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Re: Myopic Midnight Special / Reposting of Disqus Comments: The Numbers of Disqus | The Mysteries Continue

Myopic Special / Joseph Dunphy — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 08:11:46 -0000

Posted to the Disqus Company blog, in response to Tyler Hayes comment on the Numbers of Disqus post, changing the subject as he replied to this comment of mine about the breakdown of the comment feeds on Disqus:

What a very long way for us to have to go for you to still not get it. Or pretend that you're not getting it. Hard to be sure which.

"We removed the profile link from all Google profiles since we discovered that there was no way to pull in the correct link for the majority of profiles."

Yes. there. is. Let the user have the freedom to enter that url, himself. What is it about that concept that you have difficulty understanding? If you go to the entrance to the supermarket, and the door doesn't swing open, do you, the shopper, wait for the repairman to come fix the motion detector, or do you just push the door open, and go buy your groceries? Do you see where I'm going with this Tyler? Is it really that hard for you to understand the idea of letting people bypass the automation?

If you're tremendously afraid that somebody is going to do something evil with that link, whatever that might be, you could just have somebody enter an id into a form following the string

"http://profiles.google.com/"

and have the link go to http://profiles.google.com/... id the user enters). You see, we have these things called "keyboards", and what's even more amazing is that nature gave us these things called "fingers". I used them when I was typing this message to you. They come in handy. Anyhow, and this is where it gets wild, you can use those finger things to type alphanumeric strings into forms, and if you really want to get fancy, even insert a little punctuation into them. You might think that it would take people years of trial and error to learn how to do this, what with there being no owner's manual for these fancy "fingers" I keep talking about, and compatibility issues given the lack of standardization in the manufacture of these items (which have been known to come in a wide variety of lengths and thicknesses), but in fact people pick up the concept, right away.

"Just in case you didn't get our last couple emails, here are instructions on how to set a link to a website in your Disqus profile (which in your case it sounds like you'd prefer to be a link to your Google profile"

Really, amazingly unperceptive. Follow link. Go to my profile. Notice that I already have a homepage link, so obviously I know how to set those, and no, I don't want my homepage link to go there. I want my Google link to go to my Google profile. How many times do we have to go around and around before you understand that really, really simple concept?

Now ask yourself what on Earth this any of this has with your canned response in which you tell me how to set up a website on Disqus, something that one absolutely does not have to do in order to set a homepage link? This is the worst user support I've ever seen. Not only do you read from a script, cluelessly, but you follow the user onto the company blog to do so, in public. Incredible.

Oh, and by the way, awesome job on bypassing the observation that your RSS feed is still broken, something else I've written to you about, only to get greeted with the usual form letter about how to set up a site on Disqus which, again, had absolutely nothing to do with what I had written to you, about.

Re: The Numbers of Disqus

Myopic Special / Joseph Dunphy — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:21:45 -0000

What a very long way for us to have to go for you to still not get it.
Or pretend that you're not getting it. Hard to be sure which.

"We removed the profile link from all Google profiles since we discovered
that there was no way to pull in the correct link for the majority of
profiles."

Yes. there. is. Let the user have the freedom to enter that url,
himself. What is it about that concept that you have difficulty
understanding? If you go to the entrance to the supermarket, and the
door doesn't swing open, do you, the shopper, wait for the repairman to
come fix the motion detector, or do you just push the door open, and go
buy your groceries? Do you see where I'm going with this Tyler? Is it
really that hard for you to understand the idea of letting people bypass
the automation?

If you're tremendously afraid that somebody is going to do something
evil with that link, whatever that might be, you could just have
somebody enter an id into a form following the string

"http://profiles.google.com/"

and have the link go to http://profiles.google.com/... id the user
enters). You see, we have these things called "keyboards", and what's
even more amazing is that nature gave us these things called "fingers". I
used them when I was typing this message to you. They come in handy.
Anyhow, and this is where it gets wild, you can use those finger things
to type alphanumeric strings into forms, and if you really want to get
fancy, even insert a little punctuation into them. You might think that
it would take people years of trial and error to learn how to do this,
what with there being no owner's manual for these fancy "fingers" I keep
talking about, and compatibility issues given the lack of
standardization in the manufacture of these items (which have been known
to come in a wide variety of lengths and thicknesses), but in fact
people pick up the concept, right away.

