How's Fluther doing?

We have lately seen some excellent and active members terminate their accounts. The fact that some problems people have identified can never be fixed because it is said that there is no one inclined to make any changed to Fluther.

Super happy with fluther. We miss you guys and wish you popped in more often but understand that you have a life. Thanks for keeping the site alive. Is an amazing community and the people still feel like family.

@Dr_Lawrence Off hand, are there specific problems you’re thinking of, or just the general sense of no progress?

@Judi Glad to hear it, and I agree.

Any questions I can answer?

Boxers or briefs?

@jonsblond boxerbreifs, of course. :)

It’s good to see you. Thanks for keeping this place running. :)

@jonsblond you bet

The ads on mobile are horrible and mostly tell me that I have a drinking problem or depression. While both are correct I would rather not have that shoved in my face everyday. I will give you ten dollars a year to have the ads on mobile (for my account) switched off. I assume that is more then you get from the ads.

And for the love of god. Find someone that knows what SSH and sudo reboot are to restart a rouge server. The outage for the last few days was bullshit.

Hi Ben, thanks for keeping this place going.

While I tend to go missing from this site for weeks or months at a time, I always come back in the end, and while you probably would not believe it, without this site my offline real-life would actually look very different.

Thanks to this site, and more so thanks to the users that inhabit it, I have:::

- Given up an 11 year long smoking habbit.

- Found useful advice and support to help me get married. (we have massive logistics and immigration problems preventing us from getting married.)

- Found people capable of debating me in a way that has caused me to seriously question my opinions and beliefs, to such an extent that I probably would not even have the same personality that I have today if I had never signed up.

Fluther only makes up a very small part of my life, but an influential one none the less.

While I some times get questions and answers moderated for bad spelling or grammar, I am pleased that Fluther is a place that truly does allow freedom of speach. It does not matter how horrible or contraversial I get with my opinions, even if every single user disagrees, as long as I don’t insult anyone and more or less spell correctly, my questions are allowed to remain.

You owe a big thanks to the moderators, this place would have been dead a long time ago without them.

Questions:

- Could we have a dozen or so new awards to work towards, to help keep the site fresh?

- Any way you can maybe get a bit of new traffic to the site or give your users the tools to get you traffic? Having 10–20 or so more questions asked a day would help keep this place active.

- Are you ever coming back to join in on questions and ansers?

- How are things going for you since last time I saw you on here?

Best Wishes,

Signed David G. R.

He, Ben—how are you? What a coincidence. I met Auggie in person yesterday and we were chatting about “the old days” of Fluther. Naturally, your name came up. Hope you’re having great holidays.

Same as it ever was, some views are distorted by nostalgia, not mine.

Thanks for stopping by, Ben. This is silly but I would love it if you could take “Federated (beta)” off the main page. Also, “View Retired Profile Fields (temporary).” As a librarian, out-of-date info bothers me.

The main thing that Fluther suffers from now though is the lack of an influx of new intellect in terms of members so we tend to get in-grown and a bit snippy. I’m not sure there’s anything that you can do to change that.

I and most of it really appreciate your continued support (and are really curious about what Jelly will be.)

Hi Ben. I’m so glad you stopped by. I want to thank you for keeping the site up and running.
I don’t have any problems with the site, but wish more people would join.

Hi, Ben. I too am delighted that you checked back in. I have no complaints either other than wishing that you (and Andrew) had just a little more time for us, your beloved first child. Auggie (and the mods) deserve Olympic medals and a place at the side of the angels, as you do for having discovered her (and them).

Dad would have found, as I do, fluther to be a perfect example of group process in all its mysterious predictability. It seems to want to sustain itself, if possible.

I just celebrated my seventh anniversary here, unbelievable as it seems…I joined shortly after you launched the beta. I owe my long and happy life with my cat to the collective.

I’m with the penguin—we need a steadier inflow of new members. I keep a close watch on the list of new accounts, and by the time we weed out the spammers there’s only a handful of legitimate people coming in each day. Given that only a few of those will become active participants, it’s not enough to make up for the natural attrition rate. When we do get a batch of new faces, like the recent gang of Askville exes, it really perks things up. Otherwise, we start to feel like a big family that’s been cooped up together too long; we love each other, but we’ve all heard Uncle Ralph’s stories way too many times and cousin Jenny keeps doing that thing with her hair.

I frequently pause to appreciate how well you and Andrew crafted this little hangout. I just wish more people could discover it.

Thanks for checking in!

