I think we fight a lot of ignorance here, and that complaints about avatars and whether game threads should go in MPSIMS are tangential to the core mission. Those who run this board do a fine job.
The owners are acting rationally insofar as they want this unit somewhere off to the side. The effective managers of this board have a proper focus. The whiners have hilariously out of shape expectations: most boards don’t permit such detailed discussion of moderator behavior: they accurately judge that such interactions, while diverting, interfere with getting shit done.
And the moderators do a good job of getting shit done within the limits of their authority. Administrative power needs to be returned to the likes of Dex, Tuba, and Marley so they can get more shit done. I’m sure it’s frustrating for them to have to tell us, “Sorry, we’d like to, but we can’t.”
Woops, I don’t think I got that. Sorry. I’m not sure what the tradeoffs on that point are and don’t have firm opinions. Obviously, better figurative key control became a concern, legal and otherwise, after the heartbleed episode. But behind the scene hassles can’t be fun for anyone.
Hadn’t heard of such. It’s rare for a company to purchase something and then trash it. Why would they do that?
Maybe some more perspective is needed. While this is the only official Straight Dope Message Board you got, Sun-Times Media has a lot of web pages. A lot. We’re just a drop in the big corporate bucket. Unless there’s some amazing miracle something or another that happens here I can’t imagine the SDMB making googobs of revenue for STM. (I’d like to see that happen but I don’t see how.)
[QUOTE=PlainJain]
The tone of a lot of the comments spring from frustration. And in mind it’s understandable. This is an old and strong community. The owners couldn’t care less about the members and it shows. In my opinion, it appears the moderators have grown weary of their jobs and that shows too. I understand stand the mods frustration too but snapping back at posters only makes things worse.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the owners shut this place down.
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Again, I think, perspective. The way most of you see this site is not at all like STM does. You have an attachment, emotions; you’re involved with the day to day here. To STM it’s just business, another site with all the other sites they have going on.
I would be surprised if the site got shut down. On what basis is that the thing to do?
As a privately held company STM is not required to publish this kind of information. I think I can tell you that membership has been a diminishing thing over time. I will also mention that current membership is maybe 5% of the traffic on the site.
This doesn’t mean that your membership $ are not appreciated; every little bit is welcome. But it is trivial.
“Wildly over-estimated” is putting it mildly.
Not sure what vB means by “Active members” but it does not mean people paying yearly dues. The actual count of people that ante up is a small fraction of that number.
vB must derive that number from traffic on the board, but it includes all traffic on the board, including Charter Members, Members (the only two Usergroups that actually pay dues), and all the other Usergroups in the database, including Guests, people on Sabbatical, and users that are Banned. So that “Active Member” figure is probably meaningless to this discussion.
I wish we had 5K dues-paying members.
MfM, while your numbers are way off I believe you have stated the situation accurately. Thanks much for bringing your perspective to this conversation.
You are. Not half, neither, nowheres near. A small fraction of that, even.
While in general, most complaints in ATMB strike me as faulty, and there’s far more animosity than required, there is still a legitimate issue in play here. When the response to something as trivial in time but important to the community as rolling back the smilies is unable to be addressed for the simple reason that the IT guy doesn’t have time to do it, that speaks volumes. When a legitimate concern about the traffic in one forum being overrun and diminished because of the board layout is met with the answer “we can’t do anything about that, we don’t have access to the admin to do that”, that is a real concern.
The whole issue about whether games should be in MPSIMS or not is fueled by the ridiculousness of the original answer to the question. If, instead, the moderators of this board could consider a reasonable answer to a legitimate concern without fearing of being too much of a hassle to the admin, then that whole shebang would have been avoided, or, at best, we could have addressed the question of “whether it’s needed or not” instead of “we can’t do that, there’s no admin available”. Frankly, it’s the ignoring the problem combined with the confusion of the half-measure approach that spawned the most heat in that mess.
