Floof dev speaks out against Weasyl [Ironic]

[Eevee]

Mmhmm! This is what I was hoping with Weasyl initially—

I wouldn't call Weasyl a paragon of transparency.

Their lone news outlet is still written half like press releases, none of it attributed to a human being.  The only public repository of problems is a vBulletin subforum, precisely like FA.  Their tech staff all have accounts that look effectively abandoned at a glance.  There's no changelog; there's no roadmap; there's no mention anywhere of whatever happened with Benchilla, nor an explanation of who actually owns or runs or wrote the thing.

Transparency is communication.  It's actively making an effort to talk and explain and interact, not merely a lack of melodramatic coverups.

Contrast with, say, Firefox.  Starting arbitrarily from firefox.com, there are direct links to:

• The Mozilla blog (read: PR), last posted to yesterday with an overview of how they're shuffling the leadership around;
  
• This "contribute" page, which directs interested volunteers to help translate or write code or beta test or design UI or write documentation or provide user support;
  
• A form for people interested in working on firefox.com itself;
  
• The changelog and release date for the current release, including a human-friendly description of the most interesting stuff, links to more detailed documentation on a lot of it, a link to a list of changes relevant to web developers, a link to a query on their bug tracker listing every single change that made it into this release, and a link to a blog about notable future changes;
  
• Nightly builds of Firefox, complete with its own changelog; and
  
• An entire support site they built to help with user problems.
  

None of that even necessitates that the project is open source.  Which, of course, it is: you can get the source code for the browser itself, of course, but also that initial firefox.com website, the django extensions they use as a base for all their sites, their support site and addon site and every other website they run, their bug tracker, their build system, their testing infrastructure, their new programming language, the browser engine they're writing in it, their single-signon experiment, and on it goes.  And you can file issues against these things and watch the development and see the state of the test suite and comment on all of it if you have something useful to say.  Or you can fix a bug yourself and they'll put your name in about:credits.

Not to mention that half the people in the company have their own blogs about stuff they're working on or planning; all their release planning is public; and they publish the conference numbers for their weekly status meetings.  And if even that weren't enough, there are less-official sources like this curated changelog for every release branch.

That's more what I have in mind when I say "actively run in the open".

[SimbaTheLion]

@Eevee - in a perfect world... I agree with you something like that would be pretty freaking awesome, but I can't see it happening, sadly.

Do you think that maybe furries are too scared to leave their hugbox to try new things? This happens all the time, I propose a scenario where FA is completely dead in the water, and without fail I have furries looking at me like I just shot their dog. Then I have to hear about them whining about me apparently wanting to take away their oh-so-precious furry porn! (This was an actual conversation on TGFB between myself and Sechs a while back, btw.)

This isn't really rare or at all unique to furs. Most people will resist change at least to some degree. This is another reason why the pure destructive approach some people seem to be fond of won't really work unless you can pretty much literally take the site down. The resistance to change is what means there won't be a singularity where everyone transfers. A competitor (direct or otherwise) would need to be significantly better to overcome the change aspect. Weasyl is already better but more enhancements would help it gets towards the mainstream "actually worth braving change and effort of making a new account" step.

[Eevee]

@Eevee - in a perfect world... I agree with you something like that would be pretty freaking awesome, but I can't see it happening, sadly.

Why not?  Presumably everyone is already talking about the project; just stop doing it in backchannels and do it somewhere the rest of the universe can chime in.

Much like Weasyl itself to some degree, and FA before it, this smells cargoculty: we must do everything in secret, because that's what important reputable companies do, and we want to look like we're an important reputable company.  That's why we have more policy documents with Important Capitalized Names than we have technical staff.

[winserv03fan]

Isn't it time for some fur to go on some MTV sex show?

Oh yeah, speaking of that...

Yes, yes it is.

[SimbaTheLion]

@Eevee - in a perfect world... I agree with you something like that would be pretty freaking awesome, but I can't see it happening, sadly.

Why not?  Presumably everyone is already talking about the project; just stop doing it in backchannels and do it somewhere the rest of the universe can chime in.

Much like Weasyl itself to some degree, and FA before it, this smells cargoculty: we must do everything in secret, because that's what important reputable companies do, and we want to look like we're an important reputable company.  That's why we have more policy documents with Important Capitalized Names than we have technical staff.

Many reasons:

1) Paranoia. "If everyone can see what's going on, crap, what if they undermine it, what if they try some takeover, or copy..."
2) Selfishness. "Hmph. If I'm putting in all this effort, why should everyone else benefit so much and so openly for my work?"
3) Laziness. "I can sort of slap something together half-assedly. Eww, documentation, open blogs, effort, no thanks..."
4) Bias. "Well, I know he's not the best person for it, but X has been a good friend..."

