Quality of Code Project diminishing
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gggustafson wrote:
That you would do it for personal reasons is immature and unprofessional!
Seriously? You think that this is a mature response from you? Insulting Chris. If you want to set a site that does exactly what you want, then start one yourself. I think that Chris is allowed a personal indulgence here considering how much work he's done for the community.
Too bad you didn;t read my earlier response to Chris.
Gus Gustafson
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I think that the quality of Code Project is going down. There are a number of issues that need to be addressed but there is no way that I can click on a link and provide the CP staff with a problem (bug) report. CP also needs a bug report tracker that lets me know what's happening. Let's make CP more professional! Chris may believe that ads are important. And to some extent I agree. But the large number of ads is disconcerting. Also when ads hide navigation I am even more concerned.
Gus Gustafson
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I think Code Project is one of the best sites on the internet...kudos to Chris and his team for evolving it over the years with new and interesting stuff and all the article authors that take the time out to post on the site.
You're welcome.
Gus Gustafson
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gggustafson wrote:
Chris may believe that ads are important. And to some extent I agree. But the large number of ads is disconcerting. Also when ads hide navigation I am even more concerned.
So, you would be willing to pay a monthly installment to be here? I could never complain about the existence of advertisements on a totally free site. I would report if an advertisements is preventing navigating the site. I don't recall ever seeing that happen. I'm running Firefox 28.0. I wonder what browser you are running. If you see the "Help" menu item above, then click on that and go to "Bugs and suggestions." If that menu is covered by an advertisement, go to http://www.codeproject.com/suggestions.aspx[^]
Bill_Hallahan wrote:
So, you would be willing to pay a monthly installment to be here?
CP wouldn't exist without its users. CP's users provide content and answer questions. Remove the users and what do you have left? /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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gggustafson wrote:
I think that the quality of Code Project is going down.
If you are referring to content of CP, then team CP cannot do anything about it. It is members who provide content. If you are referring to the site itself, then as others have mentioned, then bugs and suggestions is the way to go. As far as advertisements are concerned, they are never obstructing anything. They mostly appear right at top which does not bother me. I use Chrome all the time and have never seen any interference. Which device are you using, BTW? If you are too distracted with advertisements, you can always use AdBlock or something similar that your browser supports.
d@nish wrote:
If you are referring to content of CP, then team CP cannot do anything about it.
Yes, they can. But it will require a larger team, not just volunteers. :( /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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Hey Gus, If you see something that's broken please do let us know about it. Each of us, Chris, Sean, Matthew, Kamil and I, and the whole team, really want to know as soon as possible. I remember a few years ago talking to Chris about 3rd party monitoring services to watch the site and he smiled and said that he would be surprised if an alert came in before he got an email from a member. (fyi we actually have 3 external services and at least 2 internal ones). So please, best is bugs & suggestions which you can see we're very active in: http://www.codeproject.com/suggestions.aspx[^] or if you think the site is *really* broken, an email to webmaster@codeproject.com will do the trick. I do have to say that I'm exceedingly unhappy you feel the quality of the site is going down. We have been working like bandits on new and better features, adding full Git support to articles and allowing them to become full projects along with an amazing developer focused collaborative task management system, and most recently a documentation wiki system for projects. https://workspaces.codeproject.com[^] As for advertising, well that's a tricky balance. I can tell you that minimalist is our general approach, but to be useful the ads have to be effective too, and we try incredibly hard to make them relevant and on-topic as well. Anyway, please do let us know when something is broken, and please understand there are no nefarious intentions. We want to offer an excellent and valuable site to you. Let us know how we can do that better. David
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Bill_Hallahan wrote:
So, you would be willing to pay a monthly installment to be here?
CP wouldn't exist without its users. CP's users provide content and answer questions. Remove the users and what do you have left? /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
Ravi Bhavnani wrote:
Bill_Hallahan wrote:
So, you would be willing to pay a monthly installment to be here?
CP wouldn't exist without its users. CP's users provide content and answer questions. Remove the users and what do you have left?
/raviravi, the point was made in response to the OP writing:
Chris may believe that ads are important. And to some extent I agree. But the large number of ads is disconcerting.
