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Interviews: Ask Stack Overflow Co-Founder Jeff Atwood a Question
Jeff Atwood is an author, entrepreneur, and software developer. He runs the popular programming blog Coding Horror and is the co-founder of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network. In early 2012 he decided to leave Stack Exchange so he could spend more time with his family. A year later he announced his new company the Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. and the Discourse open-source discussion platform which aims to improve conversations on the internet. Jeff has agreed to give some of his time to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
Most of the time (and in this case) we contact our interview guests. We don't accept money for interviews. Occasionally someone will have something coming out and will reach out to us if we've asked for an interview before. Our James Cameron interview last year was such a case. That is the exception however. http://interviews.slashdot.org...
Or, closed as "not constructive" when the question is exactly the one I had and one of the answers contain the correct solution.
Actually, please allow me to post the full story here since I suppose most slashdot users don't know about it.
Once upon a time there was a website called The Daily WTF, it was pretty popular. And they needed to replace their old forum with a newer one, so the owner of the website chose Discourse, because apparently he was friends with Jeff Atwood.
Now, the users in that forum tend to troll each other a lot, and they love to find bugs in crappy software (it's the whole reason for the website). They found a severe XSS vulnerability within 24 hours, and a boatload of bugs shortly after (did you know Discourse has no QA testing?). People weren't happy with the "infiniscroll", the general website slowness, the inconsistent DiscoMardownBBcdeHTML syntax, etc. They started to complain.
The Discourse team came to the forum to answer questions and monitor the "meta/bugs" category (which was collecting several bugs per day). They had some frictions with the community since Jeff Atwood's idea of "civilized discussion" is clearly different than TDWTF's (plus some members in particular love to post inflamatory comments). This went on for some time, then they left.
But the forum was still slow and crashed every other day, and people still wanted to report bugs, so they went to meta.discourse.org, the official forum and bug tracker (Bugzilla, Jira? nope, Discourse). But as I said, Jeff has his own ideas of civilized discourse, which include things like silently deleting your posts for no clear reason, so people were still unhappy. Some TDWTF forum members decided to troll him a bit, doing things like everyone using the same avatar, but nothing particularly bad (IMO). This again went on for some time.
Then disaster happened: the admin of TDWTF forums went to meta.discourse to report that two buttons were in different order in the mobile and desktop views, but he made the mistake of illustrating the desktop view with a mobile screenshot (browser set to desktop mode). Jeff replied "not a bug, desktop view on mobile is not supported". The first admin replied that this had nothing to do with the bug, you can easily reproduce it in a desktop browser. ...and in response, Jeff banned every member of TDWTF, with the only messages "sorry, you are no longer welcome here", and another Discourse developer self-banned from TDWTF with the message "Time for you to migrate off Discourse".