I would like to announce that I will mark any posts made with the only purpose to badmouth Storj developers as inappropriate. These posts will likely be hidden as a result due to forum mechanics. Recent posts made by some people are definitelly not the right way to discuss any problems related to hosting a storage node.
(nicknames edited out)
Yes, everyone is entitled to express strong opinions but there are expected levels of social standards on this Forum.
We can all say what we need to say while remaining reasonably polite.
If anyone is feeling heated, please take a beat and consider you will get better results focusing on the substance of an issue rather than lashing out.
This is a general reminder as this issue crops up occasionally on all forums.
It’s just part of human nature.
This comment is not directed at any particular users, rather a universal reminder to everyone of how we must operate here.
I think the issue stems from the fact that people aren’t aware of the software development or SDLC. The steps involved can’t be skipped which in turn takes time to implement fixes. Also fixing a bug isn’t the same as waving a magic wand and expecting the solution to just materialize out of ether. (ERC-20 in our case).
I have seen Jammerdan’s post over the years and he/she is a very very very passionate person when it comes to showing his/her support for something he/she likes. You can go through the history of their posts and you will find many posts under “Ideas and suggestions” in how Storj can get more clients or improve certain things on their website to attract more customers. After having said that I also believe its unrealistic to demand C-level executives to come and reply to bugs that affect the whole network. Even when you don’t see their (executives) reply, at their levels they do their job and address issues when absolutely necessary like the end of Free Trial by making a post. There is indeed a chain of command in a company from Executives to Team Manager to Team leader to Team then individual developers to end users. The commits that we see being implemented are indeed authorized by managers.
I completely agree that the frustration has led to posting an angry reply but I am certain Jammerdan’s heart is in the right place. I don’t personally know him/her but this is by observing them over the years and I visit the forum every day.
I also agree that you have to address everyone here professionally and respect them the exact same way you want/deserve to be addressed and respected. Devs are going out of their way to answer our queries which they can easily do through support staff. Please remember mental health is important not just for SNOs but for Storjlings too.
PS: As a coping mechanism to letting out anger or venting I would recommend this method. Draft a reply to the post that’s making you angry, read that reply, give yourself time to calm down, read that reply again then DELETE/DISCARD THE REPLY.
And if you are a SNO that wants more clients and more data to come in, keep in mind that Storj public image is very important. Your negative comments can be read by customers too, and when they see problems and angree operators, thay run away with the wrong impresion.
So, think twice before posting something in a public forum. It can affect you negatively, even though you are looking for a positive result.
Where you wanna be? In a project with a forum full of personal fights and unproductive angry replys? Or a forum full of professionals, that try to help eachother and move the project forward, in a civilized manner?
Bit of a non-sequitur here but…. Does this make a little bit of a case for having some sort of access control to some of the sections of this forum?
As in, confirming that you’re an SNO before being able to view the bug reports, improvement suggestions, etc.?
I don’t think it’s a good idea for there to be any consideration on the part of SNOs for the public image of Storj when we want to report bugs, issues or concerns.
Hiya Toyoo.
I like the direction you’re going in, but was it necessary to include targeted users in it? You’ve been here for a long time, and I respect your views, but is this not more of an outlet of frustration against two namegiven users instead of a “real” effort to highen the quality of discussion here?
Kind regards friend.
If a correction needs to be made: should it be tailored to those who are causing the problem… or applied to everyone? Is there a better example of unacceptable behavior than a users recent post history… if you want the community to know what actions to avoid?
If I treat the Storj team poorly here, I hope I get called on it, so I know. Keep up the great work @Toyoo !
There is a two fold approach to naming someone - first showing support to the devs who might get discouraged by interacting with people that put them down and secondly letting the users know that if their posts get flagged then it was done by someone who made them aware of it beforehand.
Generally posts that get marked and get hidden don’t show who marked them.
I wouldn’t do that. It’s better to be open with problems and show that you are doing something about it, than making the impression that you are hiding something.
I didn’t see any personal attacks. So nothing happened.
