Gentle resister

[Samuel R. Lucas]

I appreciate all the hard work you have done, Marcello, and I appreciate all the hard work of everyone involved in the list, including the hard hardware work of Bill Mahoney. People like Bill are often the unsung heroes and heroines of all the analyses analysts conduct and present. And, I appreciate that change is inevitable.

That said, I will sound a, hmm, how to put it--a less than celebratory note about the new forum format.

I just registered, and perhaps it will grow on me. I think it probably will not. I find it a bit . . . incongruous.

On the one hand, massive computer storage capability and amazingly advanced search capability together render "organizing" material completely unnecessary--at least, the poor organization humans do. Google is one of the most, if not THE most successful companies on the planet. And their core product, the door through which 90 percent of their customers originally entered, is a simple square box in which one can type anything a keyboard allows and some things a keyboard does not (e.g., images), and the magic of google will bring--without ANY human categorization effort--relevant material to one's screen.

This is how the retiring statalist worked, especially the archives--no one needed to categorize anything. The text itself was the source for search engines.

Now, with the "advance" of the forum, instead of mining the steadily growing stockpile of information, people are supposed to "tag" their posts and, more important, place them in the appropriate collection: 1)general, 2)mata, 3)how the forum works, and 4)sandpile, er, uh, I mean box. Why? We can see the problems with this approach already.

First, there have *already* been mis-classifications, which would seem to increase the work for someone (or, eventually, it will be very tough to find the relevant material). It is unclear whether and how such misclassifications will be corrected.

Second, many postings combine material--this is the way of work, and human thought, and cannot be easily eradicated (without prohibitive costs in intelligibility, if it is even possible).
Third, navigability has already been questioned. The solution is for forum users to set up stuff on their browser. Again, why? Just to get the functionality old statalist had for someone arriving the very first time? This is progress?

Again, I completely understand the need to retire equipment, and thank those who managed aging equipment as long as they did. I am truly grateful.

I just wonder--why do we reinvent the wheel and call it progress, when, instead of a 360-degree round rolling object we now have a kludgy object that has two straight sides attached to one long curve. It does not roll. It does not rest. It does not work as well as what we had before. Why don't we just move the wheel that works to a new platform?

Anyway, maybe experience will help me see and feel this as an advance. But, judging from many other "advances," I can say--it is quite possible that most will experience a loss of functionality, and, while they may accept it (because they appreciate the hard work of those who run it day-in and day-out, and there is no clear alternative), it will reduce the utility of the resource for them.

Respectfully (and, apologies for cross-posting to statalist.old and statalist.org)

Sam

[Maarten Buis]

Some form of reinventing the wheel was inevitable as not only the hardware was retiring but also the person maintaining it, and Marcello has announced that his retirement is not far away either. So a new person would have to learn a system for maintaining such a list, regardless of which system we chose.

I am less pessimistic about the categorization system being confusing, as it is pretty minimal: you can't go much wrong if you always post in General, and my first impression is that most persons ignore the tags. The sandbox forum is just for test-messages to give new users (all of us) get used to the system by playing around. I would not be surprised if that forum would dissapear at some point. So that would leave General, Mata, and Using the Forum, which should be manageble.

[KitBaum]

I couldn't agree more with Sam's comments. The issue is not how many forums (fora?) there are. For me the major issue is the great inconvenience of keeping current, in the way that has always been feasible in Statalist-Digest. Having to enter credentials repeatedly, no good way of navigating between posts (or seeing the entire post in Recent Activity), inability to scan traffic without doing something extremely kludgy with RSS, and having to do all this customization on multiple devices in order to just return to the prior functionality IMHO far outweigh the advantages of classifying threads, the ability to paste in Stata output and write in LaTEX, etc. To echo Sam, this indeed is not progress, it is regress in the interest of glitz and not usability.

[Nick Cox]

I doubt anyone wants a ding-dong debate on was it/was it not a good idea to change -- not least because Sam placed this in the wrong forum, possibly as a way of underlining one of his objections.