” we love each other, but we’ve all heard Uncle Ralph’s stories way too many times and cousin Jenny keeps doing that thing with her hair.”

That’s an example of why I check in almost every morning.

Yes, people like our thorny chocolatier make it worth being here.

And penguins with small, unpredictible yet fetching dogs who endure being humiliated on a regular basis.

And the little dog does too.

HI Ben, long time no see.

I’ve found Fluther pretty stagnant for some time now. The style of discourse has moved away from problem solving/consulting experts in their fields (if it ever was that) to a social chat site.

The core active base means that most of us can guess what’s going to be said and who’s going to say it – we get caught in the same loops, over and over.

And yet, I still come back. Not as often, granted, but there’s still a sense of community here.

I’m a happy camper, coming up on my 4th year here in March.
Thanks for creating such a fun and informative site Ben!
No complaints from this little duckie. :-)

It would be great to be able to search only our own questions or answers if we wanted to with key words while on our profile page, or do the same on someone else’s profile page. Just adding @username in a search is way to broad and brings up all sorts of things.

Good to see you, Ben! It’s good to hear that you are doing so well.

I suppose you could go through the Meta page to see a list of issues. Getting new, active members definitely is the biggie.

One specific thing that pops up in my head that nearly everyone dislikes regards the Lurve system, and the fact that no Lurve points are given after the first 5 GAs – regardless of whether or not some of the first 5 are people who’ve maxed-out on you. Some here seem to have the capacity to keep track of whom they’ve maxed out on, and withhold Lurve in the hopes of allowing others to bump up the score. It seems contradictory to the Lurve concept.

I gave up on the search feature long ago. That has been my biggest aggravation here for as long as I can remember.

@johnpowell – I thought that once you’re logged-in on mobile, the ads disappear? I access the mobile via Chrome for iOS, and I don’t see ads.

Hi Ben!

I’m pretty happy, apart from the server lag issues we’ve had on and off for a while.

Also, I’m not sure what Jelly is going to be, but I submit all of our profiles should transfer and we should all be given aristocratic titles.

^_^

Ben—it’s nice to see you back in this neck of the cyberworld. Your new project that I’ve read about sounds interesting.

I think Fluther is thriving. We’ve recently had a new influx of jellies after the demise of yet another Q&A site.

It is a wonderful community. I get lots of support from it. Emotional and practical. I love seeing different peoples viewpoints and ways of thinking.

I am very hopeful that it can keep going.

I’m on every day. The comments above pretty much say it for me.

Thanks for the responses, everyone. Responding to a a few of you directly:

@johnpowell Ah, the mobile ads. Yeah, those shouldn’t show up if you’re logged in. Sorry, that sounds like a bug. I gave auggie the instructions for how to restart the apache servers, but I’m gonna look into just making it a chron job to avoid this kind of outage.

@poisonedantidote That’s awesome! Thanks for sharing those accomplishments. Things are going really well for me, personally. Hard at work on my next thing. I do check in from time to time and answer a question. I’m not going to add new awards, as there are more pressing issues. Maybe someday. Traffic is mostly dictated by the shifting winds of Google, so hard to control.

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room You too!

@janbb Got it.

@gailcalled Seven years… amazing. I could have never predicted the way things unfolded.

@syz yep, the community is amazing.

@JLeslie Yeah, it looks like search is broken. It used to actually work pretty well (though most people preferred Google to search Fluther, I thought it was pretty good). That may be my #1 thing I’d like to fix.

@hearkat Changing the Lurve stuff does seem totally reasonable, I’ve heard a few requests. If the community can propose and agree what the new rules should be, I would try changing it, I would just be worried to mess things up (as I don’t have almost any time to tweak things).

@Seek_Kolinahr :) Excited to share Jelly with the world soon. Will be curious to see what everyone here thinks, Your Excellency.

@marinelife That makes me happy to hear. :)

@YARNLADY Thanks for chiming in.

Good choice! I’ll take it. ^_^

I hope my new title is “Emperor Penguin!”

That’s great, Your Imperial Penguinness!

@ben And stay around a bit and maybe we can make a 10K party for you, young feller.

My super great romance with Fluther is over but I come back once in a while for some bad post-break up sex. Could be worse.

I don’t exactly have anything new to add – I thought I’d chime in as no newbies have answered this yet.

In the entire virtual world, Fluther is the only place that feels “real” to me. I’m on almost every day, and I’ve gotten some great advice. Sure, some discussions get nasty, but that’s to be expected. Thanks to the mods, it stays civil most of the time.

