Our growing pains

[DiogoRibeiro]

This latest release marked the beginning of several initiatives for GirlsAskGuys. To achieve the very ambitious goals we set for ourselves and this community this year, we needed to lay some groundwork.

We started preparing our platform for the mobile app so many of you are eagerly awaiting. As you may have noticed, GirlsAskGuys saw some down time and lower than average performance over the weekend and up until last night. Most of these issues should be solved by now.

Like Leonardo DiCaprio wisely said during his first Academy Award acceptance speech, it's easy to take things for granted. Consider notifications, for instance. It has become a staple of web and mobile applications. You receive multiple notification messages every day without giving any thought whatsoever as to how it works.

But for a very small team like ours, talented and dedicated as they are, handling all the aspects needed to create a notification system capable of working and delivering hundreds of thousands of messages daily and getting every little detail right in such a short time span is an incredible challenge.

Thanks for sticking with us through these turbulent times while we prepare for the great things planned for GirlsAskGuys. Calm waters are expected ahead, but don't worry, if a storm or two hits us in the meantime... we'll pull through!

[Bandit74]

I kinda feel bad when you release a new update and everyone freaks out but the last one just seemed pointless.

- Private opinions prevent other users from seeing their perspective. I don't know about others, but personally one of the things I like about this site besides offering my own opinions is to see other peoples opinions. So its kinda disappointing to see a question where half or even all of the opinions are private. Its just excessive anonymity.

-Closing questions isn't a bad feature in and of itself but 48 hours seems too quick. I think it would be cool if the question asker could choose when to close it. That way they wouldn't have to disavow to stop getting updates. They could just close it but still have their question linked to their profile if they ever want to look at it again to review the answers.

I get that you want to keep questions recent, so an alternative could be to add more filters to the site feed (age, topic, tags, time frame ect) . Like if it was possible to filter the site feed to only questions that were asked within the last 24 hours. That way users wouldn't have to have their questions forcibly closed and others who only want to see recent questions could make that choice for themselves and apply that filter.

Also I think it would be better if you asked for feedback from the community before going forward with making large changes to the user experience such as removing the ability to downvote or automatically closing questions. It could prevent you from wasting valuable time on implementing something that people will inevitable hate and then having to spend more time backpedaling.

[Other_Tommy_Wiseau]

this dude gets it!

[Bandit74]

@Other_Tommy_Wiseau
haha, thanks :)

[RainbowFanGirl]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

You guys seem to have trouble with this simple concept. 😛

[DiogoRibeiro]

It's not a matter of *fixing*, but a matter of making sure GirlsAskGuys is constantly *evolving* into a product that's attractive for you guys and for new users as well.

An online community or platform that doesn't change is dead.

But don't worry... We're working on several tweaks to the recently released features that should address many of the community's feedback. ;)

[RainbowFanGirl]

You're welcome admin! And I understand. 😚 i love this website and all.

[Dandeus]

In the words of another Oscar winner, Clint Eastwood:

"A man's got to know his limitations."

You say your goals are very ambitious, others would call them overly ambitious. Misguided
would also be appropriate. Others would be less forgiving in their choice of words.

If your team is so small, don't try to reinvent the wheel. It's bad enough that you already have
systems like user blocking that don't follow the uniform design that the rest of the net uses. You
guys intially asked what kinds of changes people would like to see and got several very broad,
high level answers from a handful of users. Less than a month later, you rolled out almost half a
dozen major systems and design changes in an attempt to address all of those wishes at once.
This was wrong on so many levels.

You should have picked ONE of those problems to address and focused on it. There should
have been internal discussion with your design team to come up with potential solutions. There
should have been private dialogue with the people who requested the changes to gain deeper
knowledge of the problem. There should have been another round of public inquiry soliciting
feedback from users about a variety of proposed resolutions to the problem. There should have
been closed beta tests with select regular users followed by an expanded open opt­in beta. And
once it was rolled out, there should have been a special notification at the top of the screen
alterting every user of the changes and offering them a walkthrough of how the new system
worked.

There is NO reason that this many changes should have been rolled out so quickly with so little
preparation. If you don't have the crew to make the changes you want, I'm sorry, but you either
need to hire more people and increase your capacity, or pick one important thing and do it right
instead of picking everything and doing it all wrong.

Your team would really be well served by studying some software design processes.

[GhostOnToast]

So you're basically telling us "don't be ungrateful, we put a lot of effort into this" okay, thanks, but no one likes the updates. You didn't need to change anything really, so you guys were just wasting your energy on updates that weren't needed.