I get the need for being polite on a public forum, but what about the other side of that coin?
I’ve had a reply flagged for being “too hostile” which is still hidden. I have the screenshot of the reply if anyone is interested in pointing out what was hostile about it (I did ask, but I haven’t had a reply as of yet).
Tensions have been rising on both sides amid a concentration of issues and big changes happening all at once. I’m not a big fan of calling out names, but I think it’s fair to say that patience has been running thin, whether SNO or Storjling.
I am personally wary of flagging posts as that basically leads to posts being immediately hidden when forum regulars flag them. So I reserve that for outright insults. Having said that, I think we can all do a little better to not respond to the emotions something invokes, but the the content of a message. Since (name removed after OP removed them) was mentioned, I do want to say I don’t agree with singling them out. While I may not agree with everything in their recent posts, I don’t think their comments constituted personal attacks, but rather just frustration. And perhaps unreasonable expectations. And I can think of much worse examples to name, but I won’t.
I also want to mention something I’ve noticed. When stuff gets heated here, it’s because of people who care with a passion. And to be honest, that’s pretty damn awesome, when trolls so often dominate forum flame wars. I don’t see many of those around here. So yeah, let’s keep debating, let’s keep respectfully disagreeing. But let’s all try to take a breath and assume good intentions from others before we write our heated responses.
Sorry, it was not necessary. My fault.
No worries lad. I’m glad you’re going above and beyond to further highen the quality of this forum.
Thank you for that.
I’m interested in seeing it and I will report my opinion to you.
As someone who is regularly edgy but has never gratuitously insulted anybody on the internet (even though I read a lot of gratuitous insults directed to me), I always have bad feelings about any kind of censorship. The reason is that there is only one censor in the world I could actually trust, and that would be me!
PMed and please be honest, I don’t personally mind.
I will have to insult you, you $%!#%/#$… 
I think it’s a good example of the danger of censorship. You are complaining (not clear if with or without good reason, not that it matters…), make use of a bit of irony, but in a good mood (you made a joke!). Absolute zero name calling and really nothing personal going on.
The storjling you’re talking to (no names!) is a bit frustrated and complains about people who complain (SIC). I believe he was in a bad mood for whatever reason and decided he would not deal with you anymore. Made your post disappear and moved to the next post hoping to find some much needed compliment instead.
And that’s my verdict! 
If I could double heart your reply, I would .
A bit of insight from outside the box…
I’ve been lurking in the storj ecosystem for years now learning about the technology and waiting until the right moment to deploy it locally and advocate for it in the enterprise. Recently my understanding and technical experience matured enough for me to attempt to pitch distributed storage and specifically storj to some of my clients and employers.
We’re all techies and we understand it and we think it’s cool for the most part but from an end user perspective it’s very new bleeding edge technology that is tied to web3 which is “crypto something something” to the uninitiated with all the horror stories they see online on sites like Reddit coming to mind. We understand the deliniation between the two worlds but they don’t.
They are being asked to put corporate data on storj and expect it to be available and secure in varying degrees. They usually already have a backup system in place and this isn’t something to pitch as yet another backup destination. It’s use case is a file storage system and the sell is the cost vs AWS and even wasabi. Most companies don’t have a lot of things they’re storing that they don’t need so it has varying levels of criticality in availability requirements. If they can’t put data on it and expect without compromise it will be there when they need it, it’s not viable.
It’d a hard sell right out of the gate because for such a bleeding edge system it lacks features that the bigger and medium players have had for years. Even with that the price can’t be beat and in today’s economically challenging environment that’s enough alone to get them to at least want to know more and perform their own due diligence.
Unfortunately while I have been successful in shoring up interest and advocating for this platform every single person who is serious about their interest does their research and due diligence stumbles across this forum. Thqt’s where the discussion ends and my credibility takes a hit.
No amount of praise or technical wizardry can negate the fact that this looks like a really amateur project run by unprofessional entities. All this infighting, attitude and bickering is unacceptable and embarrassing. That’s what Facebook is for not a web3 distributed storage project. This is not the only distributed file system out there and sooner rather than later another leader will come along and this will project will just fade into nothingness as so many others have if there isn’t a course correction in the near term in my opinion.
