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    While more communication is a good idea in general, it also has to be taken care with not losing oneself in details too much. There are many people on SE who do understand quite a deal of web development and when revealing too much you can easily get into discussions about the implementation details resulting in back-and-forth of how to do what and users telling the developers how they should "do their job" to accomplish this or that feature. That can be fruitful in measured doses, but in practice will probably just cause a headache. If they'd need help, they'd ask on SO. ;-) Commented Aug 13, 2018 at 16:49
  • 6
    For what it's worth, I hope we can keep the robots too. The way I think the behind-the-scenes is that the more customizations we have, the more things that can go wrong when we move to new sites. The designers are documenting their framework publicly. So, for instance, you can see how tags are styled. I'll encourage our designers and developers to provide more details about what can and cannot be done within the framework right now. Commented Aug 13, 2018 at 17:25
  • @JonEricson That's excellent information, thanks! I wasn't aware of that documentation; it looks really helpful. Commented Aug 13, 2018 at 17:39
  • 2
    Love this answer. I can hear the passion behind it without being hit over the head. That said, I'll admit that I don't really understand the point about communication in this case. Sure, there might be ways in which we can improve our communication, but the volume and frequency of communication over a seven month period about these changes may just set a record for disclosure. Commented Aug 13, 2018 at 17:53
  • There was the initial blog post, and meta post 1, 2, and 3. Plus posts on individual metas. Commented Aug 13, 2018 at 17:53
  • With each stage I've attempted to request constructive feedback and be responsive where possible. I understand that each stage brought in new folks who hadn't seen the previous messages, but I always linked back to those so people would have context. Commented Aug 13, 2018 at 17:53
  • 12
    @JoeFriend: I just followed those old links and noticed that I can hide the sidebar in my user preferences. That would have been useful to recall in discussions I had last week, but I totally forgot it existed. I had assumed the collapsing sidebar feature was never implemented since it wasn't obvious from the UI. I think this is the sort of thing where rephrasing the goals and status of the design could help even if it feels like we are repeating ourselves. (That said, you are communicating more than we ever have in the past. Thanks!) Commented Aug 13, 2018 at 18:13
  • @JonEricson There was a separate post about that: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/311528/… Commented Aug 13, 2018 at 18:20
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    @JoeFriend I'm trying to figure out to say this the right way and maybe failing, but . . . I think what I mean is that even though you (and I do mean you in particular) have been awesome in communicating what's going on, the rationale for some of that stuff has been left out. So in one particular arena, I've been hearing a lot of users asking why precisely the standardization will make bug fixes easier. You've told us that, which is great, but I think people want a bit more detail there. Commented Aug 13, 2018 at 19:36
  • Also . . . yes, you've definitely engaged with people on a network-wide level on Meta SE, and I hope it'll continue for when changes are rolled out to specific sites. I can't speak about that yet since none of my main sites have had designs explicitly proposed yet - I've just been watching in the gallery. Commented Aug 13, 2018 at 19:37