If the owners of the board are so annoyed by being told how to run their business, well, they have two good answers for that: (1) shut down the SDMB; (2) shut down ATMB. But what’s the point of telling us they might not like hearing our opinions?
And I don’t understand how they can simultaneously be annoyed by our complaints and be ignoring us to the point of neglect. If they’re paying attention enough to be annoyed, then they’re paying attention enough to at least consider the complaints and provide the necessary resources to keep the place running smoothly.
And yes, I know I can log in and post, but having a forum that actively chases away traffic is not running smoothly, and not being able to do something about it because we don’t have admin time is a serious problem.
is still under consideration by the moderators. We have been assured that our concerns are part of that consideration.
I think the owners being annoyed by our complaints might have been an inaccurate description. I believe it was Dex who said that they would never even be aware of such complaints. This sounds far more likely to me. Look at all the posters acknowledging that, to the owners, this is just a business.
As to your last point, I don’t see which forum you are referencing that is actively chasing away traffic. If you’re talking about TGR, I don’t think those posters who do not want to deal with the traffic in there are consequently leaving the SDMB.
The “management is annoyed” comment was a hypothetical expressed earlier in the thread. Actually I’m pretty sure upper managemenet has no clue any of this is going on. Why would they?
ATMB was not devised for upper management to be aware of your concerns. It was set up so local management (moderation) can be aware of your concerns. We handle what we can on our own. Sometimes we take them up the ladder as appropriate.
On this level that means we’re talking to Ed and Jerry and the guy in charge of the display ads, who we talk to on rare occasions when something happens involving the ads. Beyond that it’s STM management that we don’t know and don’t see. I bet it works the other way around as well; they don’t know the site like you do and they don’t see the site as anything but another site in the system. What you may classify as being willfully ignored/disrespected is not personal at all. Why would it be? They don’t know you and there’s no business reason why they would.
Am I the only one that finds this a strange situation.
We have a company that reportedly has a lot of web pages, obviously websites are something they are heavily invested in. Yet there is one particular website in their portfolio that they are completely disinterested in?
If you said they were a print media company that found itself with a website it didn’t really want that would make sense, but surely a media company with “a lot” of websites would be more aware of one of its sites, not less? A company with lots of websites would surely understand how hamstring one of those sites would be without daily admin support?
I’m not saying you are wrong or inaccurate, but what you describe just doesn’t make any sense.
Right? It comes across as some blind owner who leaves all the decisions concerning the board to mods that are not that powerful, and one admin who’s had only 200+ posts in the 15 years of the life of this board.
I mean, hey… this is only a message board after all, but it is one of the biggest on the net. Its glory days seem to be steadily slipping, because I think users expect more modernization and interesting things from a board that attracts the general public.
The content is being looked over (and less being created) because the cover here looks like the phone book (which half the users on the net have never seen one).
I mean, I get the whole “if you can’t say it with only words…” attitude, but that’s really beginning to date this place heavily. Ironically, for a board full of mostly liberals, I’ve never seen so many conservatives over the nature of this board.
Tuba is wrong. Sun Times Media (which is actually owned by a company called Wrapports) is heavily invested in daily and weekly newspapers. The only reason they own The Straight Dope (the column, the website, and the the SDMB) is because they purchased the Chicago Reader, a weekly paper. There only other major web presence is RogerEbert.com (which is actually less popular than StraightDope.com, believe it or not).
Now obivously, each of these papers has an associated website, but calling Sun Times Media a web company is misleading at best. Aside from their flagship sites (suntimes.com, RogerEbert.com) I imagine they treat every website like the SD.
I’m not privy to what is in the corporate mindset but this is not the first time we’ve been in this position. When we were under the Reader the emphasis was totally on the Reader, on the print side and then the digital side of the Reader. We were in the mix but not more important than the Reader.
I bet all their assets have websites; in these times it would be surprising if they didn’t. The websites take a backseat to the papers.
