, we aren't going to get Google to change its model.

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[John Smith]

In the past few weeks I have looked at various competing sites and this was the only software to have
A)  moderation that stopped new users from being able to post immediately and
B) was the only site that didn't allow users to edit their own comments (yes even after other users had replied).  And yes you could also choose how often you receive emails.

Conclusion: Google groups is clunky, confusing, semi-abandoned by Google and is frankly out-of-date.

Yes any form of progress that involves change is almost guaranteed to involve squeezing Luddites, but from a business perspective attracting new customers in significant numbers should be way more important than pleasing the change resistant old-timers.

But why must such a system necessarily be free?

If MLO are serious about helping their very best advocates generate sales by talking (for free) to new users,  I find it strange that they are not prepared to spend a single cent to facilitate the process - if that is what you are saying.

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[Daniel Sekera]

I have been around since almost the beginning and I guess i'm one of the luddites.  I do not post much and when I do it is usually because I have taken the windmill i'm about to joust against personally.  However i'm usually very busy completing my next actions, wondering why my "use" of it seems so easy compared to the seemingly 300 quadjillion (scientific mathematical term..lol) ways others are using this software (and somehow it accommodates almost all of them) and whatever time is left over I spend trying and discovering new features.  I have never read the manual as I learn by playing.  I wonder which way is "right" as learning by experimentation just seems so natural.  I rarely "ask how" because I'm not a asker.  I guess i'm writing for no other reason than to express the opinion do what you want but my opinion is nothing needs not be dragged anywhere into any change.  learn by doing.  but opinions vary, have fun.

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[Stéph]

Hello John,

Editing posts isn't helpful if they've already been emailed out and people are replying to what you've already written.  In a verbal conversation or in "snail mail", you can't edit what you've said.  Doing so on an online forum risks fractured conversations, with people replying to comments or questions which no longer exist.  For those reasons, I think the Google model is the right one.  

So, it's down to us to review and moderate our own comments.  Especially if expressing something with emotional or emotive content, it's always wise to draft offline, walk away, come back and read afresh before you press the send button.  

Regarding moderation of posts from new users - We have had one or two spambots and pyramid sellers get onto the forums before, though no trolling that I'm aware of. I don't know how many other spame messages get captured by the moderators each week, but I imagine they might be saving us from having to read quite a lot of junk.

Just my two penn'orth. 

Stéphane

[John Smith]

> Editing posts isn't helpful if they've
> already been emailed out and
> people are replying to what you've
> already written.

Most modern forum software simply does not work like this. And for good reason.

The reality is that most humans do not get anything absolutely right first time and for this reason most forums allow you to edit your posts at least for a while.

What many systems do is to NOT send the  email out for an hour or two and during this time the author can edit their own work.

Another solution is to allow the author to edit their work right up to the point that the first person comments on it.

Both of the above solutions would strike me as reasonable.  But I notice that Facebook goes much further and allows people to edit their comments at any time.  I can only assume that the world's most successful social networking website has put a LOT of thought & user trialling into this issue.

What Google does in Google Groups required a learning curve from new users. It is obvious when posting a snail mail letter that you cannot edit it after you have sent it. But nowadays most forums have moved on even if Google hasn't. And although yes, we in the know can triple read our text to get it ready for the thoughtful community that we have here at MLO, it is yet another thing adding to the learning curve for new users.

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