I expect he did't considered the continuing costs of paying for high bandwidth from an ISP and server costs. I consider conditions here to be more than equitable. The advertisements never bothered me. And, I hope the people who made this site make a good profit too from advertisers. I can see this took a lot of work. The article quality varies. Open sites on the Internet are analogous to mining for gold. There's gold, but you have to sift through a lot of dirt to find it. Restricting access to the cognoscenti is neither possible, nor desirable. Good ideas come from all kinds of people with varied levels of expertise. Sites that do restrict access often have an higher average quality of material, such as sites that publish academic papers, such as the ACM or the IEEE sites, but that comes at the cost of having fewer members and fewer ideas, and also requires a financial price. There are a huge number of practical ideas here that never reach those types of sites.
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Ravi Bhavnani wrote:
Bill_Hallahan wrote:
So, you would be willing to pay a monthly installment to be here?
CP wouldn't exist without its users. CP's users provide content and answer questions. Remove the users and what do you have left?
/raviravi, the point was made in response to the OP writing:
Chris may believe that ads are important. And to some extent I agree. But the large number of ads is disconcerting.
I expect he did't considered the continuing costs of paying for high bandwidth from an ISP and server costs. I consider conditions here to be more than equitable. The advertisements never bothered me. And, I hope the people who made this site make a good profit too from advertisers. I can see this took a lot of work. The article quality varies. Open sites on the Internet are analogous to mining for gold. There's gold, but you have to sift through a lot of dirt to find it. Restricting access to the cognoscenti is neither possible, nor desirable. Good ideas come from all kinds of people with varied levels of expertise. Sites that do restrict access often have an higher average quality of material, such as sites that publish academic papers, such as the ACM or the IEEE sites, but that comes at the cost of having fewer members and fewer ideas, and also requires a financial price. There are a huge number of practical ideas here that never reach those types of sites.
The ads don't bother me, either. Sadly, I don't find them useful (appropriate) and have rarely clicked on one. :( /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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d@nish wrote:
If you are referring to content of CP, then team CP cannot do anything about it.
Yes, they can. But it will require a larger team, not just volunteers. :( /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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Are you referring to hired moderators? I don't think that is a good idea for a business that gives away everything for free to users.
My CP workspace: Incredibly trivial and probably useless code samples[^]
No, full-time editors. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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David, I do not suggest some nefarious purpose. Just mis-guided. Let's look at the two pages to which you referred me. In both cases, I enter the pages with a fixed format using IE9 Win7. Bugs and Suggestions The first thing I notice is that two collections are displayed: Bugs and Suggestions and The current TODO list. I believe that these two collections should appear on two distinct pages. Note too that at the bottom of Bugs and Suggestions there is the familiar CP page navigation controls for the other pages in Bugs and Suggestions. But following that is a line of inappropriate classification choices, a line of flags, and a line of instructions. What are they for? I notice is that I cannot collapse items that have sub items under them. It appears that someone "sliced and diced" the format of the Lounge. This causes a problem displaying the whole page. Especially The current TODO list. When I go down to The current TODO list, at the bottom I see "Displaying 26 tasks out of 39". There is no familiar CP page navigation control to let me view the other 13 tasks. Adding "You can use keyboard shortcuts to navigate" is hardly useful. I suggest a redesign of the Bugs and Suggestions page that removes these concerns. Workspaces On the Workspaces page I find "Connect to GitMachine using your favourite [sic] Git client (XCode, Visual Studio 2013, EGit for Eclipse) and upload your code or clone from a remote repository." I don't use VS 2013. Are you limiting Workspaces to CP members who use VS 2013? I use VS 2008 because it does exactly what I need without bloat. But I guess that my real question is "Why Workspaces at all?" What unfulfilled need of the CP membership is satisfied by this dubious feature? All I want to do is to click on the Download buttons found in an article.
Gus Gustafson
gggustafson wrote:
Are you limiting Workspaces to CP members who use VS 2013?
