There is no fundamental reason that Jerry has to be the only person on the planet with access to the AdminCP. One would argue that he’s a pretty terrible choice, actually, given his limited time. Why not give one of the admins who actually visits the board more than once a year the ability to actually, you know, administrate the board?
Just to be clear: the mods have no vote whatsoever in any of the decisions that are made higher up. I live in constant expectation that the PTB will decide to pull the plug, any day. I’m sorry if I was too brutal, but I’ve given up trying to fool myself that things are other than what they are. The SDMB gets income from advertising. We can’t even stop ads that are contrary to the “fighting ignorance” philosophy. We mods don’t know whether there’s profit from the SDMB (I assume so, or the plug woulda been pulled long ago.)
We pass your great suggestions on to Jerry, and he says no, he’s got no time for it, and there we are. As I say, I wish it were otherwise.
Absolutely, and as soon as I’m named CEO, I’ll be sure that change is made. Again, we (mods) got little to no say in those decisions. We (the mods) are the janitors in the basement, we do some sweeping up; or, if you prefer, we’re the study hall monitors, and requests to remodel the bathroom or update the school computer are made by the School Board, 17 or 18 levels up from us.
I nominate Dex since that seems to be his role (more or less) so far as I can tell. He seems to step in when things are coming to a head and when something needs to get kicked up to jdavis, why not let him make the little tweaks that need to be made?
OTOH, if keeping Jerry as admin so changes can’t be made since he doesn’t have time is on purpose, it’s not likely to change. Kinda like at a business where they tell you ‘you have to talk to the boss…but he’s not in’ and you just keep getting the run around until you give up.
BTW, I do apologize if I’m being super-negative, I’m pretty down this evening over a coupla personal bits (and Robin Williams’ death is a bummer.) I’ll be more cheerful in the morning.
Also, Joey P, thanks for the vote of confidence, but I don’t have anywhere near the technical expertise to do that sort of stuff.
So whatever happened to xash?
Obviously I have no connection to the board. Let’s do some math.
There are currently 5758 active members. Call that 5800. Say all are paying members.[sup]1[/sup] Say 1/2 are chartered members, 1/2 ordinary members. That amounts to $65,250 per year. And that’s a highball estimate: the actual value is a fraction of that. To a media company, that’s a laugably small amount. In fact it’s likely that someday someway the plug will be removed from the electrical outlet, the lights dimmed and if we’re lucky the torch passed to an interested party. Though there’s no guarantee of even that.
I will blame the rolleye lobby.[sup]1[/sup]
On the upside, they do have a brand.
[sup]1[/sup]Snort.
For Heaven’s Sake, Fenris is an administrator over at Giraffe Board. He splashes smileys around like pigeon shit. At some point, you must realize that is simpler to change the smiley than for you (all seventeen levels) to continue to deny, block, handwave, and make excuses for not implementing a simple request.
Once, as a corporal in the army, I asked a full bird colonel 'Wouldn’t it make more sense to move the water point from out there in the hot sun to under that shade tree over there?’ He said, ‘Good idea, son’ Nobody freaked out because I had bypassed the entire chain of command (all seventeen levels) because it made good sense and was easy to implement.
Would it not make your own jobs (all seventeen levels) to simply be a tiny bit more open to your customers?
Seen at Mardi Gras:
(o) (o)
Oh, WE (the mods) realize it. That’s why I’m so frustrated. But presumably, at the Giraffe Boards, Fenris was given authority to handle administration. NONE OF THE MODS HERE HAVE THAT AUTHORITY. So when you say, “you must realize” – who is the “you” to whom you refer? If you mean the mods, we know it. And we’re frustrated by it, and we know there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.
I repeat: you’re talking to the janitors and hall monitors here, telling them how simple it is to hire more teachers to undo the overcrowding. You’re chewing out the local election judges because Congress is a mess.
And you’re comparing a large Message Board, owned by a very large corporation, to a small Message Board run by a handful of people.
