Thank you for bringing your honest thoughts to the site in the last two days. No productive conversation can exist without candor - and you all have been candid. We've gotten around 800+ comments, nearly half of which have been angry, congratulatory, suspicious, engaging, or surprised. (The other half were from spam bots, in case you were wondering.)
Some of the comments were the beginning of longer discussions, and we'll carry those on over the coming weeks. Others gave us a great to-do list which we're working on over the next couple of days.
So, the mea culpas:
- Videos: Believe it or not, we hadn't considered the WMV issue. We've already translated those files to AVIs and will use that format for future videos. The AVIs will be up on the site next week.
- Readability issues: We're going to darken and enlarge the text on the site.
- Phishing filter: We've dealt with a few errors that caused phishing alerts in some browsers - please let us know if you see otherwise.
- Safari: We are going to fix the "missing submit button" as soon as possible
Due to requests from the community, we're going to implement a registration system (NOT Passport!) that will let us deal with spamming more effectively.
I wasn't surprised to see some paranoia in some responses - before joining Microsoft in 2004 I was often convinced of various conspiracy theories involving Redmond - and I am going to address this up front.
One poster suggested that the quality of comments overall was significantly lower than the dialog on other sites:
Friday, April 07, 2006 2:50 PM by David Cherryholmes
It looks suspicious to me that so many of the posts attacking MS and supporting FOSS has been poorly written and rabid. I contrast that with the degree of literacy, elegance, and well-framed arguments that I read on other pro-FOSS sites and, well, it just makes me wonder.... could there be some moderating going on here in an effort to deliberately mis-portray the community? Of course the question is beyond proof, a point anyone still inclined to give MS the BOD will rapidly point out. But still, the character of the posts are at odds with many, many other data points out there to be garnered.
We actually believe that many of these comments are from linux.org.ru, and not community members. We're going to deliver a "modded comments" area in the near term where you can dig in to see what comments we've modded down. We are NOT modding down intelligent discussion - it is "literacy, elegance, and well-framed arguments" that we hope to see here.
Longer term, I want to establish community moderators. It will take us a bit to implement this, but if you are interested in being a mod, please let me know.
So again, I thank you for being part of our community at our launch. Have a great weekend.
Sam