Show of HandsShow of Hands

DerekWills June 2nd, 2018 3:32pm

Will SoH undergo the major overhaul it so desperately needs within the next 10 years? In comments, list the issues you have.

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Comments: Add Comment

EarlyBird Portland
06/02/18 6:17 pm

The app won’t be around in 10 years. It’s dying a long, slow death right now. The owners don’t care about it.

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mistah Happy Happy Joy Joy
06/02/18 4:45 pm

The app is more than likely never going to be updated. We can only hope that if/when they decide to shut the servers down they give us a warning

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DerekWills Lone Star Gun Rights
06/02/18 1:01 pm

It’s very broken. Formatting issues, aesthetic issues, lacking of features.

susanr Colorado
06/02/18 11:28 pm

I guess you’re not using SOH on an iPad, then. (No, I remember you’re using Android, right? I think there was some Android issue *way* long ago...)

If you were using an iPad and got tagged into a poll, you couldn’t tell what poll you were in or who made it. (You can on an iPhone; I don’t know about Android... and that’s true for most of this.) If you followed a reply notification into a poll you might not be able to tell what poll you were in. If you were a Standard user and tried to use the in-app targets to target a poll to Men or Republicans, you’d get an error message saying you had to purchase an upgrade to do that. (That’s a bogus message; targeting was made free for *all* users a few years ago.) If you then purchased an upgrade so you could do targeting and tried to target a poll to Christians (you have to *type* that one, it isn’t built in), the targeting would fail - apparently *all* typed targets fail from an iPad, upgraded or not.
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susanr Colorado
06/02/18 11:33 pm

So if you purchased that upgrade in order to target to Christians, you spent $25 for *nothing.* (In one case I am aware of, an upgrade was *gifted* to a user for that reason.) All because of a *bug* that SOH has known about for ages and hasn’t fixed, even when they said they were going to fix bugs and asked us which we most wanted fixed. I said *that one* because it was unfair to some users and was SOH’s fault. Oh, and that means all SOHAH polls posted from iPads get seen by *children* as young as 13 - on an app rated 12+ in the App Store. (Not that SOH even has graphic sexual discussions listed in the Rules any more, or deals with them consistently when they’re not targeted, anyway.)

Even if you’re not using an iPad there are numerous other issues. I don’t know if the long-comment truncation error affects Androids, but it affects iPhones as well as iPads.

I could go on, but I’ll stop. There are quite a few things that really are broken.

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MachoMatt84 Climbing Mountains
06/02/18 12:07 pm

I'd like to see the option to make visible either the question asked or the comment you're replying to visible while typing. Similar to how you can make visible the question while in the comment section. Sometimes I'm replying to a multi part comment and forget certain parts of it.

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susanr Colorado
06/02/18 11:21 pm

I often resort to composing my comments somewhere else, where I can flip back & forth between there and SOH, so I can see the entire comment to which I’m replying.

Either that, or have the comment page open on two devices - say, reply on my iPad while looking at the question on my iPhone. I guess one could reply on one device and look at SOH on the website on a computer, too. But it would be nice to just be able to move the reply window around, and much simpler.

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MannIsMe Did You Assume My Party
06/02/18 11:56 am

Well we're a cynical, pessimistic bunch, now aren't we?

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Zach21 California
06/02/18 11:00 am

I don’t think it’ll still be here in 10 years

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jfish82285 Tennessean in Colorado
06/02/18 10:32 am

It’ll be dead in the next ten years.

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SHIPPY1944 Tn.
06/02/18 10:29 am

I hope so, On my iPad, sometimes locks up & I have leave the site & log back in. Also it will sometimes post my comments on the wrong thread‼️

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BamaGirl ROLL TIDE from Texas
06/02/18 10:28 am

I’m doubtful, unless someone who loves SOH buys it.

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DerekWills Lone Star Gun Rights
06/02/18 11:17 am

I’ll give them $5 for it

Think Lovin Life
06/02/18 11:23 am

Derek ... some of us already paid many times that for the app.

DerekWills Lone Star Gun Rights
06/02/18 12:39 pm

I paid when they offered their tiers as well.

BamaGirl ROLL TIDE from Texas
06/02/18 12:41 pm

I admit that I did not pay back in the day but someone gifted me a subscription back then.

LeftLibertarian The Age of Outrage
06/02/18 10:19 am

I’d be very surprised if this app still exists and is active in 10 years honestly

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paranoidandroid peace love science
06/02/18 10:17 am

Ensuring the web can’t be used in any way to get around another user ignoring you... they said they fixed that last year... they didn’t.