Plenty of others too, but you get the idea.

I've received approaches for new startups from four different individuals/teams of individuals now - I totally agree with your views. If everyone came together and actually made it happen, things would be awesome.

Your head's screwed on the right way, Eevee. But a lot of people's, even those in some high up positions, sadly, are not.

[winserv03fan]

I've received approaches for new startups from four different individuals/teams of individuals now - I totally agree with your views. If everyone came together and actually made it happen, things would be awesome.

Why does anyone want to keep making more sites??? That's just going to break people up even more and make people leave all sites but FA faster. It's time to call the quits. Now that Weasyl is public, THERE IS NO MORE DEMAND FOR ANOTHER SITE.

It just sounds like everyone wants their slice of the pie. :/

[ProvincialTwit]

Words

Sorry about your autism

(and your furry porn site that never went anywhere)

[SimbaTheLion]

I've received approaches for new startups from four different individuals/teams of individuals now - I totally agree with your views. If everyone came together and actually made it happen, things would be awesome.

Why does anyone want to keep making more sites??? That's just going to break people up even more and make people leave all sites but FA faster. It's time to call the quits. Now that Weasyl is public, THERE IS NO MORE DEMAND FOR ANOTHER SITE.

"I've received backing and encouragement also (including from the new source tonight) to start something entirely new from scratch, but in my opinion it's a bit redundant to reinvent the wheel when there are perfectly functional cars I can make shinier"

^ As I said last night. Seems everyone says everyone else is corrupt though, heheh. It's difficult to know who to trust.

[graeme]

While I'm not one to pimp my own project here.. since it's under my real name.. .. I would suggest trust ones that have Git repos you can download, trust ones that have open communications, trust ones that have decent documentation and mission statements/plans that are a little more detailed than "I wnat to make the next FA cuz Neer sux"

That's who I would trust.

Also, I wouldn't trust anyone that wants to make you lead coder if you hadn't heard of them before.  Odds are, they want YOU to do the work for them, and they'll just be the "idea people."  Which, is why my project is on Github and isn't really been thrown around alot    It's not READY.

[graeme]

Isn't it time for some fur to go on some MTV sex show?

Oh yeah, speaking of that...

Yes, yes it is.

Oh awesome, and it's Sibe ,too.  This is gonna be spectacular!

[Kindrift]

Hot piss, it's a Weasyl thread!

[habnabit]

While I'm not one to pimp my own project here.. since it's under my real name.. .. I would suggest trust ones that have Git repos you can download, trust ones that have open communications, trust ones that have decent documentation and mission statements/plans that are a little more detailed than "I wnat to make the next FA cuz Neer sux"

https://github.com/JarrodHenry/SpiderSilk
I couldn't find the decent documentation or the mission statement. where are they?

[Conan]

Mmhmm! This is what I was hoping with Weasyl initially—

I wouldn't call Weasyl a paragon of transparency.

Their lone news outlet is still written half like press releases, none of it attributed to a human being.  The only public repository of problems is a vBulletin subforum, precisely like FA.  Their tech staff all have accounts that look effectively abandoned at a glance.  There's no changelog; there's no roadmap; there's no mention anywhere of whatever happened with Benchilla, nor an explanation of who actually owns or runs or wrote the thing.

Transparency is communication.  It's actively making an effort to talk and explain and interact, not merely a lack of melodramatic coverups.

Contrast with, say, Firefox.  Starting arbitrarily from firefox.com, there are direct links to:

• The Mozilla blog (read: PR), last posted to yesterday with an overview of how they're shuffling the leadership around;
  
• This "contribute" page, which directs interested volunteers to help translate or write code or beta test or design UI or write documentation or provide user support;
  
• A form for people interested in working on firefox.com itself;
  
• The changelog and release date for the current release, including a human-friendly description of the most interesting stuff, links to more detailed documentation on a lot of it, a link to a list of changes relevant to web developers, a link to a query on their bug tracker listing every single change that made it into this release, and a link to a blog about notable future changes;
  
• Nightly builds of Firefox, complete with its own changelog; and
  
• An entire support site they built to help with user problems.
  

None of that even necessitates that the project is open source.  Which, of course, it is: you can get the source code for the browser itself, of course, but also that initial firefox.com website, the django extensions they use as a base for all their sites, their support site and addon site and every other website they run, their bug tracker, their build system, their testing infrastructure, their new programming language, the browser engine they're writing in it, their single-signon experiment, and on it goes.  And you can file issues against these things and watch the development and see the state of the test suite and comment on all of it if you have something useful to say.  Or you can fix a bug yourself and they'll put your name in about:credits.