I don’t have any complaints, but
I do second @hearkat‘s lurve suggestion.

Thank you for keeping this place running, Ben. Nice to meet you.

We appreciate your keeping this site up and running with all the other things you have going on.
I am happy with the site as is, warts and all.
The only thing I can think of is that Auggie needs flowers sent to her. That woman is a saint.

How many people visit fluther? And how many currently use it?

Is it still worth keeping it up at this point? You mention technically and financially.

I like that this place seems small and tight knit. Although sometimes I feel what makes it so great is a drawback in itself. I have some other reasons. I won’t bring them up as to no create calamity. For me in that I can always expect a certain array of answers from other people. And with a smaller panel I may get perhaps better answers or in-depth conversations however already knowing that person’s position on things can be a buzz kill for me stumping things a bit too. On certain questions I find I get no real good answers.

I don’t know what you are looking to do with fluther, but maybe like all things in life is it simply running its course.

@LDRSHIP https://www.quantcast.com/fluther.com is somewhat accurate for logged-out traffic. For logged-in users, around 2,200 per month.

I’d like to be able to turn off the lurve thingy on my own so it doesn’t record lurve. Seeing GA’s in the sidebar are fine, I just don’t want my lurve to always go up.

Glad to see you Ben.
Hope Jelly is a BIG thing.

Hmm, I just wrote out a question, hit the Ask Fluther button & won’t let it through.
Any ideas would be mildly appreciated.

Hi Ben! It’s all good. Thanks for checking.

@ucme…same here.

@Dutchess_III Very fucked up, I just tried another just to see what was up & that was refused entry too, buggered if I know the problem.

@ucme and @Dutchess_III I tried to post a test Q just to check, and you’re right, the “ask” function isn’t working.

Ben, did you break Fluther???

Fluther is unique, there is nothing else quite like it in the entire Internet so thanks for inventing it and thanks to you, Augustlan and the Mods for keeping it going. This site has made an impact on my life in the real world as well as being fun.

I thought the site might have grown steadily as it attracted new people but it doesn’t seem to work like that. There seems to be a natural optimum number of users. Anyway, the site is great and good luck with Jelly and Twitter (whatever that is.)

Twas a fun crimbo question too, I shall be very cross if this issue isn’t resolved immediately, do you hear…absolute disgrace :)

Ben broke Fluther.

This is why we don’t let him fiddle with it anymore.

I’m in Germany in Stuttgart waiting for the boxing to start

@Lorna Go Barker, knock his fucking head off!

@ucme I do hope so. Looking forward to a good fight.

@Lorna Saw the ref rob Groves against Froch, shocking decision.

And why are those comments on this thread? Derail much?

I don’t have a Twitter account but I thought I might make me one so I went there. The first thing I saw was BEN! Made me sad all day.

@janbb I think he’s gone.

Okay, so we currently have a Q&A site minus the questions, not half as good.

.

Hehe, I love the thought of questions waiting patiently in line, straining at the leash to be let loose when the bug gets fixed.

Whats with the cardboard person?

What cardboard person?

The one in the audience?

That was quick!

@ben May I ask you if Fluther has changed and whether you like the change or not? Is it still what you envisioned?

@ucme I’m wondering if it’s just asking a question under Social that’s messed up. A question has been asked in Meta and in General within the last couple of hours, but it’s been 4 hours since a question’s been asked in Social.

Nope. my test Q was in General.

@Dutchess_III Nah, my second “test” question was asked in Meta just half an hour ago.

Ah. OK.

Maybe we should post our questions here in this thread!

Good god no, heaven forbid derailing the “sainted one’s” thread :D

In all my time here i’ve never known the ask feature to breakdown, a landmark occasion so it is.

Never doubt the powers of God Ben. :)

If Dr.J could speak…“ooh, it’s just questions with you, always questions!”

Hi all—I’m back. I have been trying to fix things this morning and afternoon. The servers should now auto-restart, and I managed to get search working.

Did I break ask? I will look into it now.

God Ben has auto-restart servants. Figures.

Ok, figured out what’s broken. A fix is on the way shortly.

Not a moment too soon. The “newborn” questions are starting to hit puberty.

LOLL!

Thank you Ben. You are the best Munchausen EVER!

Hey, ah… once the “important” items are attended to, could we look into getting weekly shipments of fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies mailed to my house??

Nice to see you @ben.

Really nice. Wish you could visit more often. And Andrew. Damn Twitter.

And lo! A new question has appeared in the firmament! Glory to Ben!

Fixed!