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CrazDab Florida
06/02/18 8:56 am

Ability to post pictures in the polls and in comment section. But no one is gonna invest in this shit hole and do anything. In fact, it will most likely shut down. I’ve already been on a few apps that shut down and are no longer online. And this one will follow and have the same fate. Thumb. Opinionated. BuzzE. SOH.

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thatguy2 We tried to warn you
06/02/18 9:15 am

This user is currently being ignored

DerekWills Lone Star Gun Rights
06/02/18 11:15 am

Meme wars need to happen!

susanr Colorado
06/02/18 11:13 pm

I really, *really* don’t want to see pictures among the comments. I love that we don’t have pictures intruding in comments here. I really hate looking at comments on Facebook posts where in some places it’s most a string of memes, with things gyrating or bouncing around, distracting me from the words I’m trying to read. I don’t think they really add much to begin with.

Just use words.

Pictures of actual things, for a purpose, are fine, but don’t make everyone look at them. Upload them somewhere and post a link to them.

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geoag02 Dallas, TX
06/02/18 8:55 am

My guess is there will be no app update until there is a new version of iOS that the current release of SoH is not compatible with. At that point there *may* be an update to SoH that will make it compatible again.

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GrandmaALiCE
06/02/18 8:46 am

I have many issues, but it would be a waste of effort to list them. We have had polls like this in the past and nothing gets fixed.

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DerekWills Lone Star Gun Rights
06/02/18 8:47 am

It’s almost as if they don’t care about their users........ 🤔

Think Lovin Life
06/02/18 9:40 am

Derek ... an alternative would be for the owners to shut it down. Would that be better?

DerekWills Lone Star Gun Rights
06/02/18 11:13 am

Sure. At least that’s an honest representation of their feelings.

Think Lovin Life
06/02/18 11:20 am

Derek ... why do we care about their “feelings”?

DerekWills Lone Star Gun Rights
06/02/18 12:41 pm

Because if they actually cared about their customers (us), they’d make the app worth a shit. I care about their feelings because the app sucks when you consider how little it’s actually changed since its inception.

gluxford1 Arizona
06/02/18 8:40 am

I’d like to have the option of more than 2 answer choices. Also, raise the character limit on questions and comments.

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DerekWills Lone Star Gun Rights
06/02/18 8:45 am

That too! They did expand the character limit for both polls and comments a few years ago. I think it used to be 100 characters for each, if I’m not mistaking... It was incredibly brutal.

gluxford1 Arizona
06/02/18 8:47 am

They should also allow for a larger number of votes in each poll instead of automatically closing it after 252 votes.

DerekWills Lone Star Gun Rights
06/02/18 8:49 am

It used to be 100. Then they had a paid service for a brief while. Bottom tier would allow for 500 votes and was $25 annually. They nixed that when Tony sold the joint. I think it only lasted a year.

susanr Colorado
06/02/18 11:00 pm

I wrote something below about why there aren’t more than 2 answer options, and maybe never will be (even if SOH ever does any more development), although they may have different ideas than Tony did.

Character limit on comments was 250 when I first got here, then increased to 350. It increased to 1000 I think in 11/15 (and was called “Susan’s space” by the developer in beta testing. Gee, I can’t imagine why...). I don’t remember about poll character limits.

Personally I think 1000 characters is OK. What bugs me is you can’t have more than 1000 characters or 20 lines, but sometimes you have less than 20 lines and still get an error message saying you have too many.

glux, the 250 vote limit - and a *lot* of the restrictions - have got to be about cost. (And Derek’s right, it was 100 initially. If you paid $25 it was upped to 500; paid $100 it was upped to 2,500.) That 100 went *really* fast if you had a lot of followers (this was before the Tap list).

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gluxford1 Arizona
06/02/18 11:02 pm

I remember the 100-vote limit. It was like that when I joined.

susanr Colorado
06/02/18 11:06 pm

I don’t really know why they ditched that whole subscription system (originally it was intended to be an annual payment) except that it wasn’t at all popular among younger people without much of an income, or any income, or for anyone who was used to apps all being free. (Trying to relate it to something like one good cup of coffee or cheap beer a month - my strategy - didn’t help, either.) I *think* it’s still available - it’s still on the Upgrade page of the website - but I can’t swear that it still works and I haven’t recommended that people use it for a while. But I know a few people used it around a year ago and it worked.

