Content Submission - Pulling my hair out still, over how Elgg handles this!

I am so sick and tired of how Elgg is STILL handling these tokens and content submission!

I just lost a fairly long comment that I was posting to one of the plugins, which had several questions and good suggestions. But apparently I had already had that tab open too long before I began typing the message and then when I got ready to submit it, I got another one of those expired page messages!

[removed].

I simply cannot use Elgg. I had already thought for some time that I would just build my social networks in Drupal. I am convinced NOW that this is what I am going to do.

Rather disappointing! I was really loving Jeroen's new profile manager plugin. And I think that the whole Elgg experience is generally speaking much easier to set-up and get going.

However, I simply CANNOT have such IDIOTIC messages and handling of user contributions!

Imagine hundreds of users encountering the same thing all of the time! They worked SO HARD on a content contribution to the site. They UNFORTUNATELY did not type up the content in notepad or wordpad or word, before pasting it into the form on Elgg. They DON'T have the content ANYWHERE ELSE and it was ORIGINAL CONTENT. And now they get this ASININE error message about the page expiring and they have LOST THEIR CONTENT FOREVER!

Thanks alot, [removed]! I HATE YOU FOREVER.

The days of Classic Elgg are gone, when this [removed] stuff never happened!

  • I personally prefer Elgg because you can Customize it. I mean, we tried other CMS and we kinda found Elgg (well one of the developers at milocker.com found it) and since then we love it. 

     

    I think Elgg is strong and Reliable. It has robustness and we never had that error. You should be respectful with the guys @ Elgg.org 

     

    Elgg is free, and use it at your own risk. If you think it has some "serious flaw", well, then don't use it and switch to something else... Or better yet, fix that and then share your fix with the community...

     

    Like Sam Walton said "Give something back..."

     

  • What we still struggle all a little bit with, is that we have three active environments on our hands: elgg.org / google / trac. And while they all deserve a function, I would love to see this all come together in one enviroment. We are considering funding the development of an to open source project management / ticketing elgg plugin. Would people like the idea? Or is it too far out to assemble all communication here?

  • @Tom I suggest to wait for Elgg 2.0 version before funding an open source project management. 

  • I understand Yakiv's frustration. I also understand the the community runs on donated time and it is therefor hard to complain. Elgg atempts to have many functions working and allow for some fancy plugins, so it is bound to frusrate, no one knows this more than me!

    Here is what I think about the issue of "stability" in functions performing well.

    I am most frustrated about the first step in a users experience, registering, and the second step, loggin in after registering. It is easy for "one man shows" like mine or Yakiv's to develop a problem through upgrade, added plugins or ever plugin reordering.

    Is there someone who might develop a "registration test" script which runs on chron once day and tests a registration? I think this would be most helpful knowing your registartion is working.

    I just installed the new Profile Manager and Jeroen is one of the best contributors we have and it has a very basic bug. Point is, as much as we all love new functions, how do we make sure the basics are working? Usability is such a fine line, and people will leave quick if they feel let down by the system.

    Font sizes in TinyMCE are ridiculously small, and no one fixes that while they march on to the next "big thing". How can we all create a stratgey to focus on basics before looking too far down the road? There is a balance, but I understand Yakiv's frustration in that it seems little useability issues get pushed aside.

    As I have said before, if you are a professor in a Uni, your students are going to have to use your Elgg system, warts and all. But if you are out in the open Net, you need to have a system, that allows the average user to see benefits very quickly, or they will never make the effort to learn and grow getting deeper into the system.

    This is what I focus on, the first level of success for the user, then let them dig deeper. One bad experience like Yakiv's and he fears they are lost, I understand that.

    If I could finanace a plugin right now for everyone it would be a popup screen mask form based on custom_reg, so at some time delay of after click some link, a pretty form masks the screen for my many fields registrartion/login. Grabbing the new users attention and challenging/inviting them into the system (successfully!) would be a great first start.

