I played WOW from vanilla to cataclysm (I played the most during tbc and wotlk) but did not play MOP, from my perspective the most fun of the game was to meet people while levelling, grouping together and then having that develop in a friendship and/or starting a guild and so on.

When I left nobody grouped for anything during levelling due to the content being way too easy, x-realm dungeons removed any sort of incentive to behave (in the "old days" if you were a ninja or you ruined a party your reputation on the server would be immediately affected, meaning no more runs for you, kicked out of your guild etc.), and in general realms did not have much of a feeling of community anymore. After I left apparently they introduced x-realm zones which seem to me the worst of both worlds, you have people everywhere ( so competition for nodes / quest items ) *and* they are not from your realm, so you can't really interact much with them and there is no incentive again to be nice.

From my perspective if I could make decisions I would:

- remove automatic x-realm gameplay (if you know somebody on a different realm and you want to invite them, fine) so no x-realm raid finder or dungeons or bgs
- make all nodes or quest mobs drop shareable loot so there is no competition for them
- merge low-pop realms, create a couple of "special" low-pop realms players can be moved to if they so choose
- significantly increase the difficulty of levelling and dungeons, and I mean difficulty, not just lowering drop percentages of items
- increase the role of 'proving grounds' to make them more and more mandatory, every time you run through a proving ground you get a buff (say, lasting a day or two) and only with this buff you can PUG (raids or dungeons or bgs)
- any time you fly when you dismount you get a "can't pvp debuff" so you cannot attack players unless they attack you first

these IMHO would bring back more of a feeling of community and achievement to the game, OTOH I am sure they are still making money hand over fist with the current model so I doubt anything like this will happen, which is sad because there definitely was a period of time where wow was an incredible game to play.

You don't need to eat processed food AT ALL to eat a balanced plant-based diet, you can get everything you need from unprocessed foods just fine... yes, everybody going veggie will start with the processed foods for familiarity and ease of cooking, I of course did that myself, but you don't have to stay there if you don't want to.

It takes a while to retrain your tastebuds, of course, and it makes it next to impossible to eat out, this can be a deal breaker for some, but I have been eating plant-based whole foods for years and am doing just fine. It does take more planning but in general various combinations of a grain, beans, greens and veggies can give you what you need. The only thing you can't get on a purely plant-based diet is b12, and that's the only "supplement" I take, nothing else.

From my perspective the less labels one uses the better, in the end putting aside any ethical considerations (which people might or might not agree with) it is unarguably more environmental to eat lower on the food chain, so the more plant-based meals people eat the better for everybody: it is nice to see more effort being put towards simpler goals (like vegan before 6, meatless mondays, etc. etc.) to lower the impact our food has on the planet without being too black-or-white about it, this is also why I don't like the term "vegan" anymore as it has way too many judgemental overtones.

I personally eat plant-based 100% of the time, but I realize it's not for everybody (it is definitely difficult especially in the working environment where these days it seems "team lunches" are a mainstay of most jobs), this said IMHO it's not hard to lower the amount of animal and/or processed products you eat at least some of the time, and having an egg substitute that works exactly the same as "real" eggs is a good step in that direction (not to mention that folks allergic to eggs would sure be happier!).

it is still really shortsighted anyways, because you might end up with a top performer that's going through a temporary rough patch (divorce, health issues, ...) and they could get caught and let go when if the company stuck with them a bit longer they would reap the benefits. I remember some time ago reading a comment here on a previous discussion on reviews where the manager stuck for this employee (who was going through a divorce iirc) and a year later and for many years afterwards they ended up being extremely, extremely, extremely high performers (as well as loyal, showing gratitude for what the company did for them).

When I read this article and read that 'involuntary departures went up by 50% because there are more frequent "tough discussions"' it makes me feel like this could easily degenerate in a climate-of-fear where if you have an off month you might end up being let go, a yearly review is not optimal but short-term dips are obviously more easily counterbalanced by good productivity the rest of the year when the issue was resolved, not to mention if you have yearly reviews on record for several years it becomes it more obvious when dips are temporary or there is an underperforming situation (which might not be the employee's fault, could simply be an issue of not having the right person in the right job or vice-versa).

As an addition I do think companies should decouple raises from performance reviews, in general the budgets tend to be fixed and low, so if you have a good team you can't really give people the raises they merit, because say if you give the right amount to three people they'll be happy and the rest will get nothing (even if they did well) while if you give a little to everybody nobody's happy (since they'll feel they just got a cost-of-living adjustment for a really good solid year of effort).

I suggest you have a "sticky" top story for beta remaining at the top of the page ( maybe with a different background ) until this is decided one way or another, this way hopefully it will be more likely beta discussions will stay in there vs in every story that's posted.

I think the restaurant metaphor is misleading, because it assumes your patrons are entirely interchangeable. /. to me is more akin to a club, where you do have the old members with the most knowledge, and the new members joining and learning from the old members and perpetuating the club "culture". If this redesign goes through, a lot of the mentors/old members will leave, and if they go under the critical mass needed to sustain it there is a risk the site itself will become non-viable and just a news aggregator with lowest-common-denominator discussion.

I can't see why sites continue to change their look to be "fresh" while not leaving the previous look available for people that prefer it, if you have your articles in a db it should be trivial to leave the old codebase up and running "forever" if you really can't be bothered to have your new codebase support the old format (which in my opinion should be the #1 feature of any code redesign, backwards compatibility).

A similar charade is going on with my.yahoo.com right now, which has force-update everybody from the old very comfortable and information-dense layout to a new "fresh" layout with less functionality (can't hover on stories to read the abstract for example, which should be a fairly basic feature) and gobs more wasted whitespace and large fonts everywhere: users are up in arms on the suggestion boards and have been since it was in beta, but the company went forward anyways and it looks like it's unfortunately here to stay.

The only constant in life is change, but it sure would be nice if this change didn't always seemingly happen hand in hand with reduction in functionality and less customizability. It would be like if the next version of emacs forced you into a 3-pane buffer with 16pt fonts and mandatory purple on white font/colors because it looks more "fresh", just because something is old it doesn't mean it's "stale", it can just mean it's tested and works well and so should be left alone.

change happens, sure, but when change is for the worse should we really embrace it? There is no shortage of news sites on the internet, I think the majority of old users like myself still come here for the comments/discussion, and if a redesign makes the comment section less usable and so causes people to leave, what's left then?

I worked quite a bit in Motif ages back at a fairly involved level, I wrote a 'cross platform' (which at the time meant 'different versions of unix') GUI creator in Motif (compatible with several versions of Motif too) where you could drag & drop motif widgets, resize them wysiwyg etc. and I didn't find it too bad to use. From a user perspective there were also some really really really nice scientific commercial widgets you could buy that made it really stand out for some applications.

I do agree it could've been made easier to use in some scenarios though, for example from the subclassing perspective, I managed to create a working text widget subclassed from XmText that did rectangular highlighting but that was quite hard to get to work correctly.

I still have the O'Reilly complete X programming series of books on my shelf, I spent quite some time with them, fun times...