A little disappointed in NaNo

[christinex1001]

No, not in my word count. I'm at 8,430, which is fine for four days. I'm not trying to beat those barn-burning crazies who are already past the 25K mark (or even done, for that matter).

What I'm disappointed in is the NaNo site itself. All this hoopla about their brand-new forums, and yet some of the functionality that made the site so fun is just

Comments

[elementalevil]

I'm majorly bummed about the signatures! But on the upside, the site seems a lot more stable. In previous years the forums have always come crashing down multiple times during the first two weeks; now, I think they've only been down once. So whatever they did has helped it stay up, I guess.

You'd think they could come up with a happy medium without stripping out so much, though. :(

[christinex1001]

I agree that it's more stable, but I almost feel as if the trade-off wasn't worth it.

BTW, you're not showing up on my writing buddies list. Are you writing under a different username?

[elementalevil]

Oh! NaNo ate the ElementalEvil password a couple years ago and I never managed to get back in, so I just started fresh as Storm Dream. Granted, I didn't really get to participate the last two years, anyway. :) I'll hunt you down right now!

[christinex1001]

I actually found you already -- hunted you down through the North OC regional forum. You should see that I have you listed as a writing buddy.

Of course, I'm about to fall woefully behind, as we're going to Sedona for the next five days, but oh, well. Maybe I can get some writing done each morning while Erik's in the shower. ;-)

[thelauderdale]

I agree. I don't just miss my pretty banner (and I have made a whole slew of them, sitting on my Desktop) but I also used my signature to promote my library. I miss the bars by people's names. Why the HECK did they get read of those? Also, on the stats page, when reading my chart, it is much harder to tell how much one actually wrote on a given day - roll over for the quantity and you just get the daily word goal. It kind of sucks.

Also, it is not 1666 words per day. It is 166*7*. That is deucedly misleading.

[thelauderdale]

Also, on the stats page, when reading my chart, it is much harder to tell how much one actually wrote on a given day - roll over for the quantity and you just get the daily word goal.

And...you already said that in your post.

Whatever. Bears repeating. Still sucks.

[christinex1001]

I don't know what the deal is. Maybe the implementation with Ruby on Rails wasn't quite as easy as they thought it was going to be.

I'm feeling so cranky about the whole thing that I haven't even donated yet. I always give at least a little something each year, but since I'm not even getting a quarter of the functionality I'm used to, I'm not terribly motivated to give them any of my hard-earned cash.

[little_oracle]

debated whether to say anything here, but then my inner geek kicked in. i figure the more information out there, the less negativity gets thrown around in the world, right?

as a web design/dev person, i know how hard it is to make the kind of transition the NaNo folk have done. it's much more than just copy/paste as they were working on the Drupal CMS before and a switch to Ruby on Rails means it's probably all custom coded from scratch. the switch means that certain features probably had to be put on the back burner in favor of getting the site stable and functional (and i've never seen it so stable! i'm impressed). if the code folk there are anything like i am, the decision to cut or postpone things was not easy and they're probably sitting there going, 'if only we had a little more time!'

so, i would guess that there's stuff that will roll out for Script Frenzy next year that wasn't on the NaNo site and then further features for next year's NaNo.

and yeah, that graph is kind hard to read.

[christinex1001]

Actually, my husband and I discussed this last night. He doesn't have a dog in this race, since he's not doing NaNo, but he's an IT geek with lots of object-oriented programming experience. He hasn't worked with Ruby on Rails too much, but he still knows a good deal about it. His sense was that they either didn't hand off enough component bits to individual programmers, or they underestimated how much time it would take to just get the backbone of the site going w/o including all the fun gizmos.

I know this stuff happens, and it's not as if I'm boycotting NaNo or anything, but it's still disappointing. And judging by what I see people saying in the forums, I'm not the only one who feels that way.

I'm not a programmer, so I don't know how hard it would be to replace the new hard-to-read graph with the old one, but if they don't fix anything else, they should fix that at least.

[little_oracle]

they should DEFINITELY explain things a little better and i do hope they pass on some of the stuff like that to the users.

i say this because i just figured out that if you hover over the little bars on the graph, it actually gives you the word count you made that day. that's just bad user experience. i think they're making too many assumptions about what the user understands about using the site.

and your hubby is probably right. this kind of stuff almost always takes a lot longer than anyone thinks.

here's to hoping they keep the tradition of improving the site every year.

[christinex1001]

Yes, some explanations along with the "pep talks" would probably be helpful.

Exactly. I mean, if it took someone as savvy as you this long to figure out that you can get the daily word count if you hovered over the bars, then no wonder a lot of people are sitting around and scratching their heads.

Of course, I got nothing written today because I had a bunch of running around to do and then an event to go to tonight, but I sort of figured that's what would happen. :-P