I wish they’d come up with some way to finance the thing, because I believe that is the whole problem with lack of development and lack of fixing bugs. It costs just to keep the thing running; costs a pile more to fix or make it better. Money has to come from somewhere. It may not be that they don’t *care,* but that they just *can’t.* (I don’t know.)

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DerekWills Lone Star Gun Rights
06/02/18 8:36 am

The overall aesthetic of SoH is still mostly the same to when I joined in 2011. It’s very elementary, and WAY past time for an aesthetics change.

Messaging still sucks brutally. If you miss the notification that you have a message, you won’t notice it for days. Not to mention how awful it is to try and edit portions of a message before you send it.

Update needs for iPhone X....

Multiple choice polls please!!! I know that people say “people might just put Yes/No/Maybe polls all the time if we do that!” Let them! Let the free market of SoH dictate who is and is not worth following.


That’s all I have for now....

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DerekWills Lone Star Gun Rights
06/02/18 8:37 am

And this stupid BS commenting issue where it obscures the last line... fix that!

NOW that’s all I have... for now.

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benseth 11,780 votes
06/02/18 8:45 am

Yeah that hidden last line can be infuriating to me.

Think Lovin Life
06/02/18 9:06 am

Gents, snap out of it! While I don’t like those and other idiosyncrasies either, the app is a free forum that satisfies 90% of our needs at a cost of zero!

Yes, I wish @Tony were back, but it’s not happening. It’s time to suck it up.

benseth 11,780 votes
06/02/18 9:10 am

Tony left?

benseth 11,780 votes
06/02/18 9:44 am

I haven’t been on here in around a year. But thanks for the info.

benseth 11,780 votes
06/02/18 12:41 pm

Now I know why I haven’t seen product pic polls anymore.

susanr Colorado
06/02/18 10:41 pm

The Message feature was never intended to be a full-fledged messaging system. It really was only intended to provide us a place to exchange outside contact info where other users won’t see it. I know most of us use it more extensively than that, but I strongly suspect that this is the reason it’s never been made easier or more pleasant to use on the *iPhone.*

That doesn’t, however, explain why it’s become all but impossible to use on the *iPad* and it hasn’t been fixed (except that virtually *nothing* has been fixed for over a year that would require an app update, and that surely would).

Matt, you don’t have a message number “badge” on the main menu on your iPhone, like you have for comment replies?

Multiple choice polls: Tony once wrote a cogent explanation for why *he* thought two-answer polls were good. I know he toyed with the idea of multiple answer polls for users and dangled them as a possibility once but didn’t do it - I’m sure there was a reason...
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susanr Colorado
06/02/18 10:47 pm

...and I think the reason was more than just that he though Yes/No/Maybe polls were bad/a copout. Probably the expense to the system. Possibly that the data display sort of sucks, compared to a regular poll. (At least, *I* never get quite as clear a picture as with a simple A/B poll.)

The long-comment truncation error: YES, that. They’ve known about that since November 2015. It was high on our list of things to fix PLEASE in that poll where they asked which bugs bug us the most. Did you see that one? In late April 2017. The release notes for the promised update claimed “Lots of bug fixes!” We could find... one. (Plus they removed the Election 2016 section FINALLY, and gave us crappy new Rules.)

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susanr Colorado
06/02/18 10:52 pm

Here’s one thing you can *try* if you see a line cut off: TURN your device to the other orientation. That helps *sometimes.* If you have a different device, look at it, and turn it. (It affects devices differently.) I suspect (but haven’t checked) that the web version will always have the correct full comment, so try there.

The worst case is when you don’t even know you’re missing part of a comment. And it’s a link you didn’t know existed. Or the punch line to a joke or the whole comment, which changes everything.

It really, really sucks.

So... don’t be the person who *causes* the problem: Any time you are writing a long comment (anything that shows less than 600 characters left, to be safe) throw in a blank line and then a single character. That should prevent the problem entirely.

And thank user cpaswr (at least in your head) every time, because he’s the one who thought of it.

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GrandmaALiCE
06/03/18 9:58 am

“Matt, you don’t have a message number “badge” on the main menu on your iPhone, like you have for comment replies?”

*Derek, not Matt


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susanr Colorado
06/03/18 10:05 am

Thanks, GA! Not sure how I did that... I hadn’t even been replying to Matt just before I wrote this.