SpamSandwich

gatorguy said:

SpamSandwich said:

gatorguy said:

SpamSandwich said:

jSnively said:

Funny is gone.

It became the new dislike, and wasn't important enough to be worthwhile. I thought about just reducing to simply 'like', but looking around it seems the informative button is being used well and holds some value, so I have no problem leaving that in.

Happy new Year everyone.

Personally, I find these attempts to control posting behavior annoying (beyond methods of identifying and quickly squashing obvious threadjackers and spammers) and I'd be supportive of getting rid of all tags unless they represent a fuller spectrum of opinion, both positive and negative. 

"Funny" taking the place of "Dislike" (or whatever) was misguided. As long as "Like" remains there should be the opposite. Can you just go back to thumbs up/thumbs down?

IMO informative is a very good tag that shouldn't go away. It lets the reader quickly note that a specific post has information, details, facts or opinion that is very helpful and perhaps not generally known, a certainly worthwhile read. It definitely serves a purpose as quality posts of that type are uncommon. Like? Whatever the forum leadership decides is fine of course, stay or go. At least it's positive and encourages rather than discourages more engagement by less active members.

"Informative" is fine, but have you ever seen anyone stop posting because they got a lot of down votes? I haven't. 

How would you know? I've seen a lot of new members go missing, tho I've not bothered to go looking/asking why. I can imagine if a someone new signs up and first honest post in gets whacked with several downvotes (oft-times accompanied by claims of "troll") they might feel discouraged and decide this isn't a very welcoming site, and even worse leave with an unfair stilted view of Apple fans in general. I think that's what the management is trying to avoid. There's no benefit to allowing a handful of loud and too often insulting voices to drowning out intelligent discussion by sending new opinions and posters packing.

If they're truly trolls the mods will deal with it pretty quickly. Jumping in with immediate downvoting to discourage new blood that may simply not be toeing the currently popular line won't help the forum thrive. They could well ahve some very unique insights and experiences that add to the forum value if we give them a chance. We really should be more welcoming to new members. Not everyone who comes in with a first post to note a problem AI has put up a story about is trolling, but they should certainly be forgiven if they think most members believe they are based on the downvotes they would receive. Personally I don't think those frequently using the thumbs-down were ever representative of the forum membership as a whole, just the most egregious. Could be wrong of course but I've been around long enough to understand there's a pretty small but very loud and less-tolerant segment. 

The tone of the forum had to change if it was going to continue on, and I believe it's too important a resource not to. We all should appreciate the more dedicated forum leadership instead of nitpicking a silly button, grammatical errors, or moderation efforts. They aren't trying to break it, they're trying to build it up.

smaffei said:

Certainly appears that the professional Mac is going the way of the dodo at Apple. Which to seems self defeating to me considering the only way to develop iOS apps is to use a Mac. (Yes, I know about PC Hackintosh, but it's not approved). You need a reasonably beefy Mac to do decent development.

Isn't neglecting the tools that support your bread and butter platform suicide? I hope we're not going back to the dark days of Metrowerks CodeWarrior!