Sucks Sucks

It sucks that everything sucks!!!

Up until now, this page had nothing to do with the title, so I fixed it.

eBay PayPal Fees Suck

eBay PayPal fees are a real rip-off. They charge for any transaction that may happen within PayPal and on top of that, when you transfer the your bank account, it takes up to 9 days. With millions of transactions every day, eBay makes interest on your money they hold whilst being transferred. An extra income for them I guess...

-- ColinHunt

We know how it's supposed to work. Somebody creates a page FooSucks? as a spleen venting exercise, and pours out their bile. Other people respond with the opposite point of view, and when it's settled down a bit somebody extracts a compilation of the opposing viewpoints (using ThereforeBut or similar if necessary) and moves the whole thing to a more neutrally titled page ProblemsWithFoo? or WhenShouldFooBeUsed?.

(According to the archeological eveidence, once upon a time people would actually try to express this in pattern form, but I think that was probably just a Golden Age to which we can't hope ever to return)

These days we get halfway through this process, stall before refactoring, and end up with a threadmode mess poorly integrated into the rest of Wiki. In at least one case (LispSucks), the Sucks page was created 'after' WhyWeLoveLisp and WhyWeHateLisp, so I can't see any reason to view its creation as anything other than pollution.

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?search=Sucks

Are people really this unwilling/afraid to refactor? Or am I missing interesting content creation elsewhere on Wiki?

(I think that part of the responsibility that goes with the offer of Wiki as a platform is that you should see the process through when people respond to what you say, and that the end of the process is something more like ThereforeBut than like the apparently IrrevocableThreadMode that is StlSucks)

-- DanielBarlow?, now part of the problem

Perhaps the problem is too many newbies given a gentle introduction to using wiki, blurting out whatever is on their mind, and never learning to refactor. There seem to be the same number of WikiGnomes as there ever were, perhaps a few more, but vastly more writers, many of whom are clueless as to the original culture that made WardsWiki insanely great. The recent wars have made people more afraid of refactoring, but the problem is mostly that people don't know they're supposed to.

On that note, what is refactoring? Can a link be posted for anyone full of ignorance?

There is a page WikiRefactoring which is one starting point. There are other ways in, such as to type refactor into the search at the bottom of the page, which will give a list of pages with refactor in the title. There is also a page called CategoryRefactoring. If you go to that page and click on its header, you will get a list of all pages which contain a link to it, but don't necessarily have that word in their name. I hope this helps. -- JohnFletcher

CategorySucks