jSnively

chromos said:

The AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule products are not currently being sold in Apple Retail stores.

This is incorrect. I purchased 2 AirPort Extremes from my local Apple Store within the last month. The linked article is quite old and the stock pull possibly had to do with an FCC issue that resolved in June.

via the link:
"This discrepancy could lend credence to the idea that these stockouts are related compliance with a June 2 deadline set by the FCC. This is the date at which routers approved under an older set of rules can't be sold unless they meet newer security regulations which have been phased in since 2014."

Which turned out to be the case, as Chromos pointed out. It looks like we're guilty of not updating an older article. That's a legitimate complaint.

Mike did his due diligence checking with his resources and local retailers -- as we do for everything we post. We have updated the last line of the article to say "some" retailers instead of all. Not everything is a conspiracy, this is not evidence of living in the "post truth" world.

nht said:

...

Actually it was dismissive and without seeing the data no one has any idea whether or not it was effective.

I understand "without seeing the data no one has any idea whether or not it was effective.", but that is beyond the scope of what we're going to divulge here. Partly because it's a fairly complex mash-up of metrics, but also because that gets into numbers in a way we don't want to discuss publicly. At some point you just have to trust we aren't making arbitrary decisions. If I wanted to be dismissive, then I could have just told everyone to go pound sand, or let everyone complain into the void.

nht said:

The only statistic that really matters is revenue. I don't think having a troll friendly forum increases your revenues but your servers so your call.

Actually, this is wrong. The forums are a loss-leader for us.

We keep them around because this community/site has been around for so long, and it's important to us. Too much of the internet has proven ephemeral, and we are in a unique position as an earlier Apple-focused news outlet to preserve some of that history. It's one of the reasons we work so hard to ensure our posts from the late 90s still load up in the current CMS, and links in from extremely old URLs still function. I recently saw a thread over on the MR forums about someone doing research on Apple for school, and they were looking for early apple news from before a certain date (I forget when exactly). Not only did a number of replies say "check AppleInsider", but guess what was one of the few still-running sites they could actually uncover working posts for? It made me smile.

It would be very easy for us to just go hands-off like newer endeavors and let the conversations happen primarily on social media. That's where the people actually are these days. But, we find value in building and expanding the community around the site, and we want as many people as possible to be a part of that. It's part of our DNA. I grew up on BBSs and small, localized internet communities; almost none of which are still around. That's why we're making changes, and that's why we're actively working to encourage more people to participate.

It's not always easy, and we're not always going to get everything right, but it's important to us that we foster a community of fun Apple lovin' people. Who knows, maybe now is the time we fail, maybe that desire is strange and outdated to begin with, but it's the place where we feel the most at home.

We hope that's true for most of you as well.

SpamSandwich said:

I do like the addition of "Funny" and "Informative", even though both are essentially just variations of "Like".

If "Dislike" is permanently removed how about adding some variation(s) that likewise allow readers to express an opinion without forcing them to type out a potentially explosive or controversial reply? Maybe "Offensive" or "Spam" or "Wut?" buttons?

If we get to the point where we revisit the dislike button, we will take a look at exactly how to break that out into a less generic button as well. Putting in those options right now would have the same effect as not removing it.

If you're going to report spam, please use the flag link, as that will actually trigger an alert in the administration panel, whereas the reaction buttons don't. I can look into moving that Flag link so it's better presented as well (this has always bugged me), it's burred a bit deeper than I would like in the software.

gatorguy said:

Nice to see evidence of the mods keeping topics on track today. My apologies for my own distraction in one of them but I think this might just work to make the forums a better place to exchange ideas and opinions. Thanks!

We just want keep things on topic. Editing bait-y language and removing pointless and/or trollish posts seems to be the best approach. If you get moderated don't necessarily assume you did something wrong, sometimes posts get killed because they responded to another post which we removed, or sometimes we just foresee them causing more problems than they're worth.

