Those of you new and old to Rock Town Hall who have little to no interest in the behind-the-scenes drama and upstairs/downstairs dynamics that we’ve dragged over from our original home are advised to steer clear of the following link:
So, if you’re into this kind of thing, here’s our initial Mailbag for the new home of Rock Town Hall!
Expanding the list from its initial home and broadening the list’s aims were met by the sort of offlist messages we’d hoped for:
I think this sounds great. To be honest, the old format totally bums me out because it’s so archaic, yet at the same time I totally dig the nerdiness that goes on.
As well as the sort we’d expected:
When you change something freewheeling and reactive to a cinched down proactive thing, you take away any compulsions that could come over me and force me to be part of some segment of society, however slim, instead of just being able to while away the years in the hermitage.
We took the comments of veterans into account and tried to respond to people both directly and in the initial design we’ve rolled out. Of course there are limitations and disappointments, but we’re keeping our eyes on the prize. Some of the initial offlist messages we received reflected our collective hope and ambition, such as this one:
Looks excellent! Great Job – you guys should go celebrate. The splash page picture is awesome – Is that an original? You should make that into t-shirts. Another idea is to take great pictures from history and “RTH” them up and rotate them.
And this one:
I give up! You’ve won me over. I should not have expected less from you.
We even got the obligatory
You guys rock!
You know what we think? You guys rock! This is about all of us. Look at the stuff that your Moderator and your Back Office send to each other – offlist:
Poindexter’s rippin’ it up! You wanna give him blogger status or some coke and a reacharound or something?
We welcome your enthusiastic compliments. In fact, we feed off your energy! Keep it coming, but don’t hold back on the other stuff. We appreciate your struggles:
We old men have no idea what the Sam Hill you’re talking about. Bloggers, administrators, who can view posts and comments. I know nothing whatsoever about all the levels of this. My understanding was posts could be made by any registered member – comments could be left by anyone – it’s all overseen by an administrator, who keeps it all PG-13. What else is there?
Your thoughtful consideration:
After giving things a bit more brain time, the following thoughts occurred to me:
1. A public forum will squelch some of the asshole-ism that makes RTH’s gated community so much fun. Speaking for myself, you will see no more dickhead anti-hippy commentary.
2. The mechanics of the blog version will be crucial to its adoption. I’m a Web-based RTH user, so the change may not mean as much to me, but I dunno. If the new format makes the threadiness of RTH go away, I expect dire consequences. But, again, I retain my open mind about the whole thing.
Your frank initial impressions:
Frankly, I’m not feeling the blog so far. The list is a conversation, stretching over a variety of topics all at once. With the various threads segregated like this, it’s impossible to sustain the same flow and tie various threads together, even when you’re using the last comments function. It’s all just too fragmented.
And your concerns regarding our financial welfare in this venture:
But regarding the Amazon store…do you get your vig on anything purchased from Amazon as long as I enter thru a link on the page? or only if I order things listed on the page? or only if I order the specific item I entered Amazon via RTH?
(By the way, we’re looking into this question, but a good way to help us get an answer might be to both order an item in our list and one not on the list but through the initial portal of our list!)
What’s it all about? It’s about thanking you for giving this a try, for taking a few seconds to register, for your comments, for your suggestions, for your contributions, for passing the link to rocktownhall.com along to your rock nerd and rock snob friends, for coming back for more of whatever develops tomorrow and the next day, for making us laugh, for helping us reconsider an artist we’d long ago written off or ignored…for getting it.
Am I the only one who finds the black print on the dark green background hard to read?
In any case I’m enjoying the new features a lot, although the list doesn’t quite feel like conversation in the same way anymore.
So I’d say there are some positives and negatives for both formats.
What I miss most is the ability to respond to only part of a specific post. I always deleted most of the post I was reponding to, quoting only the relevant portion (I know not everyone did this). As others have said, if there were subthreads it would help, instead of having everything in one sequence after the originating post.
I had figured out the ‘last comments’ workaround, but you have to remember to go to the point where you’d last read a post and read upward. It’s kind of like the ‘one comment after another’ (non)structure of the website version of Yahoo RTH, except that you lose the convenient listing of all previous posts underf the one you’re reading, and, as I said, a way of showing that you’re commenting on only a small corner of the general thread. One could theoretically cut and paste text from a previous post into one’s current comment and insert the > symbol to indicate quoted text, but that’s cumbersome.
The current volume of traffic makes these deficiencies manageable, but if you ever got up to 100+ posts per day, which Yahoo RTH has been known to achieve, it would probably get out of control, unless you checked the ‘last comments every few minutes.
PS. I do like the fact that comments appear *immediately* after one hits send. Unlike Yahoo, which periodically goes into a fugue state, holding posts indefinitely, eating some and spewing others out of sequence. Today things are fucked up over there. Jim, I hoipe you’re not sabotaging the old home place to induce defection or dual citizenship. 😉
BigSteve wrote:
No. I’m finding it easy to surround text I copied out of a previous post and then tage it, with the word “blockquote” in the “more than/less than” brackets, with a forward slash preceding the word “blockquote” at thte end of the text you want quoted. Or you could simply use quotation marks around the excerpt you’ve quoted.
When we get to that bridge, I have a couple of ideas regarding crossing it, and I’m sure you folks will as well. I’m also holding out hope for an upgrade to the html capabilities that will allow for commenting automatically on individual comments.
Before I return my attention to patting us all on the back, I will say this: look around the web and show me a provocative, wholly interactive site with aims such as this one that’s figured out the ideal way to achieve 90% of what we hope for. I’m not putting this out there to challenge anyone in a negative way, but to encourage you to show us sites that have overcome some of our limitations after 1 week.