Now is not the time to rest on laurels nor will there ever be an appropriate time to do that in this space. I can’t continue going through the embarrassment of advocating and recommending a project that can’t even control its own public image in a forum. One client told me he wouldn’t put his photo gallery on a platform that has issues like this and another said they trust GoDaddy more. That stings and this isn’t even a company I’m affiliated with directly.
If storj wants to be around in 3 years or less I highly recommend you hire a public relations expert or someone other than the technology folks to manage this situation. Let’s call it what it is and call it an emergency situation. One thing I learned in my 27+ years in tech and business is you can’t have tech folks running the entire company. Commonly we lack the public facing nuance and skills that are required in some areas and situations like the current one.
The tech staff are best being left to be masters of their universe and let the social / PR folks be the masters of theirs. There isnt a lot of skill overlap and neither are suited to perform the others roles.For example my tech-focused brain says “scrub all the negative discussions from this forum” but the business side says it’s too late the archives have it and we will look like we are dishonest. I’m sure someone who is trained in this would have much more elegant response that doesn’t have the potential to blow up and exacerbate the situation 10-fold like my idea would.
I think this is an amazing project and I still think it has the capabilities to be the number one it’s just losing its way and in the most publicly facing way where even small missteps will be archived for years. The public Internet is the last place you want anything negative.
I mean no I’ll will or harm in writing this. My intentions are to be a catalyst for change or at a minimum awareness and discussion. I hope the situation can be corrected and this productivity and image draining situation just fades into the past only to be viewed as a small blip in the otherwise stellar history of this nextgen product
Thank you for coming to my TED talk! I know this was long but it’s months in the making and if I didn’t think there was hope I would have just disconnected. Have a wonderful day everyone and good luck. I’ll be the first one to pitch this product again as soon as it’s public image improves.
Thanks for the detailed thoughts on the challenges you are having pitching Storj to would be customers.
First, we absolutely have PR and Marketing people who specialize in their respective fields.
The forum is part of Storj Community and is where users of the platform can get assistance with technical issues and Q&A. I agree that some conversations in the forum are negative and may raise questions from prospective customers. However, the vast majority of content is troubleshooting help and assistance. And this is mainly the concerns of SNO’s which are not customers but node operators.
Storj has always acted transparently as possible to answer questions and doesn’t try to hide anything. This is very important to many people inside and outside the company. Moving discussions behind walls would likely reduce confidence, not strengthen it. With Storj you can see there is a very active community and a lot of members of the forum helping each other to make the most of the platform.
Like any forum, there are passionate people and sometimes trolls who are looking to argue their points. We have a code of conduct and ask users to abide by those rules. When conversations break the rules, or go off topic, the admins may remove the posts. But we try to allow everyone to have a voice and ask questions and if needed, express frustrations.
For Community to work, information needs to be shared and users helping users is a large benefit to the company as a whole as it reduces support time for staff. With a small company, this is especially important.
We do have a process where users can flag other user’s posts and state the reasons why they feel they are inappropriate. As admins, we will review these and take action as well. Often if a post is flagged multiple times for being off topic or worse, we will hide the content.
That all being said, I am not personally against the idea of purging old messages that are no longer of value, but it would be a significant undertaking to sort through years of content and pick through which are good to keep and which aren’t. But outdated information is not useful if it contains inaccurate instructions with today’s platform.
Perhaps it would make sense to have the SNO forums not be public and instead filtered to SNO’s only. Not to hide the conversations but to reduce confusion among would be customers wondering what a SNO is and if it is something they need to concern themselves with. By reducing this conversational clutter they could focus on the user and programmer aspects instead.
We do have this setup in the forum already. When you join, depending on your interests you are steered towards the correct forum categories. However, I can see someone going towards the more active groups which tend to be the SNO groups.
So, it is something we can consider. In the meantime, if you or anyone has potential customers we can connect them with our people to have conversations and help answer any questions they may have.