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240

Get with the program salesfarce.com

240 points posted to Dell Web Site by badblood 10/26/07

Ideastorm is a great idea, hampered by poor software. This site is so buggy as to be unusable half the time. New bugs have just sprung up today that prevent you from editing your comments. Users all over lost points last night for no apparent reason.

Cosh, an ideastorm user, has developed a better version of this software. If he can do it during lunch breaks, why can't salesforce.com manage it with all their millions of buck and staff. Are you staffed by Windows Vista developers or what?

Salesforce.com what's up. Get with the program!

Oh the idea....
Ring up salesforce.com and tell them that their software is rubbish, that ideastorm users are tired of working as volunteer test rodents, and that they should spend some of their millions and fix this software!

Thanks

premcv
10/26/07		 And get talking to Cosh and have his software running out of Ideastorm!
petzymathuram
10/26/07		 Really?..cosh then you need to show your talented activity and challenge this salesforce....;)
mkmaster78
10/26/07		 IdeaStorm is just like a little white lab rat, cowering in the corner of its cage, and wondering where the needle is gonna come from next. Salesforce is the lab tech towering over it with a twelve-inch saying, "You will only feel a slight pinch..."
mkmaster78
10/26/07		 twelve-inch needle* sorry can't edit my post
mkmaster78
10/26/07		 ya, makes me feel like going Office Space-style on Salesforce's servers lol
badblood
10/26/07		 @gmat I agree that we are speculating. The ball is now in Dell's court to quash the rumors and undertake damage control.

Well it would be if anyone seemed to be around.....
petzymathuram
10/26/07		 By the way where are the Admins?...
cosh
10/26/07		 AAAAAAARGH! I didn't develop a better version of the software!!! I developed a search index of ideas! It doesn't support all the things that this one does - like the voting and the comments and actually posting ideas, and the whole logging in thing, and the stats in the admin console etc!

I just want to make it clear that it isn't to compete with IdeaStorm - but to usefully complement it with (as it says here) a better search engine and organisation, and, for interest's sake, a lot of statistics.

And my site has some silly bugs too, which I'm aware of. Just they don't get noticed because it doesn't get a lot of use.

If you really want alternative software to Ideas Exchange, there was that development company advertising their solution on here a while back - I can't remember the site now because the idea got deleted for being advertising.
badblood
10/26/07		 No need to be modest cosh.
petzymathuram
10/26/07		 How is that Cosh you are able to bold letters, some are able to post pictures...I'm not able to do any of such things...
well can you help me post a picture of an "Angry Tweetie"?....
Now dont roar like a lion plzzzz....aaaaaaaaargh...and likewise .....
badblood
10/26/07		 phubert taught me how to do that, or was it captainsensible.

You find the picture you want on the internet and you copy it's internet address. then you put the address between the following symbols:



then post
badblood
10/26/07		 oh it disappeared and I can't edit it
badblood
10/26/07		 You need one of these < at the beginning and one of these at the end >

After < write 'img src=

put a " after =

After "put in the address of your picture then put another " then > to close it

then post
cosh
10/26/07		 Like this you see:
<b>bold text</b>  =  bold text
<i>italics</i>  =  italics
<img src="http://s3.crispynews.com/themes/ideastorm_v1_2/images/dell_bttn.gif"> =


Just change the url in the quotes to the one from the image you want to use.
cosh
10/26/07		 Hey I just found confirmation that we are all test rats:



The software is in BETA.
dell_admin1
10/26/07		 Hey guys - I wanted to make sure you'd seen my responses and updates to the recent bug reports... they are here: Give Us Our Points Back and Brand New IdeaStorm Bug. The team has been working hard to address these issues quickly... check out the conversations there for the latest update.

In my conversations with the development team at salesforce.com today, we concluded that you'd probably like to hear directly from bathow, our lead developer at salesforce.com, about all this. (I can't wait to see him and cosh chat it up!) bathow will be joining this conversation some time soon, and will share some insight into the team's focus with this beta site.

Keep in mind - Dell and salesforce.com are really doing something different with IdeaStorm, something no other company of Dell's size is doing yet today, and so we're improving the site as we go - and as we learn from you. IdeaStorm isn't perfect, and we know that, and that's why our team is constantly reading your feedback here regarding features and functionalities - and using it to inform the site development . But I'll let bathow tell you more about that, if you have questions for him.
bathow
10/26/07		 Hi everyone,

I'm from Salesforce. sorry about the spate of issues that cropped up here yesterday. dell_admin1 has explained the details in this thread here. I can answer any questions about it here or there.