[DiogoRibeiro]

Like I said, there's a lot more going on "under the hood" than the features we released with the latest update. ;)

[BellePepper]

You know what would have helped? Not messing with it in the first place ;)

If you have a small team, maybe you can try focusing on centralized goals and updates? Sometimes it's better to eat a meal one dish at a time instead of mixing it all on your plate and having more food than you can finish.
49.media.tumblr.com/.../...m8kNAM1rnpboto8_250.gif

[Dipsy]

I think a website like this should stay as simple as possible. Like how it originally was.
Of course there have to get things changed sometimes, but i wouldn't really change a major concept like downvotes, or not be able to vote on questoons after a certain time.

Also, i heard chat groups were available before too (i made an account after that), i think that would be awesome though!

I hope i helped somehow with telling this,
And anyway i love this website! :)

[Dipsy]

@DiogoRibeiro
I don't know if you're reading this, but I thought of an idea:
MyTakes are often made, and there are some really good ones among them, it's actually a kind of a waste if they were just to stay on the site for only a few days/weeks.

Probably when a myTake gets promoted (or featured and/or just has a lot of likes from GaG users), it could stay somewhere in a list on the site forever. That way this site also gets a sort of a guide and questions/mytakes wouldn't really get repeated.

Like say someone writes a myTake on how to attract the opposite gender (topic: Flirting). Say it gets promoted/featured/lots of likes, you can set it in a list of 'good' myTakes in the flirting topic.

I think that would be a good thing to do. What do you think?

[DiogoRibeiro]

That's actually quite a good idea. I'll discuss it internally with our Chief Editor. ;)

[Dipsy]

:) glad I could help

[OrdinaryGentleman]

Yup still don't understand where people were listened too. We get new admins making up stupid questions about "who is the best", the site doesn't function properly and the choice to not listen to the community is pointless. In summation what has this new platform done exactly? speed up the entire site all together making it more streamlined, easing the stress on servers? thats a laugh. The entire place has been dealing with bugs ever since it was upgraded, your programming team needs to learn to fix the html text before--- its----released. That's not even saying how bad this new design is. But la-dee-da "growing pains" is what everyone is experiencing? really? You don't think its just the fact that none of you are realizing that without all of us you would not be in business. simple. we gave you feedback and the team thought it best to have us screw off. Unless you genuinely like treating people they are a bunch of children... seems that way.

[Spirit_Is_Free]

I wish you luck - The last few updates have ruffled a lot of feathers - I think both sides have to accept it is a learning curve - The site is constantly evolving - I never had any major issues with the site - The only thing I would say is keep the channels open both ways - Nobody is perfect and as such the GaG team haven't been doing a bad job - It is a great community site, it would be a shame to let it slip.

[redeyemindtricks]

Welcome back (;

[RainbowFanGirl]

You're back! I missed you!

[Spirit_Is_Free]

@RainbowFanGirl and @redeyemindtricks - Yeah I was always coming back, I just wanted to start a new account - I was fed up with being a master.

[douride2]

Hey look whos back.

[TripleAce]

Its indeed quite a challenge to get everything right. Its important to push a direction you feel is the best to accomplish present and future goals for GAG and its users.

Sometimes we dont know what we want until we see it.

Whatever path the team decides to choose, I'm sure in the end it will work out.

[DiogoRibeiro]

Thanks for the support! :D

[FilthyPervert]

Stop limiting questions and fucking forcing us to close them, I hate you with a passion and only use this site as a means to meet cool people, the means is not pleasurable at all right now.

[justbanANNAz]

while i do get frustrated sometimes, i never ever overlook this. it's very important to remember the effort that goes in behind the scenes so i do remain thankful for that.
good on you for speaking up about that.

[Phoenix98]

And if you actually listen to us instead of pretty much just repeating the same nonsense over and over you'll get calm waters.

[Dim_121]

I still miss the down vote button it lets us see which are the good opinions to read and what are the bad ones. It was also a way to get back a little bit at the annoying trollers.

[YourFutureEx]

Stay strong. I can understand how hard it is to handle such platform. I don't like the way users are (kinda) offending you guys. They'd say this in more peaceful manner. I'm with you. Let's see how I'd help in my next review.
Good luck, patrão!

[Anonymous]

So it's a mytake to bitch about our bitching, eh? Funny.

[LittleSally]

Oh, well... I was overwhelmed with some of the changes, but we're patient - we'll get through it. =)

[ConsultantIsBack]

P. s. all the asshole remarks coming from me to you admins is made with love❤❤
I luff u guys

[meatballs21]

Thanks for the honest explanations.

That girl has tiny feet!!

[fauchelevent]

Okay but why are her feet so small.

[DiogoRibeiro]

Hahaha... I don't know.

[Tank2]

Back at it again with the white vans

[theCatcherintheRye]

lol I read the title so wrong >.<

[YourFutureEx]

HAHAHA me too LMAO xD
Adverse effects of using GAG too much

[theCatcherintheRye]

@YourFutureEx exactly! hahaha