The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

Hard times in banking

Computer professionals are not the only ones facing a bleak future. Even bankers have to contend with offshoring....
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/business/articles/timid68936?source=

Tapiwa
Monday, October 27, 2003

what happened to auto links?

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/business/articles/timid68936?source=

Tapiwa
Monday, October 27, 2003

Joel has disabled automatic linking because he is afraid that posters will steal his oh-so-precious google page rank...

:-( What he did SUCKS and I think it will cause many people to leave this forum.

Jericho
Monday, October 27, 2003

Do you know that for real, or is your aluminum foil hat pinching again?

Kero
Monday, October 27, 2003

Autolinks went away over the weekend. The three main theories seem to be:
1) A software update broke them accidentally, and since Joel's off to PDC they won't be fixed for a bit
2) Joel took autolinks away because people were using them to hitch a ride on his google rank.
3) Joel took autolinks away to protect his google rank - autolinks encourage people to leave his site.

I think (1) is wishful thinking. I can't see Mr. Perfect Software accidentally breaking something so fundamental and releasing anyway.

I don't know the vagaries of Google ranking, so I can't comment on the likelihood of (2) over (3) or vice versa.

Philo

Philo
Monday, October 27, 2003

Having a large number of outgoing links doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, hurt your own google ranking. What it _does_ affect, however, is the benefit that your outgoing links have on other pages' Google rankings.

For example let's pretend that Joel wanted to quid-pro-quo with someone like...oh...off the top of my head Creo: By putting a link on his site to them (and I'm sure vice versa) he's giving them a Google bonus. The value of that Google bonus is something along the lines of your_google_ranking / the_number_of_outgoing_links.

Removing clickable links is ridiculous - if one is so protective of subversive advertisement at the very least render links into post-backs that redirect to the destination URL.

Dennis Forbes
Monday, October 27, 2003

...I can't see Mr. Perfect Software accidentally breaking something so fundamental and releasing anyway.

Take a look at CityDesk 2 and you will be surprised ( I was ) how many fundamental items weren't caught. It happens.

B#
Monday, October 27, 2003

I think the google ranking theory is moot. I don't think that the discussions are indexed by google. Case in point:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=philo+joel+on+software&spell=1

Philo should have much more than just the top link, if these discussions were being indexed. So maybe it was turned off to prevent the google ranking fishing erroneously, or it was turned off for some other reason.

Maybe British Telecom told him to stop linking or get sued, as they own the patent to linking...

Andrew Hurst
Monday, October 27, 2003

Who gives a shit what Joel does. He draws you suckers in with ever little thing. He re-writes a bunch of crap about developing software from development books and bam people adhere to the stuff like glue. Joel ain't exactly a god. He's just another developer out to make a buck. Now he said there were 20,000+ copies of CityDesk out there. Hrm.... if only 1/2 of those were registered how much money do you think Joel raked in? Plus the sales of FogBugz? One hell of a lot, but he didn't get my money and he won't. Citydesk is a poor excuse for a content management system and FogBugz is basically a few asp pages on top of a database... big frickin deal.

Monday, October 27, 2003

I agree with <blank> that there is definitly too much speculation on Joel's actions and/or motives. But you could have left out the hostility.

DJ
Monday, October 27, 2003

"I can't see Mr. Perfect Software accidentally breaking something so fundamental and releasing anyway."

Well, the linking had the added-end-space-bug for quite some time, so that sort of sinks that theory.

I think it just might be a nudge in the system towards a better dynamics. It will now take more effort to get people to follow a link, so you have to put in more effort in the description, or provide the content versus just a link. It also should make it far less interesting for spammers to post on the board. This action is very much in line with the mindset underlying the design of this board.

All in all, I see it as a positive thing at this point in the lifecycle. In hindsight it even seems an obvious evolution.

(of course if it turns out Philo is right, I've realy put my foot in it now ;-))

Just me (Sir to you)
Monday, October 27, 2003

I am amazed at how a board populated mostly by software development people gets all worked up into a conspiratorial lather over what is obviously a bug.

I say "obviously" because I assume Joel wouldn't do something like this without announcing it. What, for heaven's sake, in his previous behavior would indicate that this is anything other than a simple mistake? Whatever happenned to the concept of "benefit of the doubt"?

I'm as cranky as the next guy, but just damn.

Grumpy Old-Timer
Monday, October 27, 2003

"I think it just might be a nudge in the system towards a better dynamics. It will now take more effort to get people to follow a link, so you have to put in more effort in the description, or provide the content versus just a link."

I think with this kind of "not-a-bug-it's-a-feature" speak, you're ready for a job in Microsoft marketing.

Jim Rankin
Monday, October 27, 2003

"What, for heaven's sake, in his previous behavior would indicate that this is anything other than a simple mistake?"

The undisclosed Creo & book author back-scratching, for one.

how 'bout that?
Monday, October 27, 2003

"I say "obviously" because I assume Joel wouldn't do something like this without announcing it"

Actually, Joel's attitude towards this board has been to operate like God. Replies get nuked, entire threads deleted, without any comment from On High. Nor is any explanation forthcoming about *why* things get removed.

Let me add one more possible explanation about why he did it:
To see how we'd react.

Philo

Philo
Monday, October 27, 2003

so much for the outsourcing of banking positions.....

apw
Monday, October 27, 2003

"What he did SUCKS and I think it will cause many people to leave this forum."

Jericho,

Bye-Bye and don't let the door hit you on the way out!!!
Or better yet, start up a "JerichoOnSoftware" and autolink all you want...

Dudey
Monday, October 27, 2003

If he took the links off because of the google page rank, that's silly, as the page rank for a thread in the forum is about 0... Plus he could use robots.txt or such to prevent the page from being indexed...

C++ <fan>
Monday, October 27, 2003

Somewhere in this site there is a set of "rules" from where I understand: "this is my forum" and "if I don't like it I can get rid off it". That's it, if you don't like it write somewhere else. I feel it is really silly to advance all sort of theories about the links working or not (anyway, it is quite easy to follow a link, the old copy and paste). The whole point of the current design is to facilitate civilized discussion, avoiding most drawbacks a la Slashdot.

Concerning banking jobs, they have been suffering outsourcing for as long as (or even longer than) IT jobs. They have also suffered closing or reduction of staffing levels since the internet banking revolution. Thus, IT was/is screwing bank workers and IT workers are following them now.

uncronopio
Monday, October 27, 2003