Nostalgia. Don't you just love it? A vocal element in the forums is complaining that the latest upgrade was not asked for, not needed, and not welcome. That everything was almost perfect until last week. That developers have thrown the baby out with the bath-water, introducing an unwelcome skin, making the site more difficult to use by design, and creating a lot of bugs.
Personally, I don't recognise their descriptions of a wonderful visitor experience under v2.0. There were good bits, and there were bad bits. Tracking the site's evolution from TVTome, there have been almost annual redesigns (launch in 2005, the WEB2.0 inspired changes in 2006, upgrading the submissions process in 2007, and now this). All have seen immediate critical system failures caused by sloppy code-writing, poor design concepts that made key features more difficult to use, a month or more of workarounds first by users and then by developers, and a year or so in which bugs and acknowledged design failures are not fixed because of limited resources. By tradition, some of these remain unresolved when the next site overhaul is launched on a nervous, under-appreciated and unappreciative user base.
In terms of the look of the site, and navigation around it, we will get used to it: we always do. In terms of lost features, the people behind the site will restore some of them and not others. They always do. In terms of functionality, once fixed, the submissions process will be more complex and cumbersome than it was before: it always is.
Now, who else is looking forward to the submissions overhaul in 2009, or the new look in 2010? Will most of us be begging TPTB to go back to the fabulous v3.0, which looked great, had all the features we wanted, and was relatively bug free?
I apologise for omitting the accents from the blog title: we haven't been able to use non-ASCII characters in titles since v1.0… Plus ça change, plus la même chose…
Comments
And if the 2.0 was okay because it was only display, this one is not only display, it's also submissions wise. Have you tried the frigging system ?
I mean you have to click on the ADD button every time after submitting a new guest etc.
And the only way to add crew is to go first to the crew page's so that's two clicks, and then click on add, since the add /Edit button on each episode page leads only to the actors' page.
Honestly, why didn't they at least beta test it with us. we would have flagged these problems immediately. That's the main problem, they launch a new website without any beta testing, even imdb still doesn beta testing before launching a new version. And IMDB is bigger than tv.com will ever be.
I have never been under the illusion that CNET or CBS care(d)/cares about anything other than total and unique site and page views, so the cosmetic changes seem entirely natural to me. You don't set advertising rates based on whether the crew list for a program is updated or accurate.
Rather than moan about the TV.com mission statement, why don't people moan about John N. selling their work for his profit back in the "real database" day?
John had always owned the site and it was his to sell. With the benefit of hindsight, I do think that in the early days he put forward disingenuous arguments to persuade people to join him and create show guides at his site instead of on sites of their own. There were to be huge advantages and no disadvantages. Within a year of that, he was removing editors from the guides they had created on flimsy pretexts, much the same kind used by Tv.com now, so even then the writing was on the wall, and people should not have imagined they were building up any lasting goodwill. The only reward was to be in any enjoyment editors and contributors got out of the creative process, and it was a fun site. It may be that John's intentions changed as we went along. In any event, almost everyone who works for nothing is making a rod for his or her own back.
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OK I admit, I'm not holding my breath that I'll get a paid job as a beta tester when they can have us do it for free instead...
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The "old" site (v2) definitely wasn't perfect, but at least it didn't give me headaches after three hours of use. On the plus side, my "insomnia" will probably disappear because I'll go to bed much earlier due to not being able to submit into the wee hours because of a headache!
There's always a silver lining. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The thing that is making me laugh (aside from your comments in the forums....I especially liked "No.") is that the suggestions that have been brought up over and over in the ideas forums and have now been implemented, are causing uproar because users don't want them. I love it!
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I'll be sad when everything settles down in (by my calculations) a week and a half...and I'll have nobody to laugh at. I'm counting on you and your sarcastic comments to improve my TV.com experience! (sorry for the lines...trying to make my comment semi-readable)
count-chocula