Also, while you think about this and think about what’s changed for the now challenging, think about what is offered by the new setup and what is potentially offered by bringing in a new crew of contributors. Again, this is not said to challenge anyone in a negative way. Through the misgivings and learning curves, I’m seeing some cool stuff in progress.
Ha! Not at all. I’m putting my attention into this site today, but as always, Yahoo’s mix ups are as out of my control as ever. Here, when something goes wrong, Jason and I can yell at each other.
I dunno. I can’t say I’m diggin’ this
so far. I feel like I’ve switched from
a discussion to a question-and-answer
session, which is all well and good if
you like that sort of thing…
Also, why is my text disappearing at the
end of the block? I have to hit “enter”
to make it stop, otherwise it continues
somewhere into the great beyond.
Actually, now that you mention it, that’s exactly what’s been bugging me that I couldn’t put my finger on! Can we get a lil more contrast up in this bitch? You see that sagey green box that’s shading between the olive drab and the gold? What if you swapped that and the main background? Same color scheme, way more readable.
yes, the color combination is a bit rank. the background color needs to be a tad lighter so that there’s more contrast. i’m not a big fan of camoflage green anyway. it’s not very “rock”, is it?
scott, i was having the same problem with line length. But if you just “keep the faith” and continue to type, it’ll take you to the next line automatically. it may LOOK like it’s going into the “great beyond” at right, but it really will work. do you have the “auto-br” box below your text field checked? that may be the problem.
as for me, in general, i AM diggin’ this. good work, mod.
It’s almost like you wrote a user’s guide to explain this stuff.
If you’re used to html coding this stuff comes almost naturally to you, but for me it’s a lot easier to start my reply with all of a previous post, so that all I have to do is delete what I don’t want. I hardly noticed those white text boxes, and then I wasn’t curious enough to find out how to produce them.
No one has ever described me as observant or adaptable, but I’ll try harder.
Steve are you serious? You “hadly noticed” the white text boxes? Wow!
In fairness to Steve, however: Mr. Moderator, most blogs have a handy “quote” button in the corner of each comment that does the block quoting automatically.
It seems like this wouldn’t be too hard to incorporate, and it would make it easier to have conversation.
A request: Could there be a RTH Bulletin Board link? One of the practical functions for RTH was that this or that rocker would post a query attempting to contact someone, or might notify “the list” of a gig. Since list participation has slowed, and “RTH: the blog” currently has no outlet for such a function, I thought I’d ask.
Now: are there any RTH’ers out there who know how to get in touch with Brett Tobias?
Indeed it does seem that way. It also seems that it wouldn’t be difficult to add “comments on comments”. I’m not a PHP programmer so to be perfectly honest, I don’t know if this is easy or not. (If anyone out there is PHP savvy and wants to help… )
These and other features were sought after. We had a list of features that we wanted to include when we started searching for the best blogware option. Price also played a significant role in our choice. b2evolution offered 90% of what we were seeking at a price we could afford. We are told that both of these features (and others we want) are in the works and trust that we will implement them as soon as they are available.
Regarding a Buletin Board. Interesting idea and one that we will definitely consider.
In the meantime, we envisioned the daily All-Star Jam posts as a forum for posting such announcements, posting comments that are unrelated to any of the topics and perhaps posting a comment that might be bumped up to the Main Stage. More of a freeform thing akin to the Yahoo! list.
Over the weekend we increased the size of the text to help out all of us old men with readability issues. In an efffort to bring this terribly boring comment to an end, suffice it to say that lightening the color “a tad” is not a viable option. Trust me. Although I can say we are hoping to offer a choice of “skins” in the near future. Ideas for skin themes include “Office Safe” (looks like you’re working) and “Grumpy Old Fart” (which will be 72 point black Times font on a white background.)
We also increased the size of this comments box in an effort to stem the “when typing, my comments extend the box before returning” issue. The Back Office doesn’t have this issue (using Safari & FireFox) so let us know if this change has helped or not.
Keep the suggestions coming. They are noted and apprecitated but please also maintain some patience as this is a labor of love for which we have neither the time nor the $ to devote our full attention to.
If anyone wants to support the efforts of ye grande Rock Town Hall please make an Amazon purchase so that we can afford to bump it up some notches in the near future. To date we have earned $0.65! (Our iTunes store is in the works.)
Thank you for your attention.
The Back Office
As I said, I’m not especially observant. If I’m in a new environment like this, with all kinds of stuff happening I’m not familar with, I might see something but not necessarily assume that it’s something I could do myself.
As I’m sending this, I’m noticing that the blockquote feature does not indicate who said the thing that I’m blockquoting.
The Back Office said:
I see that the box is bigger through my IE browser, but as we feared, the line breaks just run a few characters longer, to continue running off the page. But you know what?…
I hit PREVIEW and can ensure what’s happened before hitting seng. Hey, I think I’ll hit PREVIEW again…
There…it’s like I have Magic Fingers!
Like The Back Office says, comments are essential. Suggestions are more than welcome. Participation is essential. If you’ve got a little faith and patience, we’ll get to a place where you’re so comfortable with the site that the next time we do change something you’ll be complaining about the new set of changes:)
One final thing, if anyone failed to pick up on the self-mocking tone of BigSteve’s user’s guide comment, we do have a fairly thorough User’s Guide section on the side bar that we encourage you to explore and use.
Now how ’bout we turn our focus back to the Rock?