On bungled listings
-------------------

jebug29 vented his spleen[1] recently about the current, let's be blunt,
totally fucking broken state of the SDF phlog listing.  I imagine he's pretty
much just said what a lot of us have been thinking.

The vibrant and growing phlogosphere is one of the best things SDF has going for
it, in my obviously not-at-all unbiased opinion.  Interesting and thoughtful
comment on all kinds of things appears here at a much faster rate than it does
on BBOARD or COM, and unlike those walled gardens the phlogs are visible to the
outside world, and they are actively bringing in new users to the Fortress.

This is awesome!  Thanks to all the SDF phloggers.

smj has obviously noticed this, which is why phlogging was prominently mentioned
in the recent newsletter (the first of its kind that I've ever seen) and why the
new gopher.club domain was registered.  He has recognised the good thing that
his service has and wants to help make it better.

This is appropriate and appreciated.  Thanks smj, sincerely.

But what followed was a bunch of changes to the way phlogs are displayed/sorted
and the way that phloggers get their phlogs bumped to the top of the list after
updating.  As far as I can tell, none of the phloggers were consulted for ideas
on how to improve this, the changes were made without warning and without
explanation as to why they were necessary or useful.

This is perhaps not ideal.

When people went to BBOARD and pointed out that the changes appeared to have
broken a lot of stuff, smj's response was basically "this is how it works now,
update the tutorial!".

This is almost actively unhelpful.

The current situation has not changed for days and right now anybody who isn't a
hardcore gopher addict has probably given up on regularly reading the phlogs.  I
get that smj is on holiday right now and can't act on this as quickly as
otherwise (one might wonder whether making changes to an important part of your
site shortly before leaving on a holiday is a good idea), but in the meantime it
seems pretty likely that newcomers to the phlogosphere are being discouraged
from reading or contributing, which is probably the exact opposite of what the
attempts to "spruce up" the phlogosphere were meant to achieve.

I have no doubt that this will all be cleared up in due time and will become a
short blip on SDF's radar, but right now, this is bloody frustrating.  I don't
feel like a valued contributor to a community project, I feel like an anonymous
user of a product from an uncaring megacorp.  This is exactly the *opposite* of
how SDF should be.

But, all clouds have silver linings.  Slugmax is a gentleman and a scholar for
so quickly putting up a script for listing recently updated gophers[2], although
it seems to still have some quirks (probably not Slugmax's fault - my phlog
shows up there as last updated on Dec 25 2017, which is exactly the same date
that the official SDF phlog listing showed a few days ago).  Alex Schroeder has
written a tool called Moku Pona[3] which lets you subscribe to gophermaps and
see when they have been updated, allowing anybody to set up their own
Bongusa-esque aggregator.  Kvothe speculated about a gopher client having some
kind of subscription facility build right into it[4].  I actually originally
planned to have something like this in VF-1, but decided against it to keep VF-1
doing one thing and doing it well.

Ultimately, the various tools that come out of this phase of disruption will
just make the phlogosphere more robust, and hopefully make it just as easy to
track content *off* SDF as on it, so that people start exploring the full
phlogosphere, not just the large subset of it that exists on this particular
"mega instance".

Onwards and upwards, phloggers!

[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/jebug29/log/2018-02/03-2204 
[2] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/slugmax/cgi-bin/recently_updated_gophers.cgi
[3] https://github.com/kensanata/moku-pona#moku-pona
[4] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/kvothe/phlog/2018/02/04-rainy-weather-lo-fi-hip-hop-and-gopher-cgi