Don’t Diss the Blue Head
- March 6th, 2008
- Posted in Social Media
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Little did I know that my humorous exhortation to revisit the drupal icon would generate such a nasty response. Of course, people don’t read entire pieces any more, just the lede and then an evaluation is made and response blasted off. My “Decapitate Drupal, please” post was read as a complaint about the drupal upgrade process, which is wasn’t. The upgrade process is excellent.
The fact that my customer saw the drupal head for the first time and interpreted it to be a “kid in a dunce cap” was the point I was trying to get across. This is how the icon is perceived by people in the market for CMS, then it should be changed. “Decapitate” was used as a joke, people, not as a call for the death of Drupal, which forms an integral part of my business.
The post has been deleted because I really don’t have time to field a bunch of snark and negative feedback from people who didn’t read the whole item. However, one commenter did point out that there is a Drupal redesign group. Khalid wrote:
“Second, regarding rebranding. Check the Drupal.org redesign group on http://groups.drupal.org/. This is the way to influence the rebranding of Drupal, along with actual suggestions of a new icon as well.”
See you there.
You shouldn’t have taken down that post. That is bad Drupalism. Druplicon is ugly and repugnant. I am horrified when clients see the Drupal site. They think that the CMS will look like that. It’s a nightmare. ARRGHH!!! Chop off that head and give it a drop kick into archive.org!
I am not done with the isue, but I am now more sensitive to how strongly people feel about the issue. I am going to organize something positive and try to get it changed. I’ll write more about it here once I have something going.
I agree with john sprout. Even if you are not done with the issue, it’s a bad idea to post a summaries-only feed where one must click through to read the entire thing, then to take down the post so that those who click through *never* get to see your full argument, and *only* get to see the summary. Furthermore, taking down a post because you got negative feedback is a *terrible* way of “dealing” with it. It makes you look thin-skinned and as if you are trying to hide something. If answering every negative or snarky comment is taking too much time, then just don’t do it.
It is, however, humorously ironic that you complain in this follow-up post about how people only read the summaries, while providing only a summary to us RSS feed late-comers. And it did get me to come to your blog to comment. So cheers!
Thanks Joseph, and I’m wondering if you agree with John’s entire comment, or just the first bit?
I immediately saw the problem when I saw the summary only was posted at planet drupal. reading the summary was giving the entirely wrong impression of what I had written, and but the effect was not the intended one. I felt that if people had read my post in its entirety, they wouldn’t have been commenting about the favicon/upgrade component of it, which was just an intro into the subject.
Commenters telling me over and over I made a small mistake in my upgrade procedure, which I was plainly aware of, freely admitted and made no attempt to hide, was a clear indicator that people weren’t reading the post. Explaining that over and over again in comments didn’t seem to be a good use of my time. Better to take it down and then take the time to write it properly. I have put my thoughts down on groups.drupal.org here:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/9486