To Spill Or Not to Spill?

I hope the mods will let this post stay. I’m really not trying to rip on T-Nation about this, I love this place and want to see coherent intelligent discussions for articles. Unfortunately, I don’t think Livespills are accomplishing this.

So what do you guys think?

Do you want the Livespills to stay or would you prefer to go back to the forum format for discussions?

Keep in mind this is for articles only. I like the Spill feature for things like the training lab (short blurbs). But I feel it is an awful feature for article discussions.


Here are my reasons:

  1. It looks like a sloppy unorganized chat log. It is very hard to track which question the authors are responding to. Making sense of high traffic spills (CT’s High Performance Mass articles, for example) is nigh on impossible. Authors are just not able to appropriately respond to questions when there are about 100 people chiming in between his responses. There is no way to quote the original question, so scrolling up and down through all the other questions to keep track is difficult. The “quote” feature in forums made this a non-issue. You could scroll directly to the authors post and get all the information you needed right there.

  2. Livespills have fostered less intelligent discussion. Its much too easy to just type the first bit of drabble that comes to mind and hit enter–this isn’t Twitter. The format doesn’t lend itself to well-crafted responses and the diminishing quality of ensuing discussions is very evident. It is surprising to me that the site can still find enough authors to contribute to daily articles given the recent spills.

  3. Livespills make it harder to keep track of which articles you are discussing since there is no way to track new responses unless going back to the discussion. I am NOT asking for a subscribe feature here, the forums already have a feature to take care of this!!! You can keep track of all your posted topics in Message Center and it is very clear when new responses have been posted to your topic.


I have not seen one single person say they prefer Livespills over the Forum format. Hopefully if this thread generates enough responses, the powers that be will listen. I am pro-democratic process so if Livespills win out, then so be it (although like a true American I reserve my right to continue bitching)…

So how about it T-Nation. What do you think?

I liked the livespills for the unveiling aspect of things, but for discussion, eh, not so much.

I’m not in my 20s so this livespill thing baffles me.

Visually, at least, I think the livespill format fits short form stuff like CT’s training lab. In terms of clarity it’s ok if the discussion is short, but once it gets long (as it does with most article discussions) it gets unclear.

I say go back to the message board discussion for the articles but leave the livespill for stuff like the training lab, with the exception of potential longer lab “reports”.

B.

I cant see any advantage to the livespill format. At all.

I’m not a livespill fan either

I find them confusing as shit

[quote]angry chicken wrote:
I find them confusing as shit[/quote]

Agreed. If you want well thought out responses, that is not the vehicle for it. It would seem to attract the types of people you really don’t want to read that much from in the first place.

I am sure fan boyz love it though. They can now text “OMG I luv wut u rote win u rote wut u did bout big biceptz!!!” at lightening fast speeds.

Perhaps they should be 2 dimensional, this is what a lot of news websites use.

I have posted in a couple of live spills but am not convinced they bring anything that the article discussion forum did not provide. Most of the time it seems like a great opportunity for people to sh*t talk or belittle the author or article, with many people it seems just posting for the sake of putting the article down/bash Biotest’s marketing strategy, which is totally uncalled for in my opinion, Its the information that is important and people should be able to look beyond the marketing and take what they deem important. /micro rant.

Back in my lurker days I remember reading some threads after the article that were so obnoxious I would not have been surprised if they pulled the whole comment function.

I suspect this is to keep discussion from getting crazy and insulting to the authors.

[quote]Big Banana wrote:
Back in my lurker days I remember reading some threads after the article that were so obnoxious I would not have been surprised if they pulled the whole comment function.

I suspect this is to keep discussion from getting crazy and insulting to the authors. [/quote]

They still have moderators for the forums…

[quote]Joris wrote:
Perhaps they should be 2 dimensional, this is what a lot of news websites use.[/quote]

Could you explain this?

Livespill is too hard to follow. I don’t want to have to read through several posts to try and figure out who an author is responding to.

I preferred having the question linked to the answer through the quote function. I stopped reading much of the discussions after the switch of formats.

Not a fan either. I’ve posted in one of them, but overall do not like.

I don’t even bother reading them

Livespill for the article discussions sucks. It just looks like a hard to follow, sloppy mess. I stopped reading discussions because of it.

[quote]RSGZ wrote:

[quote]Big Banana wrote:
Back in my lurker days I remember reading some threads after the article that were so obnoxious I would not have been surprised if they pulled the whole comment function.

I suspect this is to keep discussion from getting crazy and insulting to the authors. [/quote]

They still have moderators for the forums…[/quote]

Exactly.

Plus, to the point, it seems thta the Livespills have MORE author bashing than the forum format did, not less…like I said in my OP, its much too easy to just fire off the first bit of nonsense that comes to your head and hit ENTER.

[quote]VTBalla34 wrote:

[quote]RSGZ wrote:

[quote]Big Banana wrote:
Back in my lurker days I remember reading some threads after the article that were so obnoxious I would not have been surprised if they pulled the whole comment function.

I suspect this is to keep discussion from getting crazy and insulting to the authors. [/quote]

They still have moderators for the forums…[/quote]

Exactly.

Plus, to the point, it seems thta the Livespills have MORE author bashing than the forum format did, not less…like I said in my OP, its much too easy to just fire off the first bit of nonsense that comes to your head and hit ENTER.
[/quote]

I agree a well moderated forum discussion would be better.

So far:

For: 0
Against: 13
Unsure: 2

Hopefully the man upstairs is listening.