I am using GitHub and VS2012. I have not seen GitHub UI yet. I just use shell to do it for me. Works fine. Although, I have not tried VS2008 yet. You may want to give it a try.
My CP workspace: Incredibly trivial and probably useless code samples[^]
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No, full-time editors. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
Yes but that would really help with grammar isn't it? I personally wouldn't like and editor to change the content of whatever I post. I believe OP is after quality of CP itself. Now that is something I do not agree with. Yes, there are more things I want to be added but what exists now, just works. I have not faced anything that OP has mentioned yet. May be it has something to do with browser he uses. I use chrome and never seen advertisement issues.
My CP workspace: Incredibly trivial and probably useless code samples[^]
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I think that the quality of Code Project is going down. There are a number of issues that need to be addressed but there is no way that I can click on a link and provide the CP staff with a problem (bug) report. CP also needs a bug report tracker that lets me know what's happening. Let's make CP more professional! Chris may believe that ads are important. And to some extent I agree. But the large number of ads is disconcerting. Also when ads hide navigation I am even more concerned.
Gus Gustafson
I like this site a lot. I can't complain about the features it has but I would like to see more strict moderation. Some "articles" look like drafts or are not informative enough to deserve a place on CP. CP should be a place for quality content only. This way the site will remain relevant and attract more people who are willing to spend a lot of time creating valuable and well formatted content...
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I think that the quality of Code Project is going down. There are a number of issues that need to be addressed but there is no way that I can click on a link and provide the CP staff with a problem (bug) report. CP also needs a bug report tracker that lets me know what's happening. Let's make CP more professional! Chris may believe that ads are important. And to some extent I agree. But the large number of ads is disconcerting. Also when ads hide navigation I am even more concerned.
Gus Gustafson
What is the number of ads you are seeing? I usually use AdBlock for Chrome, but after reading this, I have disabled it for this site, and I still have no issues navigating the site whatsoever. In fact, on any given page, I am only seeing a maximum of 3 ads, and they are always in the same places, the header, footer, and the right side of the page. I am all for contributing to help make something more professional, but I don't think removing ads is the way to go. As Chris has mentioned in multiple replies, you can indeed submit both bugs and suggestions. So, my question to you is this: Other than your issues with not being able to find where to submit bugs and suggestions, and the ads that appear to be working incorrectly on your browser, what other issues are you having, and what exactly do you want done about it. P.S. The addition of Workspaces for this site actually intrigued me so much so that I immediately signed up for a paid subscription. I love how simple it is to use, and how fast CP updating it. My suggestion would be to maybe implement an ad-free version of the site for those that have a paid subscription. It would not affect me either way, but it's just an idea. ;P
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David, I do not suggest some nefarious purpose. Just mis-guided. Let's look at the two pages to which you referred me. In both cases, I enter the pages with a fixed format using IE9 Win7. Bugs and Suggestions The first thing I notice is that two collections are displayed: Bugs and Suggestions and The current TODO list. I believe that these two collections should appear on two distinct pages. Note too that at the bottom of Bugs and Suggestions there is the familiar CP page navigation controls for the other pages in Bugs and Suggestions. But following that is a line of inappropriate classification choices, a line of flags, and a line of instructions. What are they for? I notice is that I cannot collapse items that have sub items under them. It appears that someone "sliced and diced" the format of the Lounge. This causes a problem displaying the whole page. Especially The current TODO list. When I go down to The current TODO list, at the bottom I see "Displaying 26 tasks out of 39". There is no familiar CP page navigation control to let me view the other 13 tasks. Adding "You can use keyboard shortcuts to navigate" is hardly useful. I suggest a redesign of the Bugs and Suggestions page that removes these concerns. Workspaces On the Workspaces page I find "Connect to GitMachine using your favourite [sic] Git client (XCode, Visual Studio 2013, EGit for Eclipse) and upload your code or clone from a remote repository." I don't use VS 2013. Are you limiting Workspaces to CP members who use VS 2013? I use VS 2008 because it does exactly what I need without bloat. But I guess that my real question is "Why Workspaces at all?" What unfulfilled need of the CP membership is satisfied by this dubious feature? All I want to do is to click on the Download buttons found in an article.
