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Fate of HTLAL | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3323 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes  Studies: Serbian | Message 33 of 178 23 July 2015 at 10:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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rdearman, I meant no offence and wasn't trying to paint you in a negative light. It appears in my attempt to argue a
point has caused me all this headache so I'm just going to shut up not put my foot in it further as it seems my explanation skills suck. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4320 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 34 of 178 23 July 2015 at 10:55am | IP Logged | |||||
And this is what pisses me off. We don't need to split. It's being forced on us by pushing a decision through whether we like it or not. It's the middle of the summer holidays. Some people are just not online all the time. There is a lot of loud discussion about how the software here is crap. OK. But the other side of it is that the community is great. Those pushing the new site with it's flashy software are destroying the community. Personally I value the community more than flashy software, for others it's the other way around. For me any new site needs to be community run, which means at a minimum the community decides who the moderators and administrators are, not the the other way around; because it's the community structures (not the software) that will inevitably make for a strong and vibrant community (as HTLAL ironically shows). Personally, I think a split is also inevitable now too since the other site isn't going offline and sufficient old members have already voted with their feet. I am sufficiently annoyed with the way this is happening that I think I'll either stay here (and watch HTLAL die) or simply vanish into the virtual aether. Which is disappointing, and unnecessary. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4631 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 35 of 178 23 July 2015 at 11:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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First of all, could we please take one step back? Comparing the current situation at
HTLAL with the separation of East and West Germany or North and South Korea is a little bit dramatic. Calling it a "schism" and comparing it to the separation of the Catholic and Orthodox Church nearly 1000 years ago doesn't help either. All people involved have pleaded for patience, so I don't see that any decision is being "pushed through". We had a similar situation one or two years ago when the forum was down and there was an emergency forum. After HTLAL was online again, some people kept posting in the emergency forum, but most returned to HTLAL. Similar situation about a year ago, when we found a refuge at PolyDog. However, this is the third incident of that sort within short time and it's getting tiresome. I fully understand if some people decide to stay at HTLAL.org and I have thought about this decision myself. At the same time, all people have repeatedly stated that no final decision will be made until FX has made a statement about the current situation and future of HTLAL. Of course, there will be some fluctuation between the two forums in the meantime and, in the worst case, FX won't say anything at all. So, what are we going to do then? If the admin really doesn't answer to our questions, I think the community will have to decide in a poll. This is the only democratic solution. The other solution would be voting "with our feet" or what some people here call "schism". This would be a very deplorable development and only time could tell which side would have the better future, but simply closing our eyes, staying at HTLAL, and pretending nothing ever happened won't help either. There will be more incidents of this sort and the state of the software won't improve magically. I don't say migration is inevitable, but if the community is to stay at HTLAL, FX has to do something about this site. And we shouldn't forget that a big part of the community already has voted with their feet. The forum community has shrunk drastically within the last three years because of the aforementioned problems. Should we simply ignore that? How is HTLAL to continue or even grow if more and more people leave it anyway? The only one who could do something about it is FX, but he ignores us. We're waiting for Godot, people. Wake up! Edited by Josquin on 23 July 2015 at 11:18am 10 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4320 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 36 of 178 23 July 2015 at 11:25am | IP Logged | |||||
This is also a bit of rhetoric. It is the summer holidays. According to EMK as soon as he found out about the outage on Monday he fixed it by Tuesday. That's not to say that he is fairly absent and also that the software is outdated. No argument there. To say that people are patiently waiting for a decision is also wrong though. EMK says that, at the same time as writing every more interesting plugins for the new site. So of course the decision is being made. The new site isn't going down, and some of our most active old members have left HTLAL. I would feel much better about this if the new site's URL wasn't how-to-learn-any-language.org. It's clearly designed to act as an alternative for this community here on HTLAL, not as a new independent language site (like Polydog). Edited by patrickwilken on 23 July 2015 at 11:26am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5570 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 37 of 178 23 July 2015 at 11:26am | IP Logged | |||||
I think you're being a bit unfair on him there. In the first place I can confirm that I have seen posts on there from people who aren't even members here, and from at least one poster who claimed not to have been able to join this one. Frankly I am amazed this site is still going at all given that some kind of outage is now pretty much an annual occurance, it's not mobile friendly, you have to be a paying member to use the search function (even for your own posts!), doing anything takes about 3 times as long as you might expect from other forums, etc, etc, etc. It speaks volumes about the community that it has survived as long as it has. We have to give FX a chance, but make no mistake, in the long term there are only 3 options here: we move to a new site, FX comes to some sort of agreement about modernising and running the site, or the community dies a slow, lingering death. Carrying on isn't actually on the table, as all the figures on new members and posting activity show. Implying that some people are taking advantage of the situation is neither fair nor helpful IMO. Edited by Random review on 23 July 2015 at 11:28am 12 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arnaud25 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 3629 days ago 129 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Russian | Message 38 of 178 23 July 2015 at 11:27am | IP Logged | |||||
- I think the majority of people here are adults and can decide by themselves where they want to go, even if there is a big "flock effect", that I can understand. - I won't defend emk, but what he's done is just installing 2 or 3 mods that anyone can download on the internet. Nothing is flashy, it's just the way it works now with modern platforms. - As a personal note, I wouldn't want that this site or the other in .org become a video streaming platform as we're currently seing on Facebook, where stupid videos with stupid comments replace more and more the texts. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4320 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 39 of 178 23 July 2015 at 11:30am | IP Logged | |||||
Of course the people who wanted to move are taking advantage of the situation. That's obvious. Whether this is reasonable is another question which we can agree/disagree on. I think it's going to split the community and lead to unnecessary bad blood, but other's don't. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4021 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek | Message 40 of 178 23 July 2015 at 11:35am | IP Logged | |||||
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In addition to my previous post: a lot of people mention that this forum is not mobile friendly. It definitely
doesn't have a special layout for smartphones, but you can use it as good as if you were using a computer: the structure of the forum is simple and it doesn't consume a lot of data even if you set up showing pictures in your browser. The biggest problem I have are links which stop working if they are longer than one line, it's just like with Chrome-based browsers on computers. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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