Statalist has been around nearly 20 years, and many of us worked out habits for dealing with it that suddenly need to be changed, or are redundant.

To me the central issue is that we now have a forum for technical discussions that respects technical content. I can post on graphics ... showing graphs. I can post code ... showing code formatted much more readably. We put up with an outdated format just like people who said that you don't really need colour television. (I was often one who said "No" to forums, and I changed my mind when I looked more carefully at how they worked.)

By and large, the main things are similar. Most of the traffic is in General; it is clearly threaded; I can identify threads I don't want to follow pretty easily.

There are some small glitches to using the software that are being worked on, but I am almost entirely positive that we have a much improved way to discuss Stata.

[KitBaum]

I must respectfully disagree. There is no question that a more modern system with greatly enhanced flexibility, as a forum provides, is a move forward. It is the flawed implementation that is problematic. Surely with the tools available for web-based applications it is possible to have the option to view all posts (in their entirety) made during the last 24 (or 48, or 72) hours in order to separate new content from past postings. That was the great advantage of the digest format. The "Latest Activity" does not do that, or anything similar: it shows posts that are not even in chronological order (why?), and requires you to click on each one to see it in its entirety. Surely there are forum implementations in which it is possible to view current material and separate it from items weeks old, but this does not seem to be one of them (at least as it has been implemented).

This is not an argument for habit persistence: it is a matter of time required to get to the same place. It takes MUCH more time to figure out what has shown up in the forum than it used to. I am all in favor of change (and change in log-established habits) if that makes it more efficient for me to keep current with Stata users' concerns and gain the advantages of being able to see code, maths, etc. The current implementation goes in the opposite direction and makes that a tedious and time-wasting exercise to get some semblance of the same information content. In net terms, not progress by any stretch of the imagination.

[Nick Cox]

The page I look at most is

http://www.statalist.org/forums/foru...ussion/general

I look at it more than once per day on average, which may be a substantial difference here, but I can see quickly enough which new threads have started. In many cases the titles alone tell me that I won't understand or won't want to read the question. In total I think following Statalist is for me quicker than before (from someone who looks at least briefly at perhaps half the threads).

Despite watching Statalist carefully for many years I continue to be surprised by others' habits. The digest for example struck me as the worst possible way to get postings: a time-ordered stream with pollution from anything other than plain text, but now its dedicated fans are jumping out of their seats!

[Alan Riley (StataCorp)]

I'll jump in just to comment on what I find to be effective use of the forum.

I too find that I can keep up with Statalist much faster via the forum than via either the old individual emails or the old digest. Here's how I do it:

1) make sure I am logged in. Right now, this is a bit of a pain because of the bug in the forum software where 'Remember Me' is not effective between browser sessions. However, as long as your browser is open somewhere on your computer, you won't have to log in again. The reason you want to be logged in is that the forum software can keep track of what you have viewed/not viewed across devices. So, let's assume you've logged in on whatever device you are currently using to read the forum.

2) Go to a forum of interest, say, the General one where most substantive discussion occurs. If you like, you could go to the Mata forum. You can ignore the Sandbox forum, because it is for testing purposes, and 'Using the Forum' is probably not that interesting to you in the long run either.

3) Now, you're looking at all of the topics in the general forum. If you click on a topic, all of the responses to that topic appear in date order linearly under it, so you can read an entire topic of interest in one go without messages from other topics getting in the way. This is the first thing that helps me read Statalist faster via the forum. When I am interested in a particular thread/topic, I can read everything people have posted so far about it, one message right after another.

By default, the thread which has been replied to most recently is at the top. Threads which have new posts since the last time you read the forum will have their titles in bold, and threads you are already caught up on won't be in bold. Here is what I see when I look at the 'General' forum right now. I can easily see at a glance that there are three threads which I either haven't read at all, or have new posts in them which I haven't read:



4) See the red arrow above? It is pointing at what is perhaps the most useful part of the forum, that little circle with a double down-arrow in it. If I click on that circle instead of on the thread title, the forum is smart enough to jump me right down to the first post within that thread which I haven't yet read! So, even if I read the first couple of posts in that thread yesterday, when I come back today and see that there are new posts in it, I can click on that circle and go right to the newest content in that thread. If you haven't read anything within that thread, it takes you to the first post in that thread. So, I click on it. I read from there to the end of the thread. I hit the 'Back' button in my browser, and I repeat for all threads in which I am interested but haven't yet caught up.

