Dude, where's my shopping list?
===============================

A lot of folks recently phlogged about the fucked up state of SDF blog listing. 
I can totally understand their frustration, also their commitment to create 
viable alternatives -- which alternatives freak me out big time, to be honest.

Let me explain.

The basic approach "automate all the things" for these tools are fucked up by 
nature. It yields for crap results. You cannot automate it. You just cannot. 
What are you going to base your automated method on? 

On changes made to the gophermap document? Will result crap. I'll correct a typo 
in my gophermap so it will pop up as a feed element. I've tried it. I added a 
dot -- a fucking dot -- to my gophermap and it got listed atop. Also, what if I 
don't use a gophermap?

On newly added files? Will result crap. What if I just rename a file? Or change 
its content, so the checksum will differ?  

Take slugmax's solution[0]. At this very time, the first element in the listing 
is "laemur", from "May 29 2015" -- and he doesn't even have a fucking blog in 
their gopherspace, just three links. The fourth element in the listing is 
"jmcgann", who literally only wrote "Hi there!" since August 2017.

You just can't automate everything. Sometimes the only solution is indeed human 
intervention. That is what the "phlog" command was all about. Look, "phlog" is 
like "Betelgeuse": there is a reason why you have to yell it a well defined 
amount of times -- this is how the magic happens. By using the "phlog" command 
you managed to avoid all the fuckups an automated solution may result in. It is 
based on announcement instead of random harvesting of shit. And it worked, 
because you cannot actually harvest stuff without harvesting a shit-ton of... 
well, shit.

This is one reason to be frustrated. And it can get worse, because the other 
reason is even more frustrating.

It is about me, having to do whatever-the-fuck in my own shell account to get a 
proper, feed-like listing of SDF phlogs. There's absolutely no bloody way I'm 
going to run whatever scripts in my shell, mainly because, well, 1. it doesn't 
fucking work as discussed before and 2. I don't want to fuck around with stuff 
like that. And while a big respect goes out to the guys who tries to solve this 
problem, they must be aware that anything they try is merely a workaround, not a 
solution. And the results are crap, because, and I have to say it one more time, 
you can't automate this reliably.

One more thing: your shell accounts are not the place to host this. SDF main is 
the place to host this, as before. The most important entry point to SDF 
phlogosphere shouldn't be located in my shell account or yours, it should be on 
the bloody front page of SDF. This is the whole point if you want to make 
newcomers comfortable and want to encourage them to explore stuff. I am not a 
programmer, nor I am an übergeek. I am used to use the shell but that's all. I 
can confidently handle my phlog via the shell -- but I most definitely don't 
want to do scripting magic to have a (crap) list of recently updated phlogs, 
which should be fucking basic for any *log service.

And this is not even the most frustrating thing. I don't participate in BBOARD 
or COM discussions, so I've only seen it while reading solderpunk's recent 
entry[1]. By "it", I'm referring to smj's response to the multiple concerns: 
"this is how it works now". 

This is fucking terrifying. 

Even Facebook rolls out changes this significant for only a limited number of 
users (which is, I guess, in Facebook terms equals the whole population of 
Kazakhstan). Facebook! 

And you know why? Because Facebook knows that they only exist because they have 
users, so they don't want to piss them off by rolling out shit before seeing how 
it affects it's users on a limited sample. 

The best part of SDF for me is definitely the vibrant phlogging community. This 
is why I don't terminate my SDF shell account and just stick to Aberdeen. 
Because I want to be part of that community. And to be part of that one of the 
best way is to follow the new phosts, read recent updates, maybe react to them 
and also, let others know that I did. And phlog listing was the easiest -- let's 
be honest: the only reliable -- way to do that.

So for me, "this is how it works now" is the worst fucking possible reaction to 
this issue.

Imagine next time walking into the supermarket and have your shopping list 
swapped with someone else's by the store manager. And imagine him responding to 
your brags with "you better get used to it dude, because from now on this is how 
it fucking works".

---

[0] gopher://sdf.org/1/users/slugmax/cgi-bin/recently_updated_gophers.cgi
[1] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/on-bungled-listings.txt