For what it’s worth, I almost never venture in to the discussion area, and my reaction was immediately “Ahh, the new changes must have gone live!”
That said, for anyone who doesn’t touch Discussion, or objects to the “live testing” philosophy, I can see it being an issue. On the other hand, setting up an entire cloned test site, or doing all the changes via CSS, would have made this a more complex project—especially given that they’re not being paid to do this, I consider it pretty reasonable to do “live QA”.
It also has the added advantage of getting feedback from everyone, instead of just the Favored Few of the Bayesian Conspiracy :)
The difference between “Ahh, the new changes must have gone live!” and “Ahh, some new changes must have gone live!” is negligible in this case I think. The problem was that you didn’t think before you opened up the site “The new changes are probably up by now” and thus there’s still a surprise involved.
And thanks for finding a name to where our disagreements lie. I object strongly to live testing.
For what it’s worth, I almost never venture in to the discussion area, and my reaction was immediately “Ahh, the new changes must have gone live!”
That said, for anyone who doesn’t touch Discussion, or objects to the “live testing” philosophy, I can see it being an issue. On the other hand, setting up an entire cloned test site, or doing all the changes via CSS, would have made this a more complex project—especially given that they’re not being paid to do this, I consider it pretty reasonable to do “live QA”.
It also has the added advantage of getting feedback from everyone, instead of just the Favored Few of the Bayesian Conspiracy :)
The difference between “Ahh, the new changes must have gone live!” and “Ahh, some new changes must have gone live!” is negligible in this case I think. The problem was that you didn’t think before you opened up the site “The new changes are probably up by now” and thus there’s still a surprise involved.
And thanks for finding a name to where our disagreements lie. I object strongly to live testing.
You are not alone there. I think that a failure to communicate about that was the biggest issue here, and doing it at all was the second.
For what it’s worth, I too was surprised, but it was a pleasant surprise. “Ah, the changes have finally gone live, awesome!”