Great @Alpine I now also work from home. GIS Director is not easy at all. There is not a day that this technology doesn’t change.
My formal title is GIS Applications Engineer. But, we all do everything. We are a small group of sys admins and programmers. We switch hats as needed. Hourly.
Ever since I read The Shining (REDRUM) over 40 years ago, I’ve always been suspicious of potential backwards names/words. I typically notice them.
Oi! Rajah! 
56! I bone, k? 
And these guys are in the mountains, too.
Are you saying everyone living in the mountains has a tendency to be a psychotic murder?
[ thinks about the history of his own Colorado Springs ]
Yeah, I think I’ll step away, there may be some truth to that…
I haven’t been here long enough to leave and come back (well, not for more than a couple of days due to IRL things or being super-stressed by something and not wanting to share it), but in terms of reading the OG column and from their the SDMB, yeah, I came and went for the decade + I was a fan but not wanting to participate.
For the record, I could see the hazing, the “I’m not touching you” attacks that barely skirted the rules, and other things that didn’t encourage me, not to mention endless complaints about the stability of the software.
COVID and Discourse where what changed things for me, along with (IMHO) a tightening of the moderation.
( I apologize if I’ve made any spelling errors or continuity of thought jumps that make no sense, I’m running a noticeably high fever right now [ second does of Shingrix ] and while I’m feeling energetic, my wife tells me I’m not making sense 100% of the time - something I saw in an earlier post after the edit window )
You’re making perfect sense. Hope you feel better soon!
I joined in 2002 and wander in an out. I took the longest break not too long into the pay-to-post situation - the board was very quickly becoming too insular and increasingly toxic. I don’t recall now why I came back but I haven’t taken as long of a break since.
I’ve never been a very active poster, but as ParallelLines mentioned above, the tightened up moderation has actively participating instead of just lurking a little more attractive.
I joined in 2003 when i was still working in IT. I dropped out a bit from 2006 - 2010ish
when i left IT and only had dial up internet access at home. Restarted with a vengeance
around the discourse swap-over.
I’ve left for as much as at least a year because it sometimes was more hostile than pleasant, but I haven’t taken more than a couple of weeks’ break since moderation tightened.
I haven’t been on The Dope long enough to leave and come back (just a decade), but I wanted to chime in to say how much I appreciate hearing that our current approach to moderation is encouraging those who left to feel comfortable to come back. It’s nice to hear we’re on the right track.
Of course, I suppose we won’t hear from folks who left because they disliked the changes to moderation. I hope there aren’t many.
Those people almost certainly needed to leave anyway.
Ha, I see the sheer number of typos, wrong words and jumps and I have to beg to differ. Not that I make perfect sense all the time anyway. But yes, a bit better. Right after posting that I said “stop with the frenetic energy” you’re all screwed up, and went to take 1) more pillz 2) my temperature 3) a cool shower. I was just over 101F. So yeah.
But anyway, better, much lower fever and pain.
But I came to comment on @Aspenglow’s comment as well, because yes, the moderation makes a huge difference. I’d participated in a limited fashion on some Discourse and Discord based forums, and found that the “hazing” there if you aren’t alike in mind or are a newb are orders of magnitude worse.
So you folks (the mods) do good work.
And now I’m off to ponder if I have the energy to cook the pork chops I prepped yesterday but lacked the energy to cook or care about.