The thing about excuses that people with excuses never seem to get is, how good your excuses are is never all that important. How often you need excuses is all that matters.
Twice a year, “I spilled my coffee, sorry.” is fine.
Twice a week, “My mom is recovering from a attempted axe murder, and the police think it was me.” isn’t good enough. Go directly to jail, and let’s get a new guy.
Tris
We could all just migrate to the Unnamed Place.
Half of us are there anyway, it seems to run fine, and there are no pretensions of fighting ignorance, which is instead warmly embraced, explored, and celebrated in a spirit of communal kinship.
Googled up Creative Loafings home page, scrolled to the bottom where I located a “send us an email” function and sent the following:
Dear Sir or Madam
I have been a loyal member of the straight dope message board for many years. I have enjoyed all the boards have to offer and find it one of the most enjoyable places on the internet.
As you well know, a few years back, they became pay to post. I was happy to fork over my money for the membership.
What I’m not happy about it paying for a subscription to a board with on going service delivery problems. I am, by nature, a patient and easy going person. I have been more than willing to accept the reassurances of the mods and admins that they are doing their best. To be patient, they’re working on it.
The board has serious ongoing problems that do not seem to be being addressed. The concerns of the members are constantly met with half assurances to just be patient, that they are doing their best in a difficult situation. Unfortunately they have gone to that well too many times and the community members has lost faith with them as a result.
Members of this community are understandably frustrated with the inaction on the performance issues and are tired of being told, ‘we don’t know any more than you, we can only hope for things to improve, etc, etc.’ We’re only asking for our concerns to be heard and to be given some answers.
If you don’t really care about this gem you have acquired, enough to make the changes that would stop the board from constantly crashing, functions being shut off to keep it up and running and whatever it would take to stop the timing out and slow loading that plagues us, then please just do us the service of telling us so. We are adults, I assure you we can handle the truth. No need to explain your reasons, I’m sure they are sound. We’re not looking for an argument, we’re looking to be heard and to get some answers.
It is less than 30 days until most of our subscriptions require renewing. I am not alone in finding in difficult to justify paying money for a board with such serious and ongoing issues.
Kindly do us the service of responding to our request for straight answers, as loyal members I happen to think we are owed an explanation. If you have plans that will improve performance kindly share them with us, if you’re not in a position to improve performance then kindly own up and put us out of our misery.
Thank you for your time and attention, I remain
Yours truly,
Elbows
I’ll keep you posted, in the unlikely circumstance this produces any results.
There is Live Journal community. And we once made a temp board when some assholes hacked the server for a month.
I think that’s just to the webmaster. Should we try to contact someone at the editorial board of Chicago Reader?
I think we need actual names and contact numbers. I know e-mail campaigns are frowned upon, but I think this is different, and I have a feeling a few mods and admins will be silently cheering us on.
I don’t get it. Servers are not terribly expensive. The software is cheap. Configuring the machines and software, transferring everything over, performing QA in a test environment and then going live should only take a week or two at most. It makes no sense.
Where is the server located? I think some of our crackerjack database administrators, hardware aficionados and bulletin board whiz kids should visit the location and volunteer. It’s one thing to be turned down via e-mail, it’s another when you just walk in the door and proudly proclaim, “We’re the pros from Dover and we figure to get this bulletin board up and running and get out on the course before it gets dark. “ *
Seriously, why can’t they get their crap together and get it fixed?
*My apologies to Elliott Gould
Can you (or the other Admins or Mods) contact these people with the answers?
Send them links to all the threads and tell them that the pitchforks and torches are being gathered. Suggest that they might want to spend a few minutes of their valuable time letting us know what’s going on. Better yet, suggest that they take advantage of the numerous offers of free expertise since it seems obvious that they don’t have, and aren’t willing to acquire, expertise of their own.
I love this board. It’s the only one I read and post to. I’ve been here a long time. And like so many others, I’m fed up with the excuses, the silences, the back peddling, the waffling, and the bloody fucking nonsense.
(NB: I am not yelling at you, Giraffe. I know you had nothing to do with causing the problems and there’s nothing you can do to fix ‘em, either, anymore than the other Mods and Admins. Just sayin’, is all.)
I love you.
Hey if e-mail and letter writing campaigns worked to save TV shows, why wouldn’t it work to save a board we love? This site lets people create an online petition where people can sign and leave comments. Maybe we could do something like that so TPTB know we are serious about this board.
I don’t post very often, and mainly only pay to search, so I’m awfully disappointed that I just resubscribed not too long ago.
Well, we are suppose to get it back but in the meantime this sucks and hope we get another update from an Admin by tonight on what is happening. The search/New Post function is a very important part of the membership fee.
See my thread in ATMB.
The server administrator’s technical knowledge is severely lacking. It is OBVIOUS to anyone that they don’t know how to run a message board from a technical standpoint.
The Reader itself is all mucked up and monkeyed around with in the paper format; it’s a tabloid now as opposed to being in sections, which sucks and means only one person can read it at a time, which means more papers, which means more resources which means Creative Loafing sucks.
The performance of the board is a fixable problem for those interested in fixing it. Rather than fixing it, clearly Creative Loafing is bent on doing to the SDMB what Sam Zell intends to do with The Cubs and/or Wrigley.
At the bottom of the page I saw the following ad…
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www. Gay Thug Dating. com
Three questions pop to mind…
Where the fuck are they getting their ad streams from?
What the fuck is a gay thug?
Who the fuck is responsible for this board?
Another funny item: My private message count shows the following:
Private Messages: Unread 65535, Total 9.
Sweet Jesus.
Yes, and we do. For example, fluiddruid forwarded a link to this thread soon after it was started with her endorsement that it be taken very seriously. It’s hard to know if they fully appreciate the level of frustration, not knowing the posters as we do.
Speaking only for myself, I do think that the last big upset over the banner ads revealed a surprising (to me) level of commitment and concern about the future and well-being of the board. Whether that will translate into sufficiently improved service, performance, and communication in a timely enough manner to make people happy and keep the board growing at a healthy pace is (for me) still a big question mark.
CL is selling the SDMB to Mark Cuban?! Hooray! 
I know, I know, wishful thinking…
Giraffe, I’m curious about your post.
When you say, “revealed a surprising (to me) level of commitment and concern about the future and well-being of the board.”, are you referring to the commitment of the members, or of the owners?
I was okay with the state of the board until today.
I typed out a nice long post, I even did research for it! It was lovely! You all would have loved it – it had some delightful humorous bits interspersed with biting insight.
I hit the italics button on the Quick Reply panel, and was informed that that operation was horrendously frowned upon. I then hit the back button and wept for my lost post, then raged at the gods for this injustice.
From now on, I’ll remember to copy and copy again before touching any sort of button on this board. But that’s sort of like resolving to always make your passengers buckle up after you’ve launched one through a windshield – the damage is done.
Owners.