On bungled listings

jebug29 vented his spleen[1] recently about the current, let's be blunt,

totally fucking broken state of the SDF phlog listing. I imagine he's pretty

much just said what a lot of us have been thinking.

The vibrant and growing phlogosphere is one of the best things SDF has going for

it, in my obviously not-at-all unbiased opinion. Interesting and thoughtful

comment on all kinds of things appears here at a much faster rate than it does

on BBOARD or COM, and unlike those walled gardens the phlogs are visible to the

outside world, and they are actively bringing in new users to the Fortress.

This is awesome! Thanks to all the SDF phloggers.

smj has obviously noticed this, which is why phlogging was prominently mentioned

in the recent newsletter (the first of its kind that I've ever seen) and why the

new gopher.club domain was registered. He has recognised the good thing that

his service has and wants to help make it better.

This is appropriate and appreciated. Thanks smj, sincerely.

But what followed was a bunch of changes to the way phlogs are displayed/sorted

and the way that phloggers get their phlogs bumped to the top of the list after

updating. As far as I can tell, none of the phloggers were consulted for ideas

on how to improve this, the changes were made without warning and without

explanation as to why they were necessary or useful.

This is perhaps not ideal.

When people went to BBOARD and pointed out that the changes appeared to have

broken a lot of stuff, smj's response was basically "this is how it works now,

update the tutorial!".

This is almost actively unhelpful.

The current situation has not changed for days and right now anybody who isn't a

hardcore gopher addict has probably given up on regularly reading the phlogs. I

get that smj is on holiday right now and can't act on this as quickly as

otherwise (one might wonder whether making changes to an important part of your

site shortly before leaving on a holiday is a good idea), but in the meantime it

seems pretty likely that newcomers to the phlogosphere are being discouraged

from reading or contributing, which is probably the exact opposite of what the

attempts to "spruce up" the phlogosphere were meant to achieve.

I have no doubt that this will all be cleared up in due time and will become a

short blip on SDF's radar, but right now, this is bloody frustrating. I don't

feel like a valued contributor to a community project, I feel like an anonymous

user of a product from an uncaring megacorp. This is exactly the opposite of

how SDF should be.

But, all clouds have silver linings. Slugmax is a gentleman and a scholar for

so quickly putting up a script for listing recently updated gophers[2], although

it seems to still have some quirks (probably not Slugmax's fault - my phlog

shows up there as last updated on Dec 25 2017, which is exactly the same date

that the official SDF phlog listing showed a few days ago). Alex Schroeder has

written a tool called Moku Pona[3] which lets you subscribe to gophermaps and

see when they have been updated, allowing anybody to set up their own

Bongusa-esque aggregator. Kvothe speculated about a gopher client having some

kind of subscription facility build right into it[4]. I actually originally

planned to have something like this in VF-1, but decided against it to keep VF-1

doing one thing and doing it well.

Ultimately, the various tools that come out of this phase of disruption will

just make the phlogosphere more robust, and hopefully make it just as easy to

track content off SDF as on it, so that people start exploring the full

phlogosphere, not just the large subset of it that exists on this particular

"mega instance".

Onwards and upwards, phloggers!

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jebug29/log/2018-02/03-2204

[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/slugmax/cgi-bin/recently_updated_gophers.cgi

[3] https://github.com/kensanata/moku-pona#moku-pona

[4] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/kvothe/phlog/2018/02/04-rainy-weather-lo-fi-hip-hop-and-gopher-cgi