Quote by WannabeWordsmith
Quote by NicolasBelvoir
Lush is now mainly a site for chatting and swapping porn pics. With some stories added on.
Because Lush is homed on a site that was, up until six weeks ago, a place mainly for chatting and swapping porn pics. The stories have been added on; that's why it feels like it _now_. But it won't be that way forever.
Given infinite time and resources, it could all be made the same as it was, sooner. Sadly that's not the case and everything takes time to (re)build. In addition, there are ever increasing and oppressive content restrictions being put in place by stakeholders such as financial gateways and hosting providers that have an impact on what can be rolled out and how it is managed. Lush 1 would equally have been affected and would have required sweeping changes to comply; basically forcing us to moderate every single picture posted anywhere on the site, in addition to the stories.
Yes the upheaval is inconvenient in the short term. Yes there are features I would dearly love to see returned as soon as possible, including stable email notifications of stories published - as an author that can make the difference between a few reads and hundreds.
The points Susie and others have raised are all valid. Everyone has their own idea of what features are important, and not everyone's vision aligns. Some features in Lush 1 were bodges. Bodging them again for the sake of getting it working right this minute, for parity, isn't a sustainable path; it introduces instability which makes it harder to add new stuff and maintain existing features down the line.
If I had a roadmap, I'd publish it. Maybe now much of the firefighting is out of the way and people can (mostly) log in and use the site, a tentative schedule can be published. I don't know.
Trouble is, if a schedule or feature hit list is published and it's not adhered to or doesn't meet some people's expectations, it will be used as a vehicle to trash the site. If a changeset is published after every software push, it might give some people a reason to flame the site for prioritising feature X over feature Y. Maybe an advertised fix means something else breaks (which happened regularly in Lush 1 and happens in every complex software system the world over - it's not unique). In that case, publishing the fix list gives people ammo to ridicule it.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Actually, what if means is that proper testing was not done. Having tested software for many years, I can tell you that when proper testing is done, including regression testing and quality assurance testing. 99+% of new bugs or a re-occurance of old bugs can be eliminated. The problem is, most companies see it as an unnecessary expense, rather than a a great customer relations issue.