That’s terrific. I’m so glad. I once asked the clerk at the airlines desk if she could make a simple scheduling change, if the plane left 30 minutes earlier, a number of people would be able to make a better connection. What do you think happened?
Hey! I do not “splash” smileys around like pigeon shit. I carefully select the most artistic way to place them like pigeon shit. Do not denigrate my art. :mad:
She told you that you were being snarky and making a bad analogy?
Whatever you say Pollock.
Also, (sorry one more post) how can you honestly tell us that Jerry literately doesn’t have the few minutes to spare to rearrange a few smileys, something he can probably do from home in front of his TV, when he just posted that announcement for Tuba? I assume doing that probably took roughly the same amount of time all said and done and both have about the same effect on the board. One of them draws in new members while the other shows that he still respects us enough to make little tweaks to the board here and there for us.
Honest question. Not counting issues with malware, when was the last time the teeming millions have asked for a change to the board that required Jerry’s assistance?
Jerry posted that announcement for me because I could not .
Threadspottings and Weird Earls come from people who read the board and every so often people need to be reminded. I could post about it but not everyone would see the posting, as opposed to an announcement that has the capacity to be observed in every forum.
We’d do more if we could. We can’t. Shooting the messenger doesn’t accomplish much.
I for one appreciate Dex’s candor in his last few posts.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m not shooting the messengers. From day one, I’ve said this was Jerry’s mistake and Jerry’s problem. Jerry is the one I’m dissatisfied with.
Especially since he can make announcements for you, he should be able to log in and do other things that would take a similar amount of time. He’s choosing not to do so. Unless he offers a counter explanation that he’s really not allowed to do it, I blame him.
I do not blame you nor Dex at all. I recognized it wasn’t your fault from the beginning, because I’d already figured out you don’t have administrator access.
I do appreciate you letting us know you would do it if you could though. Thanks for that!
I think you missed my point. I was saying that if he had the few minutes to make that announcement for you, surely he had the few minutes to swap out the smileys for us.
The argument that unless we’re willing to give him, literally, hundreds of thousands of dollars he just doesn’t have the time to bother with us[sup]1[/sup] doesn’t hold up when we see him pop in once in a while to to admin stuff.
[sup]1[/sup] http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=17630290&postcount=57
And Joey, note the subject of the announcement that was deemed to be worthy of Jerry’s prescious time: a plea to get us to send in suggestions for Thread Spotting and Weird Earls, two features whose only function is to drive clicks. I don’t know if any revenue goes to Wrapports, LLC for clicks on Weird Earls. Driving clicks to this board, which Threadspotting does, almost certainly generates revenue for Wrapports. Do you think that Dex’s post about ad revenue that you linked to is an indication of how much revenue these clicks generate?
Jerry also has a long standing habit of not going very far beyond plain vanilla installations. This is because if you throw in custom work it all goes away in upgrades and you have it to do all over again, which Jerry is not at all willing to do.
I find it absolutely amazing that all of you know for certain that the smiley files are just sitting on a disk somewhere, where everyone knows exactly where they are, and copying them over will be an absolutely trivial thing to do.
Now I don’t have access to the SDMB servers, but I personally had the impression that they were overwritten in the last upgrade, which means that they aren’t just sitting on a disk somewhere. I also assume that Jerry has better things to do than memorize where every single file that goes into a vBulletin system is located, so that he can instantly recall exactly what directory the smiley files are located in and exactly what other files in the system might be affected and might have to be copied over as well. Therefore I assume that doing the actual copy is more involved than just opening up a terminal window and typing “copy smileys”. And I also had the impression that the smileys haven’t been lost, but they are sitting in a backup tape somewhere. And I assume that Jerry and the powers that be don’t just happen to have a whole bunch of extra computers lying around with gobs of free disk space that they can use to restore one of those tapes to so that they can go digging through the files to find what they need. And I would assume that setting up a disk, finding the tapes, and doing all of that would take just a wee bit longer than just typing out a sentence or two of text.
But all of you seem to know better than me.