Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Your Nightly 2.0 Update — At Week’s End
If there were ever any doubts that Ricochet is a two-way conversation, this week put them to rest. We rolled out Ricochet 2.0. You told us what you thought. We listened. We’re making upgrades.
We’re proud of our new house. But it’s also just that — a new house. When you first move in, there are a lot of little things that didn’t dawn on you before you actually had to live there. Will the sofa fit in that corner? Does that window catch the morning sun? Which way do you turn the knob in the shower for hot water? Sometimes you get scalded. Yeah, we can relate.
After a while though, you make the changes you need to, you oil that door knob, and the place goes from being your house to being your home. We’re not there just yet, but we’re getting there — quickly.
We won’t ever be able to express to you how much we appreciate the support, patience, and, yes, feedback you’ve given us this week. This thing doesn’t work unless we’re all in it together and you’ve shown us — not for the first time — that you’re in it for the long haul. This site aims to be worthy of that devotion.
Here’s a quick round-up of the latest developments:
- Nested comments are gone. We told you we’d try them and ditch them if they didn’t work. They didn’t and we did.
- All of your old settings for people and conversations you’re following have now been restored.
- Your alert systems should now be functional. We’re still tinkering with them to make improvements, but they should be carrying out their core functions.
- We’re going to change the “more” button at the bottom of posts so that the whole thing is a link through to the full post, instead of just the part that reads “more.” This is a temporary fix. Eventually (and we’re not talking long-term … we know you got used to long waits on 1.0), we’ll go back to the old system, where you can expand posts directly from the Main Feed or Member Feed without having to click through.
- We’ll have the Main Feed’s RSS feed restored shortly.
- We’re planning on restoring the old 20-comments-per-page standard for comments.
- All of the iTunes feeds and information for podcasts should now be correct.
- We’re still at work on the archives, the images in the slider at the top of the Main Feed, and imported media content. These are getting fixed soon.
- We’re also working on the join/update membership forms.
- By popular demand (and managerial consensus) we’re working on a simpler layout for the Main Feed and Member Feed, which will restore the kind of readability we had on 1.0. It’ll be a little while yet before we unveil it, but rest assured that we’ve heard your voices on this.
There will, of course, be some hiccups as we make these adjustments, but we’re confident that we’re on the right trajectory. And we’re making improvements fast.
2.0 gets a lot of things right. It’s beautiful, it’s going to be very fast (don’t forget that our old site was powered by a single, very sickly hamster), and — this is important — it’s adaptable. We can make changes in a fraction of the time that we did on the old site.
In the coming weeks, Ricochet 2.0 is going to become the best of both worlds — melding the best aspects of this new design with the simple functionality of the old one.
This work will continue around the clock (that’s not a figure of speech), but we won’t post another update until Monday. We’re hoping that will give the Blue Yeti the chance to catch a nap. Troy might get himself a drink — if his post yesterday didn’t get him on some sort of liquor store blacklist.
Has this week been challenging? Of course. But when we step back and take stock of it all, we feel pretty lucky. When we started this project years ago, we never imagined we’d be presiding over the construction of a brand new site with thousands of passionate and engaged members so adamant — and rightly so — that we get it right. So that’s our final note to you as we head into the weekend: thanks for joining the conversation.
Published in General
To Rob, Peter, and of course Yeti–you guys rock!
Great work!!! I see progress daily. Have a drink and enjoy some basketball!
You guys are fantastic.
At a time when companies like Google and Apple impose unwelcome changes on users and ignore complaints it’s refreshing to see this type of dedication and genuine commitment to “customers” (I do like to think we’re more than just customers around here).
Now, if only Ricochet could bring in a fraction of the money that those customer-unfriendly companies do.
I’m on Windows 7, IE10, the “Like ” also takes me to the top of the page. As for the one column of two-column format, maybe its a step toward abandoning the two-column format?