Just to give a quick explanation of what happened: A few months ago, I was trying to write some code that would automatically block spammers. However, I introduced the bug then, but due to some technical snags, couldn’t get it deployed, so it was just waiting in the repository. When I deployed today, it introduced that old bug (which I wasn’t expecting). But now it’s fixed (and we have another tool to block spammers).

Ok. Hopefully everything is working better now.

My wish list includes a functional search feature and, now that @poisonedantidote mentions it, some tweaking to the awards. I know a lot of people hate these, but I think they’re fun, and I found them to be a draw as a newbie. Maybe add some new ones, and reclassify the ones that don’t work anymore as feats of strength?

And nice to see you, @ben.

It’s an interesting site but the concept has evolved into more of a discussion/debate forum. I’d like to see an “ignore” button. Most folks here I have great respect for. A few ruin it for me.

Still chugging along, @ben. The biggest irritation is the search not working, being unable to find old questions or even tell if one you’re about to post is a duplicate of a past posting. If you ever get the time, it would be great to have that back operational.

Hi, @ben- no questions; I just wanted to say thanks for building this site. It’s really something special. And I love the orange and teal color scheme- it’s so restful and pretty!

Design so good the designer left it as his masterwork for the rest of time ;)

I think he actually got himself a hotshot job, he’s really good

@Ben: Since this site is really sui generis, couldn’t you have named your new, mysterious site Jam, Marmalade, The Other Spread or something less derivative?

or even least Jelly Jr.?

Giving your new guy four tentacles just confuses matters even further.

Looks like the bastard love child of a mushroom & an umbrella.

edit; ..or at least..

Man, I miss everything when I go out of town. Thanks for fixing and breaking then fixing things, @ben!

I’ve been here since around the same time my daughter was born, about 6½ years. I really appreciate Fluther and have made some “real life” friends on this site. Thank you for keeping Fluther alive and kicking!

Just chiming in to say I love this site, and thanks for keeping it going. The only feature I would request is that the “Greatest Answers” section on the profile pages exclude all the “Congrats on reaching X lurve!” answers. I realize this might be difficult or impossible, and it is definitely not a big deal. I like to use the Greatest Q’s and A’s to see if I want to follow another jelly, so getting rid of those would make that section more useful.

@ben, a million thanks for Fluther-! Can we add another Friday to the week-? I want more of @ETpro‘s sexciting questions. heh heh :)

@ben – Another glitch came to mind… I don’t have questions directed to me even if they’re in my area of expertise. @ETpro posted this question with the topic tag hearing, which is in my topics list. This has happened for quite a while now… I only get notified if conscientious jellies send the questions to me.

Hey, just wanted to say thanks for dreaming up this little idea—and for maintaining it. I know you guys have a lot on your plate, which makes me appreciate it even more.

And, yes, the moderators deserve some kind of crazy gesture of appreciation.
I would not want to know what they have to deal with behind the scenes. Yeesh.

@ben I started to ask a equation today, and the auto search showed me potentially similar ones. That’s the first time in ages I’ve seen that needed feature work. It you’re responsible for that little piece of magic, thanks.

Leave it to The Pro to ask an equation while the rest of us simply ask lowly questions!

So good to see everyone is still around!

ANDREW!!!

@ben I wonder if it would make sense to go back to one feed of questions. Would people like that?

You mean, get rid of the General / Social / Meta?

Hiya Andrew!!

Good seeing you Andrew!

I’d be cool with general/social being merged (and seriously letting up on the moderation for off-topic, provided people use tiny letters when tangenting). Meta should be separate.

Good to see you Andrew! We miss you both!

That would leave the mods with a big headache, I’d think @Seek_Kolinahr. Right now it’s fairly easy. We all know exactly what we can and can’t do. If we merged them there would be too many gray areas.

Social rules everywhere, I say. We survived for a LONG time before the split, and managed not to kill each other. Also, with only one main thread, Google will actually list all of our questions, and not just the ones in General.

As long as social rules! It was so tight around here when I joined you couldn’t poop. Maybe we could leave it to the OP to specify “Serious answers only.”

^ Works for me.

Are we in charge yet @Seek_Kolinahr?

We must have earned voting rights by now, at least, right?

We really need to put this to a vote if they’re serious. They can’t just go around anymore, doing whatever the hell they want to do without asking anyone!

@Seek_Kolinahr Most of my questions are asked in General because I don’t want off topic chat when I’m asking a serious question. I’d quit asking questions if social rules applied to all questions asked.

And, of course, federated should go bye-bye.