5) Sometimes there are topics I just might not care about. I can ignore those. Once I have caught up on all topics I care about, I click on the little square icon just to the right of the word 'Filter' in the header above the forum posts, and I click on 'Mark This Channel Read'. Now, the forum software thinks I have read everything, so it won't show any of the titles in bold until there are new threads or new posts in existing threads.

I find it much easier not only to catch up with anything on Statalist I haven't read but also to follow discussions, because now I can see all the replies regarding a particular topic, in their entirety, in line, one after another.


Just as a quick summary, what I find the most effective way to follow the forum is

1) sign in

2) go to the subforum of interest, say, General

3) notice all threads with bold titles -- that means there is something I haven't seen yet

4) click on the little blue circle to the left of the thread title of one of the threads I haven't seen yet

5) read all of the posts in that thread I haven't yet read

6) click the back button in my browser

7) repeat 4, 5, and 6 for each topic I'm interested in

8) if there are topics I didn't read that I don't care about, click on the box at the top right of the forum, next to the word 'Filter', and select 'Mark This Channel Read'.


We're planning on doing one or more tutorial videos to show efficient use of the forum for those new to this format.

[Roberto Ferrer]

The following comments are based on my personal experience, which of course could be that of a minority of people in Statalist(.org). I embrace change with all the bells and whistles it implies; formatting and graphs are now a reality, and that's good. However, most of what makes Alan's experience smoother, I already enjoyed, and some benefits from Statalist have now disappeared (I won't go over that here).

3) If you click on a topic, all of the responses to that topic appear in date order linearly under it, so you can read an entire topic of interest in one go without messages from other topics getting in the way. This is the first thing that helps me read Statalist faster via the forum. When I am interested in a particular thread/topic, I can read everything people have posted so far about it, one message right after another.

By default, the thread which has been replied to most recently is at the top. Threads which have new posts since the last time you read the forum will have their titles in bold, and threads you are already caught up on won't be in bold.

This is Gmail's default bahavior and other email apps/web-sites, presumably, do this as well.

4) See the red arrow above? It is pointing at what is perhaps the most useful part of the forum, that little circle with a double down-arrow in it.

I too think it could be useful, but can we please make it bigger or move it? I hate playing bullseye with it. So much, that I don't bother with it on my desktop and completely ignore it when using a mobile device.

If I click on that circle instead of on the thread title, the forum is smart enough to jump me right down to the first post within that thread which I haven't yet read! So, even if I read the first couple of posts in that thread yesterday, when I come back today and see that there are new posts in it, I can click on that circle and go right to the newest content in that thread. If you haven't read anything within that thread, it takes you to the first post in that thread.

Again, available within email apps/web-sites.

5) Sometimes there are topics I just might not care about. I can ignore those. Once I have caught up on all topics I care about, I click on the little square icon just to the right of the word 'Filter' in the header above the forum posts, and I click on 'Mark This Channel Read'. Now, the forum software thinks I have read everything, so it won't show any of the titles in bold until there are new threads or new posts in existing threads.

I find it much easier not only to catch up with anything on Statalist I haven't read but also to follow discussions, because now I can see all the replies regarding a particular topic, in their entirety, in line, one after another.

Available within email apps/web-sites.

I'm not expecting everybody use one of these email services/apps. I understand many people used Statalist with their corporate/employer email account/app and that can be very limiting. Also, many people for many reasons are simply not attracted to the idea of opening or using a web-based "free" email account. That's perfectly fine and so I hope that Statalist.org does improve their experience.

Finally, thanks to Alan for the tips. I'm sure they are very much appreciated.