Gus Gustafson
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Implementing a "feature" that makes the CP staff's lives easier is not a valid reason. It must be to make the authors and answerers lives easier.
Gus Gustafson
And the site developers are not important? If they add a "feature", as you call it, then there was obviously a reason. In fact, Chris even specifically told you what that reason was. No matter his feelings on the matter, he implemented it, and told us why and what he uses it for. He may have done it for "selfish reasons" but that does not mean he is the only human on the planet that will ever use it.
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Now that is a very hard piece of judgement. Posting in Sugs&Bugs forum, as other already mentioned, is what you need to do to report something buggy. To add up to what other said: the staff gets directly alerted when a post is made in that forum, so you cannot get a more responsive approach. "Large number of ads" is more than unfair. Ads are almost invisible on the desktop PC version of the site (Sorry announcers, I meant "well integrated", not invisible, of course). Maybe they are a bit more intrusive on mobile (what are you using) ? Nobody ever mentioned navigation problems due to ads, what is your setup ?
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus Entropy isn't what it used to.
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I like this site a lot. I can't complain about the features it has but I would like to see more strict moderation. Some "articles" look like drafts or are not informative enough to deserve a place on CP. CP should be a place for quality content only. This way the site will remain relevant and attract more people who are willing to spend a lot of time creating valuable and well formatted content...
I will second this. I have only submitted one article and when I did I went through what seemed like heavy moderation. I really didn't know what I was doing, so it came back more than once with suggestions which I was happy to implement as they made the article not only look better, but higher quality. Since then though I have seen multiple articles that are worse than my first draft ever was, but still somehow made it through. Consistent rules and moderation are really needed for everyone, whether it is your first article or you 1,000th. As for ads. I'm with the people who said "CP has ads?". I can't say I noticed them at all. I'm not on here a ton, I log on every morning check the Insider News and read through the article headlines, but that's about it unless I'm researching something. Keep up the good work, Chris and team! The site is great.
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David Cunningham wrote:
I do have to say that I'm exceedingly unhappy you feel the quality of the site is going down. We have been working like bandits on new and better features, adding full Git support to articles and allowing them to become full projects along with an amazing developer focused collaborative task management system, and most recently a documentation wiki system for projects.
i think hes referring to the quality of the articles appearing rather that CP itself. And if thats the case i'd agree and i reckon that part of the issue is that CP is casting it's net too wide (my opinion) Bryce
MCAD ---
I'm inclined to disagree about CP casting its net too wide. There are so many technologies out there just in the Microsoft world, that it's next to impossible to even be aware of them all, let alone be knowledgeable about them. I have come to CP both for 101 level information on technologies and for help when I'm having difficulty with some obscure feature of a technology. I'd hate to live with just MSDN as a source of information. Yes, some articles aren't very well written, but perhaps it's the author's first attempt at writing an article for an audience larger than their coworkers. When I read an article, I also read the comments and I pay attention to the ratings when I search for info on a topic. I have seen people post constructive criticism in the comments and I encourage others to do so.
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Yes but that would really help with grammar isn't it? I personally wouldn't like and editor to change the content of whatever I post. I believe OP is after quality of CP itself. Now that is something I do not agree with. Yes, there are more things I want to be added but what exists now, just works. I have not faced anything that OP has mentioned yet. May be it has something to do with browser he uses. I use chrome and never seen advertisement issues.
My CP workspace: Incredibly trivial and probably useless code samples[^]
d@nish wrote:
I use chrome and never seen advertisement issues.
Me too. I don't have a problem with the ads.
- I'm suggesting is the bar for entry of articles and tips (esp. tips) be raised. Full-time technical editors can help here.
- I've found myself using SO for answers to questions. IMHO, the combination of Quick Answers and the language specific Discussion Boards at CP is confusing. Also, QA is flooded with requests for code from people who seem to be simply seeking a solution to their work or school assignment. This isn't tolerated at SO. IMHO, the quality of questions (and their answers) at SO far exceeds that at CP.
On the flip side, I don't think there's any real competition to CP's treasure trove of articles. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com