Question

This website desperately needs a news and updates section.

My message is short and simple, I have to be elaborate at some points nevertheless to avoid the misconception that I am disgruntled or displeased with this website.

Answer 1

It is the 5th consecutive day now that Latex is not working on this website (for some users). While this is a huge issue and deserves immediate attention, it is not my main concern because apparently the developers know about that issue.

How do I know you ask? Exactly. I have to search, search a lot in fact, to get those informations. Googling does no good in that manner for me, if I search for OpenStudy updates or news I don't get anything that I would consider as relevant among the first 4 pages (this is when I stop). If I visit the OpenStudy Twitter website available at https://twitter.com/openstudy I find one tweet from the 16th of January about online students.
Visiting http://blog.openstudy.com announces some of OpenStudy's top LifeSavers (My sincere congratulations to them ;-)). So the question remains, how do I know?

Well, to be honest, I do not know, I don't have an official statement that I can give you about whether or not the OpenStudy Developers know about the issue and work on it. All I have are some posts by OpenStudy Ambassadors and Moderators and even some regular Users here and there telling me that the issue is being looked into.

This is definitely not the way it is supposed to be. In my opinion there is one and just one place to address news and updates to, and this is the front page, right there at http://openstudy.com It is widely known that the philosophy of OpenStudy expects a certain standard from its Users and I believe that it is the right of every User to expect that same standard of OpenStudy as well. It is a very displeasing situation to be left in the dark about what is going on or not going on. A User shouldn't have to look into all the various questions just to find if something is about to happen or not.

As a marginal side story, please allow me to add that once in a while some Owl visits my screen. It tells me to stay calm and patient, there will be updates and awesome new features it tells me. This Owl seems to work a lot, but somehow it never takes credentials for all its hard work because so far I have never been informed about these updates and changes in form of changelog or the like.

Regards.

Answer 2

@Preetha , it might be okay to link you to this :-)

Answer 3

There is the OS Blog and FB page. From my standpoint, it is not that these things do not exist. They are just not updated as much as would be helpful when it comes to problems like the ones you have described.

Answer 4

You sort of point that out in your long post. So the "This website desperately needs a news and updates section." is not really right. It is more like it needs to use the ones it has.

Answer 5

@e.mccormick, I also did mention that no website whatsoever should use a affiliated website to inform users about its status. Furthermore, not everyone has Facebook, and I agree that they could use the blog more often. That still not where news belong.

I would never come up with the idea to look for news relevant to Facebook on MySpace. Might be a stupid example so excuse me there.

In fact what I did point out in my post is that several websites exists affiliated with OpenStudy of which none are being used to share news with the User, not about updates, not about change logs or the like, therefore I concluded that a newsfeed does not exists, which seems correct reasoning to me.

The Websites they yet have could be made into something that allows them to share News with the community, but they don't, hence they don't exists.

(pardon the various refreshes, I was spotting a grammatical mistake and tried to abort the website from loading, my bad)

Answer 6

The admins used to be a lot more active about posting status updates about releases, bug work and new features in the Feedback group. There was a personnel change in the coding team and the new guys seem to be not so active in the feedback group. I understand your frustration and am sorry for it.

Answer 7

@blues, I appreciate every response to this topic so I want to thank you for yours, same goes for @e.mccormick of course. I did not know about that change in the admin group, but you might see from my posting above that it is just impossible as a mere standard user of OpenStudy to have to access to such informations at all.

All the informations I have shared so far in this post required at least 30 minutes of research on google and scrolling on this page.

Answer 8

@c0decracker /hint /hint /nudge /nudge

Answer 9

They should create a subdomain like status.openstudy.com. when the site crashes (which it does a lot), this subdomain would still be accessible.
It should also mention work in progress for future features and updates.
As far as I know the site hasn't been updated for more than a year, that's due to this change in personell. Also as far as I know OS currently only has 3 admins (preetha, bostonblue and c0decracker (correct me if i'm wrong)). This is a very small staff for such a big website.

But you're completely right, the communication from admins when the site or parts of it are down is very bad. No offence to them though, I'm sure they're doing what they can.

Answer 10

From what I have, there are a few other coders. And they have done updates as recently as last Monday. They rolled a version that removed some of the problem code. But yah, it is a slow process and it would be nice to hear more of what is happening. As for the sub domain, it would only work if it were hosted on a different server. Some of the problems that are having are with the instance itself locking, which kills everything on it.

Answer 11

From what I have heard... oops.

Answer 12

"From what I hear there are a lot of other coders."

*Raises hand*

I feel it's an issue of user-outreach, which I discussed with our director in an interview last Monday. We're going to expand our influence, and try to be more active. Believe me, it's on our list, but things like this take time :) Be patient!

Thanks!