Quite a few suggestions are made about how to enhance the SDMB, and they are often rejected due to the amount of work needed to implement them.
It seems that there are already several people who do quite a bit of work that enables the SDMB to keep humming along.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like titles such as ‘Moderator’, ‘SDSAB’, etc, help motivate people to do a lot of mostly pro bono work for the SDMB.
So, maybe if a position/title is created called ‘SDMB Programmer Extraordinaire’, or something like that, which would appear under a member’s username, it might motivate one or two people to help provide programming effort to improve the SDMB experience.
Not sure if this could ever work under the SDMB framework, or under Reader rules. Just an idea.
Over the years many people with technical experience of various kinds have offered their services to the Reader.
The Reader has chosen to say “thanks, but no thanks.”
This is a security issue as much as anything else. They prefer to keep all this in house and do not wish to give access to someone who is well intentioned but still, by their lights, an outsider, someone not under their direct jurisdiction.
There may also be legal issues that I am not directly aware of that keep this from being a useful thing to the Reader, much like the prohibition against people directly contributing money to the Reader like they would PBS. There’s a lot of folks who would prefer the Straight Dope be a similar type of nonprofit, they’d much rather donate money than pay user fees. However, the Reader is a regular ol’ business type corporation and not a nonprofit and thus cannot accept donations. It’s how things be here.
Tuba, it’s with utmost diffidence that I ask this, not as a challenge to your statement (which I have long since understood to be Chicago Reader policy). But when we were recovering from the Winter of our Missed Content, I remember that Gaudere and Noodles were promoted to Administrator, and got the distinct impression that they were working with jdavis and his team to resolve coding problems resulting from the hack (or whatever it was that precipitated the problem). I recognize that that was a very special situation, but would you be willing (or able) to clarify the distinction drawn there between whatever it was they did and the general policy? Thanks for any answer you feel comfortable giving, and under the circumstances I’d accept a NOYB with good grace.
