Perspective.
Certain Points of View.
Breathe.
Thank you to everyone who both got the joke, as well as those who were freaked out by it and didn't know what to make of it. As many members have noted, some of the best advice for April 1 is to treat everything as if it were an article on
The Onion. No ill-will was ever intended by it. Some took it in stride and in the spirt of which it was intended, some truly worried, and some have been offended. Honestly, I can understand all three perspectives. Personal reactions are all equally valid and I'm not going to say anyone is wrong for responding any particular way, but it was a simple prank built equally out of a unique opportunity ( a full rebuild of the site) and the need of the staff to have a laugh after all of the hard work.
To provide everyone some insight and understanding on how it evolved.. in order to build the new site on a parallel server, we needed a domain name to build on.. as an internal joke we used a modified DFE name, It is a common joke for web coders to do things behind the scenes that will never see the light of day for the public and when the digital-fanedit.com domain was used, it was simply an inside joke for us. As completion drew near it was clear that April 1 was a likely completion date... well.. I think it's pretty easy to see how the prank evolved from there. No ill-will or nefarious intentions at play, just a way for us to have a good laugh to celebrate the completion of a truly massive undertaking, with an opportunity that we likely would never have again (the complete, massive rebuilding of the site).
At this point I believe that we can all put the DFE joke in the rear-view mirror because it was just a way for the admin team to have a bit of relief after the hard work put into the site... if it still grates on you, my best recommendation (both as a forum member, and as an Admin) is to leave your frustrations off of the forum itself. If you still need to flame away, feel free to reach out to myself directly via PM and I'd be happy to wear my asbestos suit and hear you out, but nothing constructive will come from further public airing of grievances.. This isn't Festivus. This was a joke of best intentions. Like it, or don't like it, but I promise you it was never intended to be anything but fun-spirited, so thinking it is anything other is a waste of your energy.
With the above in mind, I invite you to walk a moment in the shoes of the staff...
Look around the interwebs, from /film, to aint it cool, to OT.com and any other place that people with our passions for film tend to go, and I think it's safe to say that the organization and generally professional execution of our site stands easily alongside of those sites (and far better than some), and that includes the previous cluttered version of the site.
I know it shouldn't bare repeating, but when you consider that this site not only generates zero income for the those that own and operate it, but it typically operates at a loss, the quality of this site is nothing short of amazing. While donations trickle in to cover the fixed costs of the site, the site regularly needs infusions of cash to either to increase the server capacity, or purchase plugins, update licenses, update versions of software or new software that benefit the community. Often we get infusions from very generous members to help offset these costs and we are always grateful to those folks that are able and happy to contribute in times of need, but also, quite often, admins with the means to do so simply step in and make up the difference without making public notices about needing money or asking for donations. We see a need that will make the site better for the members and we just simply pay for it. Not for glory. Not for personal gain but just because we love this site and this community so damn much. I don't bring this up to spur an influx of donations or to make people feel guilty, because if that's what I wanted, well I'd be publicly bemoaning that on a regular basis. I only bring it up as something for members to pause an consider before you post on the site.
I won't pretend to have been a major player in this recent update, but I was in the previous major 3.0 update that included the creation of IFDB. I know how much work that took, and this project took even more. If we had paid a professional web team to produce this work, you are looking at tens of thousands of dollars of time and expertise, and this was done all on the side by people who have full time jobs, families and responsibilities (and even some donated time by a professional web designer to trouble shoot a few specific issues, and he's not even affiliated with our site). Someone joked earlier about this, but it is really the truth; people had to sacrifice even more time away from their families and sacrifice sleep than normal in order to essentially re-build the site entirely on a completely different server, and figure out how to integrate/migrate all of our data into the new framework, and then execute it in the span of one evening in order to make the switch and go live.
We had no intention of laying this much behind-the-scenes 'look at what we did' attention on how we got from A to B, but I feel it is important to highlight so that as I indicated above, you can pause and contemplate about how to construct your observations on the new site.
With any new release there are going to be a TON of unforeseen bugs, hiccups and glitches. If a function has vanished, or decreased in usefulness, or if something is missing or is a door that opens to a brick wall, you should intrinsically understand that this wasn't the intention, so we NEED to know where all these little oddball issues are. We are a very small team and our QA department is every single one of you. All we ask is that you report the findings with as minimal editorializing as possible. We are working to make this site as fucking awesome as possible, and we're doing it because we love this community, and we love this hobby. Nobody on the staff twirls their pencil-thin moustaches contemplating methods of making the site less than it was before. If something seems like a mistake, well, it probably is. Just kindly let us know and it will be added to the bug list. With some luck and hard work, most should be able to be addressed.
I will close with one final thing however; this project has drained some people of their energy, and if you have a negative opinion about something, be it a logo, or a color scheme, or whatever the hell you want to bitch about that doesn't have anything to do with actual site functionality.. the smart money is on keeping it to yourself. A very small group of people donated their personal time, literally for months, in order to make something that was already awesome, even better. The absolute minimum you can do is keep negative criticisms to yourself in the immediate aftermath of the change-over and clean-up. This is the site. It's not going to revert back. If something is broken, we will fix it. If something is missing and can be restored, it will be. If something seems il-logical, let us know and we'll see if it can be made more sensible.
But if all you have is negative bitching.. my best advise is to be like Potsie and sit on it. This isn't intended as a threat, it's just common sense and courtesy.
Stay thirsty my friends.
- L8wrtr