Not to mention that half the people in the company have their own blogs about stuff they're working on or planning; all their release planning is public; and they publish the conference numbers for their weekly status meetings.  And if even that weren't enough, there are less-official sources like this curated changelog for every release branch.

That's more what I have in mind when I say "actively run in the open".

I agree with this post. Weasyl's communication is awful, and it's management structure confusing. There's no clear direction or goals. Advertising is non-existent.

They really need to get some people on board to help with these things, but from this end I can see they're already starting to close up and ignore people's offers to help. Kool Kidz Only I suppose.

[graeme]

While I'm not one to pimp my own project here.. since it's under my real name.. .. I would suggest trust ones that have Git repos you can download, trust ones that have open communications, trust ones that have decent documentation and mission statements/plans that are a little more detailed than "I wnat to make the next FA cuz Neer sux"

https://github.com/JarrodHenry/SpiderSilk
I couldn't find the decent documentation or the mission statement. where are they?

well okay, I just haven't put it online yet. I don't really know where I'm going with it yet.   Plus, much of the work is still sitting on my hard drive. I'm working on getting a vagrant install setup so people can clone the development environment and be ready to go. That actually was my plan for this weekend. This is why I'm not pimping my own project. Its not ready yet As there are still some core features still being implemented. But feel free to forK it and do what you wish.    And give me pull requests if you'd like

[Pi]

well okay, I just haven't put it online yet. I don't really know where I'm going with it yet.   Plus, much of the work is still sitting on my hard drive. I'm working on getting a vagrant install setup so people can clone the development environment and be ready to go. That actually was my plan for this weekend. This is why I'm not pimping my own project. Its not ready yet As there are still some core features still being implemented. But feel free to forK it and do what you wish.    And give me pull requests if you'd like

A few tips before you dive into vagrant:

• commit messages consisting solely of "g" are useless, learn how to 'git rebase' before you publish garbage history like that
• do not ever commit secret keys holy goddamn
• this doesn't seem to be enough to warrant a vagrant setup tbh
• maybe try contributing to other projects before starting your own

[habnabit]

https://github.com/JarrodHenry/SpiderSilk/commit/6dbd6f9d517c47bb6f2abdd3e8a3f7389b34274f
relatedly, this was my favorite commit message.

[graeme]

A few tips before you dive into vagrant:

• commit messages consisting solely of "g" are useless, learn how to 'git rebase' before you publish garbage history like that
• do not ever commit secret keys holy goddamn
• this doesn't seem to be enough to warrant a vagrant setup tbh
• maybe try contributing to other projects before starting your own

Okay, thank you very much for your input.  I do not mean that snarkily, but literally.  You are correct, there probably isn't enough to start working on vagrant.  I'll cease that and focus on docs.  You're not the first to point out my commit messages, though.. I don't get the reference to "g", am I missing something there?  I definitely admit I need to be more clear on my commit messages about what I changed, but I never did one letter commits that I can see in my git log here.   (Ah, and I just found it.  That was in reference to adding in flask's usage of the g namespace.  It was a shoddy commit message and I can do better than that.)

You're the second one to blast me on the key here.  That's removed and committed.

Finally, I do contribute to other projects   This is a learning project for me to get into python and webdev, that is why I say it is not ready yet.  It might not ever be ready.   Which is also why I didn't dox myself and post it... but simply mentioned it as having the code available as part of the "openness" that Eevee was discussing.   As for contributing to other furry projects that might be going down the path of creating websites for art or writing, they all seem to get to the point where they've added in a number of cool features... and then they stop because they don't want to do that hard stupid boring test work.     Or documentation.   I've looked at a few, but every time I come across them they're either in that "oooh, we're a secret" phase or they've been dormant for awhile. 

I'm sure there are more under the surface, but I don't really want to work on a team that hides everything from the world.   Even if I'm a shit committer so far, you've made me a better coder for nailing me on my commit messages and the secret key.  If I didn't have the source out there, you'd never have said a word, and I wouldn't have gotten that knowledge.  And that's where we're at with FA.

[graeme]

https://github.com/JarrodHenry/SpiderSilk/commit/6dbd6f9d517c47bb6f2abdd3e8a3f7389b34274f
relatedly, this was my favorite commit message.

That was when I was playing with Heroku.  And me in my idiocy thought I was on my master branch, when I was on the heroku branch.    But it was way too early for Heroku too

And yes, my commit messages are shit, this is known and will be worked on.