I love Ricochet. I came here by following Peter from NRO. Stalked around the edges for a month, discovered the Podcasts (I remember the flagship 100th podcast!) joined and haven’t looked back. I’ve gifted this to my son and have decided to gift it to my two best conservative friends this month.
This is what I like the most about 2.0: it seems so far to be very iPad friendly. My unforced record for not turning on my laptop was 5 days. All my emails, reports, internet surfing and Ricochet is done on my iPad (for what’s worth my forced record is two weeks when my laptop hard drive took a hit and I had to send it in for service). I haven’t tried to start a conversation with my iPad yet but will shortly. Starting conversations on an iOS device with 1.0 was frustrating. One normally gets the title only. No comments are posted. I’m hoping that’s been taken care of with 2.0. But in the meantime, GOOD JOB GUYS!
Some feedback: I’m finding pages are loading slowly. Would love to see that improved.
Some encouragement: Keep up the great work. Update often and be willing to make mistakes. We are here for the content and will stick through the fine tuning on the packaging. Nothing will please everyone and I certainly don’t expect perfection.
When I click “Like” on a comment, the “Like count” is not incremented. Instead, I’m popped back up to the top of the page.
Thank you for everything you do for us all. In particular, I am grateful for the promise of 20 comments per page and for the end of nested comments. I was also very glad to hear that you are restoring the visibility of comments on the Main Page. It seemed from the beginning like an unintentional error, and I am glad to hear that that was indeed the case.
I have a relatively minor malfunction to report which is that Stitcher no longer seems able to find the podcasts. As a Stitcher user I am sure I am in a small minority of podcast listeners, so this is probably low priority, but I’d be grateful to have the problem tacked on to the low end of the list somewhere.
I had this problem in Firefox on my Mac. Switched to Safari, and the like button is now working, but it’s painfully slow to respond.
My feeds are working, but the links on the page to subscribe to the podcasts are quite sickly.
They were referring exclusively to the stuff in iTunes. We’ve got the tech people working on the other issues you flagged.
This is a lot better recovery that that other Website. Maybe because the product is better.
Maybe thought went into this, and it is considered a feature rather than a bug, but the other way seemed better to me: we’ve had the same posts dominating the “most popular” bar almost all week. In the past, wasn’t there a time limit before they got bumped down? Otherwise, once a post reaches a certain length, two of us going back and forth could keep a worn-out thread active and on top for a long time.
We’re aware of this and will address it asap.
Please provide details as to how iTunes now “works.” My existing subscriptions are not succeeding in downloading the latest podcast. I get a security alert from iTunes that it does not recognize the ricochet.com server. When I go to the iTunes Store to attempt to do a “new” subscription to Ricochet it does not result in any new content. There is no “subscribe through iTunes” link on the Ricochet site.
If it is now working, tell us how to make that happen from within iTunes.
I hope you don’t totally get rid of the new layout. I like it, and the only change I would like to make is if it could be like Google+ with infinite scrolling. Although I’m glad to here the more button will reveal the story with having to click through, that will be great! Good work!
To be fair, when you have a billion customers, it’s hard to filter for useful feedback. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, but the best decision for the silent majority does not always align with the desires of the vocal minority.
Also, users don’t always know what they want.
Take the iPod as an example. It had one button. No one was asking for that.
Innovative leaps like that make you look back and ask why it didn’t occur to you sooner, since it’s now so natural.
That said, I also am frustrated with these behemoth companies. Sometimes they really do know better, but when they don’t, you are stuck.
The worst is when they remove hidden ways to toggle features (*cough* Google Chrome Speed Dial *cough*). Also, when customer feedback is ignored, internal quality control becomes more important than ever (Google Chrome now zooms when I ctrl+tab then mouse wheel scroll -_-).
Try this:
I’m specifically thinking of Gmail forcing users to compose emails in a chat window. In that case, I was able to find a third party add on to restore the old method, but Google refused to offer people an alternative. And with iOS7 was a case of imposing hideous design changes on people and, what really irks me, is how they make it impossible for people to revert to the old system once they upgrade. Oh, and don’t start me on Apple taking podcasts out of iTunes.