     

  • Oh another quick thought that hit the other day! My dev guy here (no names) and I are meeting in SF next week with a state of the art educational/multimedia set of tools to intergrate with Elgg. This will be a big step for my Elgg system and maybe many more.

    Here is an interesting thing to think about. Elgg is "cutting edge eductional platform", right? And yet our own communication space (elgg.org) really isn't anything hear state of the art in design and comm features. Think about that! 1,000 people here are knocking their individual brains, spending hours and hours, and really working very much alone! What it we could get realtime white boarding, video conferencing and webinar technologies running right here at elgg.org? I think I can get this moving and will have a profound effect on development when things are brought into a much higher level of planning and communicating.

     

     

  • @TahoeBilly - Some interesting ideas.  But, PLEASE don't think that by posting them here they will get acted upon.  There are Groups dedicated to discussing possible new directions/features for Elgg.  But if you really want something fixed or changed, you've got to put it in Trac.

    This whole thread started with someone who observed a problem quite a while back, wrote about it in the Groups, and then is pissed that it hasn't been fixed.  As Cash stated, if you want it fixed, it has to go in Trac.

    And I can tell you - people _do_ go over the Trac items!

    Another thought - you could put a bounty out on some of the small features you want, like the registration test.  There's a Group where you post up a small task and receive estimates, and often those estimates are in the $20-$50 range. 

    Mike

  • Not to get off the off topic, but...

    Besides creating a longer time for the page timeouts, which in a very real way are meant to protect users when they leave a webpage unattended (not having a token issue still has an issue, especially when little brother joey decides to navigate for you) creating a function when the page times out to automatically put undone comments or content entries into a draft status would be extremely ideal in this situation. 

    When a user resigns in, redirecting to this undone situation would put the user back on track. 

    @Cash you are right, submitting to trac might be a great way to bring up issues and resolve situations. However, Elgg, here as a community is also an extremely natural place to talk about problems and solutions. Some of which are going to be reflected in what might be done at the core and other conflicts might have something to do with a variety of customizations made through the use of plugins etc. I know you guys moderate the site and do your best to jump in and help, but not everyone is going to think a coding community needs to participate in two places. I absolutely understand the purpose of why trac exists, but wouldn't it also possible to add an ability inside your own community site which could star issues with a re purpose of exposing them to those who are enthusiastically part of trac? Otherwise you run the risk of having people submitting to trac issues which are not necessarily being placed in the right place. The benefit would also be the ability to have the community here notice the importance being placed on the relevant issues. 

  • Sometimes the beauty and the success comes from "random walks" down threads like this. I understand the issue of trac, and getting items in their. I will focusing on introducing some drop in technologies to light the Elgg space on fire in a few weeks! If I can get the Elgg.org to incorporate them into this space, I think we can start planning working together in a much more dynamic way than threaded comments!

    :) stay tuned!

  • I am so pleased to see that this thread has gone in a good direction. I completely agree with TahoeBilly and Zakary Venturo.

    The point is, whether I got a ticket into Trac or not, Cash participated in the original discussion when it came up months ago. And anyone looking at it could see it was a fatal flaw in Elgg, as far as the end user is concerned. And if you don't care about the end user, then what the #%@!& are you doing developing social network software!

    While I know I was way over the top, rude, in my language, I would not have posted the comment(s) if I didn't care! If I didn't care, y'all wouldn't hear from me! Period!

    If by raising Cain over this, this bleeping problem get's fixed, then I'll be only happy!

  • 1. Providing criticism is a legitimate use of the community site. I never said otherwise. What we are trying to discourage is profanity-laced rants, attacks on users, requests for money in return for providing help, etc.

    2. Posting in the forums when you find a possible bug is a good first step - especially for non-developers. It provides an opportunity to discuss the problem to determine if it is really a bug or perhaps caused by some plugin.

    3. Ultimately, bug reports should go into trac. That is part of our workflow. Trac is design for managing bug reports. Forums are not. If something is important to you, take the time to file a report in Trac. It's not that difficult to do. We've talked about writing a plugin for Trac so that it uses people's Elgg credentials but that would be down the road.

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