OMG! OMG! I need some expert help! With explanations in simple English!
But first, some GOOD NEWS about what's happened recently. If our Front Page is where you hang out; if you look at the Rec List to take the pulse of the site then dabble in the Recent List, looking for diaries you didn't even know you wanted to read, here's your new home.
The Front Page is just a click away.
Sure, it looks different and takes time to figure out, but just in the last week or two it's started to feel right. Those two pages are ours.
And that issue I raised about no master tag for Community? Markos wrote this Saturday:
I'll give you your community master tag. White House is kind of hanging out all by its lonesome self in that third line on the front page, and it's bugging me. So I'm adding a couple of extra tags to fill it out more. You get yours :)
Getting back to the topic at hand:
With less than a week to go before Daily Kos as we know it ceases to exist, I've been spending more and more time at the beta site, trying to figure out how things work. The one function I had my doubts about, Groups, has turned out to be helpful. See, I'm a sorry-ass excuse for a blogger. I didn't know how to cut and paste until last year (thanks, iriti!) and don't even talk to me about posting pictures. I finally figured out hotlinks, and my first-ever YouTube video posting made me do the shock and awe shuffle. It's pitiful. It also makes me a GREAT beta user. So I created the Cranky Users Group with this boilerplate:
Cranky Users is a transitional group for Kossacks who think DK4 is scary or weird or hard to figure out. We're gonna hold hands, help each other out, ask dumb questions, laugh ourselves silly, and make DK4 work for us. Join the group and/or favorite the tag.
Creating a group was intuitive, i.e., this fool could press buttons and find directions. All right! The problems began when people tried to join my little group of cranks. You can't join a group without an invitation (!) and joining a group doesn't mean what you may think it means. Joining a group means you can write diaries for the group. If you just want to know when another Cranky User posts a diary so you can read and comment, you're supposed to do something completely non-intuitive; you're supposed to learn how to follow the group.
UPDATE: (already! and I'm still writing this diary!) You don't have to tell me that people can be members without being editors. I figured that out just now, but not because the instructions are clear. When I send an invitation and the person accepts, the default assignment to the group is editor. That should be changed.
May I make a suggestion to the folks tweaking the system? First, don't make people ask to join a group. Have a "Join" toolbar with two choices: "to read" and "to write diaries". If it's important, require an invitation for the "to write diaries" selectees.
And folks? Sticking an orange ♥ next to something is a bad choice. I've been using ♥'s for so long that anyone seeing UserName♥ either won't have a clue that it's a function button, or they'll think I've already been there while feeling affectionate. Change it to "follow" or "join".
I've got relatives who'd take one look at all the orange ♥'s and assume Daily Kos is a dating site for leftists.
This poor Group Administrator got overwhelmed by the shitty buggy Messaging System. There are eighty-nine messages from Cranky Users and the delete button doesn't work. HALP! Can y'all fix that feature by sundown, please? Cranky Users has thirty-two members already and twelve pending invitations plus who knows how many following the tag, so fix it soon or send me a bottle of scotch personal assistant.
Aside: I set my preferences to get an email whenever I have a new message. Trust me on this - that feature ain't working.
Next point: On Friday night everything on the beta site goes bye-bye, the good along with the bad. I know that was the deal from the get-go, but <getting on my knees, like the good Catholic I used to be> can Nurse Kelley please have a pony? There must be some smart person who can save the Cranks so we don't have to start over! Aw, c'mon, Markos, these are the people who said they'd NEVER drink your kool-aid, yet there we are, poking around and joining groups and laughing and complaining and ... wait ... that sounds kinda like a community forming.
SAVE THE CRANKY USERS! SAVE THE CRANKY USERS! SAVE THE CRANKY USERS!
Let's get back to intuitive vs WTF? Two Cranky User editors wrote diaries for the group and put them in the Diary Queue for what they assumed would be automatic publication. That didn't happen. Does the Group Admin have to do that?
If I find a really cranky diary and want to re-post it to the Cranky Users Group, how do I do that? And what's the etiquette - should I ask permission? Offer a membership? Remember, this might be a diary by someone who's seriously pissed off, so I NEED RULZ!
Finally (well, not really, but I'm cranky and tired) the Search Engine doesn't. That POS did a tag search for "Cranky Users" and came up empty.
Hmmpf. Kiss my chicken fried butt!
UPDATE: Still scared of DK4? Half the comments to this diary are going on there. Come see!