Stop your kvetchin’. The SDMB is in the running for the Guinness record for least reliable message board, so don’t screw it up.
Upgrading does take some time, but it won’t get any faster by waiting for another three revisions top come out. When software works I’m all for staying with it, but this version obviously doesn’t work all that well. As for the board being down, well in my experience customers prefer scheduled outages to unscheduled ones - even in the middle of the day.
Maybe we should take up a collection to pay Jerry for the hours it would take to upgrade.
I think SDMB has many mods, and probably few are plugins.
When I ran my vB board a few years ago, I made many “authorized” mods by customizing the PHP code. It was designed for that purpose. I changed the default colors, the default logos, and many default settings. When I considered upgrading, I was warned by the vB developers that some or all of these may get overwritten during an upgrade and I should itemize and document them first. (So I chickened out and didn’t do it.)
SDMB also has a pay scheme, not part of the default package (I think). I have no idea how that is implemented, but unless you know, it would be a mistake to claim that upgrades are simple, fast and foolproof.
Does anybody get the impression that there are members who were told that free posting would be coming soon, just watching quietly while reading along, as patient as a buxom, fertile-hipped, young African maiden, seating in front of her thatched domicile with dignity and grace, waiting for bwana to do something, anything – to do more than just take from the resources of the people and give nothing of value back?
So if this thread doesn’t get a response from all the members, it’s because we don’t give a shit? Some people don’t have fits when the Dope is down. Apparently most people don’t because this thread still doesn’t have most of the members posting to it.
Yeah. I get the impression that there’s a “silent plurality”, though; a large group of SDMB members who think “if there’s nothing wrong with it, don’t fix it.”
On one of the message boards for message board operators, one discussion focused on boards catering to an “intellectual” crowd. The consensus: change on such message boards is usually at a glacial pace, and it usually faces a member base that will be far more vocally opposed to it – whether it be a new design scheme, new features, new subforums, upgrades, and so on – than what might be seen on other sites.
For a message board with a political outlook that leans to the left, when it comes to the SDMB itself Dopers are actually extremely conservative.
This is because many people here who fancy themselves “intellectuals” are only able to flaunt their “intellectualism” here on this very board, and are totally fucking scared to bitch too much, because their bitching might result in the closure of the board, thereby losing them the only outlet they have to act like intellectuals.
I prefer to think of it as “not sweating the small stuff”. Reading and posting to the SDMB is something I do for entertainment and occasionally education. If I can’t do it, I go on to something else.
No, that’s clearly keeping the barons of the Reader in hookers and blow. Not to mention chaining Jerry to some other server so that he doesn’t have a few hours free in four years to upgrade the damn software.
