[SilasX]

I have a question: why did you make transaction data from before the Nov 11 upgrade unavailable? How hard would this have been? It's just serving the same immutable transactions that were there before, right? People were expecting these to be available for planning and tax reporting.

Even finding out about them after the fact was difficult because the cause of missing transactions wasn't made public on the user-facing site. For months the maintainers fielded questions from people on the discord that could have been satisfied by an announcement on the website. And even the announcements on discord came slowly.

[lihorne]

The Nov 11 upgrade radically changed how Optimism's backend worked. Transactions after 11/11 are executed in a VM that's much closer to the EVM than before. It's still possible to run nodes that access these pre-11/11 transactions, but because of the way Etherscan and geth are designed, it's unfortunately not as simple as just serving the same data again.

Etherscan CSV exports are the best solution we had that didn't require significant modifications to Etherscan's backend. You should be able to use the CSV feature to export all of your relevant pre-11/11 transaction data (transactions and ERC20/ERC721 transfers).

While we did our best to communicate this months in advance on our twitter, blog, discord, and documentation, it's hard to reach everyone and we totally agree that this is not ideal. At the time, we had to prioritize progress, but we've since made a firm commitment to not to update the chain in this way going forward. So, this shouldn't be something people will need to worry about in the future.

[SilasX]

>While we did our best to communicate this months in advance on our twitter, blog, discord, and documentation, it's hard to reach everyone and we totally agree that this is not ideal

That doesn't look like your best. Here's the blog you refer to[1]:

https://optimismpbc.medium.com/

Imagine I came to it around the time of the switchover. Which of those headlines looks like it's alerting me that my transaction history will be gone?

Here's the Optimistic ethereum site:

https://www.optimism.io/

Where is/was the blaring warning about missing transaction data?

Here's the Twitter page[1]:

https://twitter.com/optimismPBC

The only pinned tweet is a cute meme about the whitelist change, nothing to head off frustrated users wondering where transaction history went. (I don't know how to link a historical post in context but I can assure it was not evident on the Twitter feed why I was missing transaction history, and there are no such warnings before.)

The only reason I even got on the Optimism Discord is because none of these places had any information! And then, even when I went to the Discord, and go to #announcements, and look at what was being announced in the runup and release, the loss of transactions still isn't mentioned! [2]

Maintainers talk about the upgrade, to be sure, but not this implication of it.

So no, I don't know how can justify the claim that you made a serious effort to alert users.

[1] Linked from the community tab of https://www.optimism.io/

[2] https://discord.com/channels/667044843901681675/754090866435...

[lihorne]

You're right that we could have been better communicators about this. We prioritized our concerns with applications that could break during the upgrade, and we biased our public communications towards developers as a result.

For example, you're right that a notification on our homepage, in addition to our docs, would have been a good reminder to users. We'll work on getting a blog post and better documentation up that explains exactly how to access data from before 11/11. We really appreciate the candid feedback here.

We're a very fast growing startup tackling a herculean task, so we're bound to make mistakes and this is one of them — I hope you can understand. We want to be much better communicators going forward.

[SilasX]

>For example, you're right that a notification on our homepage, in addition to our docs

I don't remember it being in the docs either, as that would have also saved me from signing up on the Discord.

And this isn't an issue of prioritization. Remember, your overworked volunteers and maintainers on the Discord are still spending hours every day fielding questions in #user-support that could have been answered by a link in prominent places. You're wasting more person-hours than you would have with effective communication and trivial updates in prominent places.

You didn't even benefit your own goals by leaving those out!

So no, I guess I don't understand what the huge barrier is to putting out these important notices.

[openfuture]

But he said "sorry" (somewhat) politely and pulled the "we are fast growing startup"-card .. so you are obligated to forgive him?

It seems quite clear to me (as a third party to this) that the lack of communication w.r.t. this behavior was intentional. Trying to fix a mistake without having to admit having made it in the first place...

Civil discussion is going to collapse even further if bad actors don't stop with the dark patterns.