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
We know.
Cool. Now fix it or I’ll show up and beat on your nest! :-)
Troy, can you provide an update on the Podcast health on Ricochet 2.0? I use Doggcatcher on my SGS4. It thinks Ricochet is for web pages. It no longer has the Ricochet logo…
my experience is that Podcasts are broken on Ricochet 2.0… What are the plans to fix them?
I wish you’d have added Paypal . . .
All podcasts are still broken for me. I’ve deleted and resubscribed. This is with downcast on iphone.
This link downloaded properly in my player (BeyondPod 3.3.68 on Android 4.4.2, LiquidSmooth 3.0), but lacked any media links, so nothing to download. All the episode descriptions are there, though.
Looking closer, it appears the “<enclosure url= . . . />” tag is missing from each item.
I hate to sound like a broken record, and if this has been answered elsewhere please forgive me, but only 46 of my nearly 300 posts have migrated. That hasn’t changed since the new site came online. Will my posts make the journey? Do you know when the migration will be complete? I’m not complaining, but I would like to be assured that they’re not lost. My little writings are precious to me. :)
We are aware of issues with the podcast feeds and are working to get the fixed as soon as possible.
They are on the way.
Thank you! :)
I keep seeing Alerts pop up telling me that someone I’m following published a post they actually posted months ago (usually, it says “7 hours ago…”). None of my missing posts have made their way over yet, but some of my other old ones have shown up in that way too. It seems to be a steady but slow migration.
Well, I get a terminal “502 bad gateway” error in Safari. I can log in using Firefox (which I normally only use for Pottermore). And WordPress can’t handle my “medium” sized pictures I try to upload.
If you were coming to the thread for the first time you’d still have to scroll through all 128 nested comments to get to the rest of the conversation. Meanwhile, 63 of those 128 nested comments might themselves be a 2X nested discussion.
I was looking for a like button next to some of the items on that list; just know that “Oh, yay!” was said for several.
Thank you all for the responsiveness and hard work. You guys really are a class act.
I’ve been seeing improvements at every return visit and look forward to those to come. I’m particularly looking forward to numbers coming back on the comments and podcasts. All of the podcasts, I hope, not just the flagship one. I’m lost without them!
Again, thank you for returning the favor and listening to us.