The iPod is different because that was a new product and the innovation succeeded because it was good. The others involve radical, often unnecessary, changes to systems that people have so integrated into their lives that the companies know they have a captive audience for their whims.
This post is encouraging. However, I’m still at a loss as to why all the changes listed here were not completed prior to the change-over. What exactly was the point of the so-called beta site?
2.0 is working great on my android tablet. Like the log in popup window too.
You mention feed issues being worked on – – I hope one of those is the SSL certificate mismatch. The superfeed URL is at ricochet.com, but the certificate is for *.wpengine.com. That suggests that your site’s IP address isn’t really your own. A quick work-around would be an http feed URL that has a redirect to the appropriate https URL on wpengine.com.
Not working for the SuperFeed. The Old Episodes button remains disabled.
This URL resolves to the same IP address and bypasses the SSL certificate warning:
https://ricochet.wpengine.com/podcast/allfeeds/
I can see RSS content in Chrome, but sadly it still shows 0 episodes in iTunes. Also, iTunes never asks for my Ricochet credentials. Maybe it’s not returning the prompt for Basic Authentication?
Phil, we are aware of the SSL issue. It is the first thing that will get fixed on Monday AM.
Phil Turmel:You mention feed issues being worked on – – I hope one of those is the SSL certificate mismatch. The superfeed URL is at ricochet.com, but the certificate is for *.wpengine.com. That suggests that your site’s IP address isn’t really your own. A quick work-around would be an http feed URL that has a redirect to the appropriate https URL on wpengine.com.
Coming along…Your planned changes are good. A few other things…
1. You list the March 20th Ricochet Podcast in a post but on the main page on the right hand side it still shows the March 13th.
2. I can’t figure out how to play the March 20th one. Clicked on everything.
3. I thought maybe the problem was my membership level is too low so I looked for a description of higher level memberships and couldn’t find anything but a drop down box that allows me to select a membership level but doesn’t tell me what it gets me. I know Rob babbled on and on about this (or something like it) in the March 13th podcast ;-) But it was pretty incoherent and I tuned out after he had gone on for an hour or two. Maybe Lileks can explain it…except I can’t figure out how to play the podcast so that won’t help at all, will it?.
I like most of the changes.
Now that nested comments are gone, it’s time to bring back comment numbering. The numbers were very helpful.
&span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>The Founders: Rob Long and Peter Robinson: Nested comments are gone. We told you we’d try them and ditch them if they didn’t work.They didn’t and we did.
Yes, they did. And quite well enough. I think it’s just that they responded when Whiskey Sam and Albert Arthur beat on Rob and Yeti’s respective windows about 3 in the morning and said “We’re going to beat on your nest every night like this until you fix the nest at Ricochet.”
They are on the way.
&blockquote>Eeyore: The Founders: Rob Long and Peter Robinson: Nested comments are gone. We told you we’d try them and ditch them if they didn’t work.They didn’t and we did. Yes, they did. And quite well enough. I think it’s just that they responded when Whiskey Sam and Albert Arthur beat on Rob and Yeti’s respective windows about 3 in the morning and said “We’re going to beat on your nest every night like this until you fix the nest at Ricochet.”
What did you like about nested comments? The reason I don’t like them is that if someone makes a nested comment on page 3 of a currently 8 page thread, the people actively participating on page 8 (soon to be page 9) won’t see there’s a new comment on page 3. So basically nested comments are like being at a party but standing in the corner and whispering. No one’s going to pay attention to you.
By the way, Blue Yeti, are you guys aware that when you edit a comment that had a quote of a previous comment in, the formatting it stripped away?
Also, how about 30 or 40 comments per page? You’d better give in to my request, or else I’ll show up on your doorstep at 3AM and bang on your window, apparently. :-)