I don't have the time to send PMs to everyone about why their post was edited or removed, but you can always PM me and I will try to respond to as many as I can.

tallest skil said:

jSnively said:
If you really disagree with a post, then reply to it!

I both agree with you on principle and hate the decision anyway.

No worries, we're going to try it this way for a while and see how it goes. We can always bring it back if we really need to.

StrangeDays said:

Yeah, not thrilled. The troll count on AI has been rising, usually from new members and especially after apple events when they come out of the workwork to bash apple. Downvoting them was a good way for the community to collectively express our opinion on that.

True forum disruption comes from the one-hit-wonder trolls, and users like sog who for months has been dropping hundreds of off-topic rants and derailing every single article. It was absurd and reaching critical mass -- thanks to his poor like ratio and heavy dislikes he finally backed off. 

I just hope this change doesn't create a safe space for trolls, every opinion is equal, etc. 

One of the assumptions we made when the feature was originally added was exactly that; Users would fall in line because they cared about that ratio and their scores. After a year of having it live and looking at the data, it turns out that is just incorrect. It didn't stop anyone who wanted to from trolling or making low quality posts. However, it did stop lower frequency and newer posters from wanting to participate.

It's important to us that we are welcoming to new users and that there is an easy path to join the community here. That's the only way we will continue to grow. If that means a little more work cleaning out one-post troll accounts then so be it. If you see one then don't feed them, report them. Down voting had no effect on those users to begin with.

Please be aware though, just because you report something doesn't necessarily mean we will agree that it needs to be removed. We have a reputation here of a being a cavalcade of "Apple fanboys", but this site has been around during some really low Apple lows, crazy high highs, and even lived through Steve Jobs suing us. Not everything is amazing at Apple all of the time, and that's okay. We all love Apple at our core, but we're not so thin-skinned we can't take a rational, well-considered criticism when it's warranted.

StrangeDays said:

I'd much rather see the forum finally implement a way to enable a reader to click back to the source post when reading a quoted reply. The old forum did this, as does MR. It's useful since it allows one to navigate and reply to an old message seen only in a quote. I would recommend using the quoted-username as the URL for their source post, instead of going to their profile. 

This is something we can look into.

tallest skil said:

Currently an informative post is worth more points

Are we talking Whose Line Is It Anyway points, or…?

There's a cumulative 'score' associated with people's forum accounts. Points are awarded for getting likes, funnies, and inf marks on posts, as well as for any badges that may get awarded. The "Good Post" badge, for example, gets awarded the first time a single comment from a user passes x likes. So yeah... only slightly more structured than Whose Line is it Anyway points ; )

StrangeDays said:

On removing Dislike - "too frequently used to dogpile reasonable posts when they didn't line up with a segment of the forum's point of view, whether that be a reasonable criticism of Apple"

...sounds like a shield for trolls. Not enthusiastic about this. Why make a negative judgment about people downvoting what they feel are low-value posts? How does that harm the discussion and thus AI's numbers?

The posts I'm referring to there are perfectly reasonable posts. A troll is not simply defined by "they don't agree with me." This applies to all topics, not just Apple related ones. The divide between left and right wing politics on the site is another stark example of people abusing and misusing the dislike button. A lot of veteran users have complained about the dislike buttons behind the scenes, and there were threads complaining about when we implemented it in the first place.

This hurts the forums by discouraging healthy debate, and lowering the barrier of entry towards general negativity. This is especially painful for new users, who maybe aren't used to some of the personalities we have here and are more likely to get piled on. In fact, I have contemplated removing the post counts (in favor of a more generalized rank) as well, because I see some really negative behavior around them, but no decisions have been made on that front yet.

You can still flag threads for moderator attention if they violate rules, or you want to draw our attention to them.

Quick Edit:
If you really disagree with a post, then reply to it! We want people talking about and discussing topics, not everything is cut and dry : )