Are you trying to tell us that all tech guys are named Jerry by default? 
IT’s JERRY’S ALL THE WAY DOWN!!!
If my dog opened a restaurant, I doubt he’d get a lot of enjoyment out of me telling him to stop pooping everywhere. So what?
Seriously, I couldn’t be more sympathetic to the mods: I know you’re in a shitty situation, having to moderate a board with epsilon->0 admin support. But not only have the owners papered this board with ads, they’re charging an annual membership fee. For a board they put less time into than almost any free board on the web. People have a right to be annoyed by that situation, it’s a pretty big slap in the face to the people who have supported this place for years and years.
It’s like you’re a waiter in a restaurant where you’re not allowed to push tables together or do separate checks. Obviously it’s not your fault so it sucks that people gripe at you. But people aren’t going to stop griping, because it’s a strange and pointless setup.
Mongo Jerry just pawn in game of life.
Yep.
It’s a lazy, fucked up way to run a business. That’s what this board is and anyone involved on that level should feel like a huge dope.
And by dope, I mean ass.
I think the rest of that paragraph addresses this:
He’s referring to me, Ed Zotti, Tuba Diva, C K Dexter Haven, xash, etc. - the people who were officially admins before all of this started. We can ask Jerry to do stuff, but as he says in that post, we don’t actually have admin powers. We used to be able to do some things on our own, like merge accounts and ban IP addresses, and now we can’t do that and have to ask Jerry to do them. I do ask Jerry to merge accounts and do some IP bans when needed, but there is some minor stuff I haven’t bothered asking him to do.
They can gripe at the waiters forever and it won’t change a thing.
That’s because either the management is asleep at the wheel, or the waiters are afraid to approach.
I have no quarrel with any of the SDMB staff and I have no reason to disbelieve what you say. What concerns me is that these comments:
because they, along with several other responses in recent threads, strongly imply that the owners of the SDMB don’t really give a damn about it, the effect of which is to prevent positive changes to the way members (and guests) experience the board.
Personally, I think that within the next 10 years we will see the current owners ditch the SDMB entirely, at which point I would hope there might be some way for the members themselves to put in an offer for it and run it privately. However, I doubt we could afford the IP rights to continue using the Straight Dope “brand”, so that might have to go, and we may not even be able to get hold of the database.
On preview: yeah, what Giraffe said.
Then you’re not actually admins.
The owners don’t give a shit about this place. The only reason it is still around is it makes them some profit and as long as it does they’ll keep it around.
One restaurant analogy per post, please. /jrmod
Not a lie but some nomenclature confusion.
This is a little long and may be boring. You might want to pack a lunch.
Until the security problem we ran into this year some of us on the moderation staff were called “administrators.” We had a higher level of vBulletin system access than the moderators, who have a limited toolset.
With administrative access we could handle most of the day to day housekeeping tasks needed on our own. Anything higher up – like anything requiring server access – that was the responsibility of Jerry (the Tech Guy).
Overall site management comes from Ed Zotti, our big boss here at the Dope.
Jerry was originally head of IT for the Chicago Reader, alternative newspaper. The Reader was a self-contained business entity and the Straight Dope was an asset of the Reader. Reader upper management was focused more on the print side of the house and in large part left us alone, they were not overly involved in the day to day operation of TSD site.
We worked like this for years. As administrators we could try different things in terms of site management because we had access to the basic vBulletin settings, so we could be responsive to situations without having to ask permission from Ed or Jerry. They were good with what we were doing and as long as we kept them informed and checked in with them on larger issues the Straight Dope administrators had a lot of autonomy.
Then the Reader got sold – this has happened a couple times now – and today the Chicago Reader is owned by Wrapports/Sun-Times Media. And so is The Straight Dope, but the Straight Dope website was decoupled from the Reader and considered a separate asset.
STM provides overall IT management and so the Reader IT department got folded into STM corporate IT. Jerry was assigned another whole full-time job unrelated to TSD. His work for TSD is a legacy assignment and is in addition to his other job.
Life went on as before. We still didn’t need Jerry for much of anything day to day anyway and all was well. Administrators handled everyday vB duties and Jerry handled server issues.
Then we had a security breach here on the Straight Dope site.
In the wake of this incident it was the decision of STM management to severely restrict who had administrative access to the Straight Dope site. We didn’t do anything bad or wrong, STM just wanted less opportunity for security hackage/exploitation.
STM removed administrative access to vBulletin for everyone except Jerry. Now we all have moderator privileges, including Ed.
That’s the level of security STM feels comfortable with and we have been told this is not going to change.
We’re being looked after. The site continues to function. We have an admin – that’s Jerry. The Straight Dope is not his only duty. It never has been.
IT resources and time are budgeted with an eye towards maintaining what is already in place. Anything that might be extra – as improvement or upgrade – is also part of those budget considerations and is evaluated in terms of return on investment. So Jerry does not have a lot of extra anything to give the site at the present time.
We’re all doing the best we can with what we have. This includes Jerry.
I realize this is a long and tedious story and it’s maybe not at all what you might want to hear. But that’s what it is.
Thank you, TubaDiva. Now- are the breadsticks gluten-free?
Marley, no soup for you! 
So, in short, the bottleneck is Jerry. While Jerry has many important IT duties, the SDMB is close to, if not entirely, lowest priority, and therefore gets the minimum amount of attention if not neglect.
Awesome way to run a business asset (and not necessarily a relatively complicated one, at that) Sun-Times Media.
True enough but that was only part of the answer. Mild curiosity about how things are behind the scenes seems normal. Anything deeper into the weeds seems weird to me. I genuinely don’t understand why anyone would care.
Bottleneck for what? Did I miss something important?
Board maintenance, upgrades, or anything else the mods need to go to a true Admin to do.
But then again, you’re not a paying customer, are you?
Creative Loafing doesn’t own the SDMB anymore. Sun-Times Media, LLC., owns the SDMB.
And it’s not in a sealed envelope in a shoebox in the janitorial closet. It’s in an old mayonnaise jar on somebody’s back porch someplace in Cicero, IL. If you want to know where, just ask Al.
And therein lies the the problem!