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Please postpone launching new communities.
I know that Codidact is a new website developed by volunteers, so I do not expect it to be as well-appointed as an experienced website like Stack Exchange.
However, although I have joined Codidact for a short while, I see that this website lacks some favorite features and has some bugs. I admit that such things are natural for a new community, but an unfortunate thing for this community is that when you report some bug on Meta, you are not usually received any response (For example, this bug or this bug).
Again, I know that this new website is developed by the volunteers such that its developers team may currently less than three people. But such irresponsiveness may put negative impact on community newcomers.
So, I request the community team to postpone launching new communities until a time that the community team have enough time to handle community issues on time.
2 answers
There have been comment responses with no follow-up from the original author on both posts, essentially saying that the development team has been unable to reproduce the issues described. We would definitely appreciate it if you could add additional details, but it's hard to troubleshoot a problem you can't see. Of course, anyone is welcome to submit fixes on GitHub. We actually need more technical contributors, so you are definitely welcome to help solve the problem of slow bugfixes!
To address your request more directly, new sites are started when a community requests them. The bugs that exist do not appear to be breaking changes for the people using the sites. Meanwhile we are doing our best to prioritize between new development and fixing these minor issues that arise - it's not that we don't care, but that our resources are limited (two developers' spare time). If Codidact doesn't work for you we're sorry - but we're not going to stop creating sites that are sufficiently functional for the users they support.
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Besides the technical stuff, I think that postponing launching new communities would actually hinder the Codidact project altogether.
The thing is that this network of sites is built to curate knowledge. Knowledge can only be curated when there are people to curate it. So in order to curate more knowledge you need more people. If now the case would be "Sorry, no new communities for now", I'm pretty sure that otherwise motivated users turn away for good or at least grow sour. I mean, why have some communities been created beforehand and this specific one where I want to participate now isn't created?
Another half-technical reason is that developing features without any input of those who are supposed to use it is never a good idea to begin with. I'm sure every developer can come up with great ideas and concepts to improve a product but the main question is: Does the person who handles the product afterwards feel the same way? Or may it be that this one additional feature actually breaks the flow?
Right now, we are on a good middle ground in my opinion. Users can request features, the development team implements them if they have the time and means to do so. It's clear that no feature ever was developed completely error-free to begin with, errors are just part of the process. Nothing I encountered so far was game breaking, some things do feel clunky or weird but hey, the journey is the reward.
Summarising it, my opinion is quite the contrary: create more communities (if they are viable) because creating one is always harder than deleting one - the ones which don't make the "cut" can still be removed, no harm done.
1 comment thread