"Just in case you didn't get our last couple emails, here are
instructions on how to set a link to a website in your Disqus profile
(which in your case it sounds like you'd prefer to be a link to your
Google profile"

Really, amazingly unperceptive. Follow link. Go to my profile. Notice
that I already have a homepage link, so obviously I know how to set
those, and no, I don't want my homepage link to go there. I want my
Google link to go to my Google profile. How many times do we have to go
around and around before you understand that really, really simple
concept?

Now ask yourself what on Earth this any of this has with your canned
response in which you tell me how to set up a website on Disqus,
something that one absolutely does not have to do in order to set a
homepage link? This is the worst user support I've ever seen. Not only
do you read from a script, cluelessly, but you follow the user onto the
company blog to do so, in public. Incredible.

Oh, and by the way, awesome job on bypassing the observation that your
RSS feed is still broken, something else I've written to you about, only
to get greeted with the usual form letter about how to set up a site on
Disqus which, again, had absolutely nothing to do with what I had
written to you, about.

Re: The Numbers of Disqus

Myopic Special / Joseph Dunphy — Tue, 31 May 2011 09:36:37 -0000

I've since heard back from the people in Support, who weren't in the least way helpful. I've since had to post this piece of advice to visitors to my pages, when running the Disqus feed

"The Disqus feed is grossly malformed, the links taking you to urls that
not only don't correspond to real locations, but which probably
couldn't. Yes, I've written to the Disqus support staff about this. All
that they were able or willing to do was read a script about how to set
up a site on Disqus. That's all that they ever seem to do. Yes, this is
pathetic, and it's a powerful argument against installing Disqus on
one's own blog, but for the time being, Disqus is a popular system, so
what do we do?

Ask our patient visitors to do what automatic machinery should be
doing for them, that's what. Treating the url as a string, going from
left to right, delete everything up to and including the first single
quote you see. Continue, leaving all symbols untouched, until you reach
the second single quote. Starting at that single quote and going
rightward until you run into the first close paranthese you see, remove
the string that consists of that single quote, the close paranthese and
everything in between. You now have the url that Disqus should have been
putting on that feed, and didn't.

Congratulations. You are now an amateur automaton, having run what
amounts to being a simple computer program. Are you wondering why some
actual programmers aren't having the Disqus system do that, itself,
given that it runs on an actual computer? If so, you are not alone in
this."

To the staff at Disqus: Have you no pride in what you do? Do you wish to produce a product that is worth using, or are you only in the business of generating press releases?

Re: Myopic Midnight Special / Reposting of Disqus Comments: Comment I posted to The Numbers of Disqus | Disqus: The Official Blog

Myopic Special / Joseph Dunphy — Sun, 22 May 2011 18:20:25 -0000

The post, which I have backed up on Blogger, just in case somebody should decide to resort to censorship, reads:

In response to this post, I wrote ...

Uh, huh. Before you start releasing new features, how about fixing the pre-existing features that are already broken? Like the one that supposedly allows one to link from one's Disqus profile, to one of a limited number of other locations where one might have a presence, such as one's Google profile. I invite anybody reading this to go take a look at my Disqus profile, on which I had such a link installed, just a short while ago. Notice how it doesn't actually link to anywhere on google.com, but instead, pointlessly takes the visitor back to the Disqus profile he just left, after making him wait for a few moments while the profile loads?

As a user, I would have been happy to fix that, manually, and replace the wrong url (the one taking the visitor back to where he just was, after clicking on the link), but I can't, because your system won't let me, because who knows what evil things I might do if such power was to fall into my hands. Like I might link to somebody else's Google profile, and having my traffic go over to his sites, instead of to mine. Why would I do that? I don't know, but as soon as I can figure out what I or anybody else could achieve by doing this, I bet it will be diabolical.