To address some questions that have gone on in this thread so far:
1. This is indeed a beta product. However its a long beta since its been that way for a year and a half or so. (not this particular site, but in its previous incarnation as crispynews).
2. We're rewriting this technology onto the salesforce platform which will make it much more robust (and also so it can be connected w/ CRM data). You can learn more about it here. We also use it ourselves here if you are interested.
3. We were all really impressed w/ cosh's Ideastorm site. Nice job! We love it.
4. Just a small correction to dell_admin1's posts but I am not the lead developer. Just the PM. The real developers are much smarter than I. Which is why they made me PM and told me not to go near the code.
5. Thanks for participating in this community. I've put a good amount of my life over the last two years into the code behind this site (while cursing IE and its HTML rendering issues) and its really gratifying to see so many people finding it useful/entertaining. However, what makes this work is the community. Not the technology. This thing is basically useless without you guys, and without the dell folks.

So thanks again for using the site. As for us we'll do our best to keep the lights on and the servers running.
jervis961
10/26/07		 kinda like motel 6? but without the cockroaches... oh wait the site bugs....nevermind ;D
jorge
10/26/07		 @bathow: Why is the hidden part of the database (don't worry you don't have to say there isn't we know there is) not flagged out of the calculations? The removed or hidden ideas are still being used to calculate some parts of the user dashboard and overall counts when we know they're no longer a part of "our" viewable database. Can you pass that on to the developers?
bathow
10/26/07		 @jervis heey we are trying man!

@jorge: you're talking about the deleted items right? there is a syncing issue between the stats, which are cached, and the actual real score. i.e. stats aren't being updated properly when ideas are removed. We didn't discover that issue until yesterday and today. its actually the one dell_admin1 has mentioned, and the one jervis brought up yesterday.
jorge
10/26/07		 dell_admin1 has known and commented on that for some time now, she probably didn't mention it to you till now. Also, the ideas aren't removed they're flagged as hidden hence the code snafu that is adding the hidden ideas, there needs to be a flag check to not count the hidden ideas.
jervis961
10/26/07		 I thought they kept it that way so you got credit for all your work even if it was deleted or merged.

Don't worry bathow, I was just messing with ya.
petzymathuram
10/26/07		 how about DCI- Xchange ..Dell Community Idea Exchange....:)
Bathow is this OK?
cosh
10/27/07		 Ooops. I was trying to stop bathow and the Salesforce team finding my site. Oh well. (Argh! badblood that was your fault!)

@bathow - the "syncing" issue - where the cached count of ideas and stuff does not get updated after a deletion or merge - has been apparent for a long time, but how hard can it be to fix? As far as I can see there are only those two points in the code where it needs to change. So at those two points just do something along the lines of:
UPDATE users SET ideas = ideas - 1 WHERE userid =  (person who posted the idea)
And if it's a deletion reduce the count of comments etc. too.
Am I right to assume it's all just in one big SQL database? That seems like the obvious way of having it but then again IdeaStorm is huge - one simple database server might not be enough.
jervis961
10/27/07		 You're way over my head now cosh but I'm sure bathow knows exactly what you're saying.

bathow - Any plans on making an improved user dashboard area more like a forum site's ? Things like avitars, PM, user settings and such. Also a rep system like the forums on www.laptopreview.com would give people a way to rate a user based on comments as well. I know salesforce is looking to sell the software and these are things that make users enjoy a site more.
cosh
10/27/07		 @bathow - I know the development team probably has a lot of feature requests to work on already, but there is one more bit of feedback I'd like to add - the merge process is very destructive in its implementation. For example, it's not reversible, and we've had admins merge one or two ideas by accident and there's nothing they can do.

Worse, a user can't tell what's happened to their idea, whether its been deleted or merged. For example, user tobyglenn posted 1 idea if you look at his dashboard page. Yet look at the list of his ideas and it's blank. No mention of where it's gone. That's going to upset people if their legitimate ideas are disappearing for no good reason.

Even knowing its exact URL - http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/71876 - it just says "Article not found", to further convince people that their ideas have simply been thrown away.

In reality his idea was just merged into this one: Ubuntu/Vista Laptop w/embedded webcam. And if you look on my site, you can see that, because it shows merges separately (when possible).

My point is that the merge process is destructive and untidy and irreversible, confusing to users, and what makes this particular case even sillier is that the merged idea was tagged as under review and the idea it got merged into still has just a blank status tag.

See also:
» IdeaStorm: Leave a link stub to merged ideas so the poster can find their ideas.
» Merging Ideas considered harmful.
petzymathuram
10/27/07		 Yeah merging looks untidy...waste of time...;)
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