And hey, nice to see ya @andrew.

@jonsblond We suggested that the OP could say “Only serious comments please.” All moderation would be in full force and effect.

@andrew- I was thinking if you today, when I saw that they’re making a Veronica Mars movie.

I like to go through the feed chronologically, and have thought that an All Questions button in the place of Federated would be nice.

@jonsblond I agree, the separation is useful.

@janbb, @cookieman, @hearkat I keep hearing about this “Federated” thing, but I’ve never seen it. Is it possible that it’s only visible to those who have been around long enough to have seen it as an active feature?

It was a beta thing a while back. Other websites with an “Ask Fluther” feature on it. Didn’t really take off.

@hearkat I thought an “All Questions” tab would be great too even if the categories were kept.

@glacial But the tab should still be showing on the top of your screen. It would be good to have it removed.

@Seek_Kolinahr Yes, not asking what it was, just saying that it doesn’t exist as far as my Fluther experience goes. Perhaps it has been removed, just for relatively recent accounts.

No, @janbb, it’s not.

@glacial Hmmm…Perhaps Our Founders could elucidate. Maybe since it says Beta it was only up for some of us.

I was saying it was a beta thing, assuming it would imply that it was only for some people. I asked to be included while it was going on, so definitely there are people who don’t have it.

Only beta users can see the federated tab.

I like the distinction between social/general (and meta should always be a separate category), but wouldn’t mind if there was an “all questions” button. Just so long as you could easily tell what category the question is in.

Hi, Andrew! Good of you to drop by. How’s life treating you?

Andrew is busy being famous, and getting in to the Wall Street Journal: “The Mirror photos are more of a contrast to the standard paparazzi, red-carpet, step-and-repeat choreography where you see all of the exact same poses in every celebrity gossip mag,” says Andrew McClain, the Twitter employee who oversees the Mirror.

Source

Glad he still has time for us little people! :)

^^ I’m actually not very “little”, literally-speaking.

I think we should use the “Federated” tab for all Star Trek related questions.

<—Is totally down with that.

@filmfann But then I won’t be able to see them!

I agree with @Seek_Kolinahr I would prefer to just leave it up to the OP to say serious answers only. I miss reading sometimes that a Q is general or social, but ai am oretty good about reading the details of the question otherwise.mi don’t know if that is true for most people. The OP can also bold it into an answer if the thread starts to go off track and they failed to write it in the original post. I think the OP should have some control over where a Q goes; some Q’s morph into some very interesting information and then the mods have to ask if we want the Q changed from general to social in those cases.

However, the suggestions to have a tab to see all questions is a good compromise since some people seem to really like the separation of social and general.

But how many people read the title of the question, and ignore the details? Or vice versa, even.

@glacial Quite a few I think. I would assume those people miss whether it is in social or general also. Maybe they don’t, maybe they catch that? I just know what I do.

Woah! A federated tab? What’s that all about??

@dxs Read the earlier posts. There is an explanation of it.

@dxs You may already know this, but if you key Ctrl F a search box will come up. Type in ‘Federated’ (no quotes) and search for that word. It’s easier than reading back through all the posts.

I think it was a rhetorical question.

IDK. I’d never heard of it either.

No. It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Excuse my interest in seemingly uninteresting things.
Did someone explain what’s in the tab, though? Is it up by the Social, General, etc. tabs? Is there a cool icon to go with it? What about the “View Retired Profile Fields” one?

Here’s the answer listed above that Seek gave:

It was a beta thing a while back. Other websites with an “Ask Fluther” feature on it. Didn’t really take off.
Seek_Kolinahr (28325points )“Great Answer” (0points ) Flag as…

The Federated Tab

Awesome! Sounds interesting. Too bad it doesn’t work anymore. I don’t remember that tab, even before the tabs happened.

Well, As Seek said only some of us had it because it was in Beta. (I didn’t remember it wasn’t there for everyone.)

Yep. I didn’t ask to be included in anything, and I was probably gone anyway at that time.

Oh.

But what about the “retired profile fields” tab?

That was from when they made a change in the profile layout and was only supposed to be up for a while.

Yeah, hi, is it too late to answer this question?

Where can I find the donuts? I was told they’re complimentary.

Oh yeah, and can I change my name? I can’t eat blueberries without vomiting now.

Much love for the site, man. high five

@blueberry_kid I think @augustlan may be able to change your name if you message her.

@blueberry_kid I hope you let us know who you are if you change your name. I love your questions and answers, they have brightnened my day more than once.