Or, how about our comment feeds? Remember those,

http://www.disqus.com/username/comments.rss

where username is the user's username? Take a look at the links on those feeds. If one views those links anywhere but on one's own profile, they lead to malformed urls taking one nowhere. Here's an example from Nabraj's feed, which can be found at

http://www.disqus.com/Nabraj/comments.rss

See the link marked

Instead of leading to

http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/04/26/sony-announces-s1-and-dual-screen-s2-android-tablets/#comment-191907229

as it should, it instead takes the reader to this deserted spot on the Internet Superhighway

http://www.disqus.com/Nabraj/(u'http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/04/26/sony-announces-s1-and-dual-screen-s2-android-tablets/',%20191907229)#comment-191907229

and abandons him on the side of the road. Disqus' "solution" to this problem would seem to be to have removed the RSS icons, instead of fixing the RSS feeds, and why not? It's much easier to sound like you know what you're doing if you say "we no longer support that feature" than it is to do so, while trying to explain why the darned thing still isn't fixed, and your users have to post guides to how to unmangle the urls for the links in your feeds, when their fed into sidebars on blogs and into RSS readers on other sites.

You know what? If you're trying to make your money by getting clueless investors into an overexcited mood by talking about all of the awesome things you're going to do, so they'll bid up your stock, you'll eventually run out of scatterbrained trustifarians to snooker. It's not a sustainable business strategy, as large numbers of former Yahoo employees and disgusted Yahoo end users will tell you.

If, on the other hand, you want to earn a good reputation, you folks need to start acting like adults, and getting one thing done before setting out to do another. Enthusiasm is fun, no doubt, but it doesn't get anything of value done without a little bit of responsibility to go with it. What a shame that you forgot that, assuming that you ever knew it, in the first place.

Re: Myopic Midnight Special / Reposting of Disqus Comments: Comment I posted to The Numbers of Disqus | Disqus: The Official Blog

Myopic Special / Joseph Dunphy — Fri, 20 May 2011 04:15:39 -0000

A comment I posted to the Disqus company blog article "The Numbers of Disqus" can be found here. Summary of comment: Disqus needs to lose a little of the exuberance, and start fixing the features they already have, some of which are working very poorly, before they start talking about new features.

Re: The Numbers of Disqus

Myopic Special / Joseph Dunphy — Thu, 19 May 2011 19:25:32 -0000

Uh, huh. Before you start releasing new features, how about fixing the
pre-existing features that are already broken? Like the one that
supposedly allows one to link from one's Disqus profile, to one of a
limited number of other locations where one might have a presence, such
as one's Google profile. I invite anybody reading this to go take a look
at my Disqus profile, on which I had such a link installed, just a
short while ago. Notice how it doesn't actually link to anywhere on
google.com, but instead, pointlessly takes the visitor back to the
Disqus profile he just left, after making him wait for a few moments
while the profile loads?

As a user, I would have been happy to fix that, manually, and replace
the wrong url (the one taking the visitor back to where he just was,
after clicking on the link), but I can't, because your system won't let
me, because who knows what evil things I might do if such power was to
fall into my hands. Like I might link to somebody else's Google profile,
and having my traffic go over to his sites, instead of to mine. Why
would I do that? I don't know, but as soon as I can figure out what I or
anybody else could achieve by doing this, I bet it will be diabolical.

Or, how about our comment feeds? Remember those,

http://www.disqus.com/usern...

where username is the user's username? Take a look at the links on those
feeds. If one views those links anywhere but on one's own profile, they
lead to malformed urls taking one nowhere. Here's an example from
Nabraj's feed, which can be found at

http://www.disqus.com/Nabra...

See the link marked

Instead of leading to

http://www.crunchgear.com/2...

as it should, it instead takes the reader to this deserted spot on the Internet Superhighway

http://www.disqus.com/Nabra...

and abandons him on the side of the road. Disqus' "solution" to this
problem would seem to be to have removed the RSS icons, instead of
fixing the RSS feeds, and why not? It's much easier to sound
authoritative and say "we no longer support that feature" than it is to
do so, while trying to explain why the darned thing still isn't fixed,
and your users have to post guides to how to unmangle the urls for the
links in your feeds, when their fed into sidebars on blogs and into RSS
readers on other sites.

You know what? If you're trying to make your money by getting clueless
investors into an overexcited mood by talking about all of the awesome
things you're going to do, so they'll bid up your stock, you'll
eventually run out of scatterbrained trustifarians to snooker. It's not a
sustainable business strategy, as large numbers of former Yahoo
employees and disgusted Yahoo end users will tell you.

If, on the other hand, you want to earn a good reputation, you folks
need to start acting like adults, and getting one thing done before
setting out to do another. Enthusiasm is fun, no doubt, but it doesn't
get anything of value done without a little bit of responsibility to go with
it. What a shame that you forgot that, assuming that you ever knew that, in
the first place.