That’s certainly a possibility. It has been my experience that in small to medium sized companies, the IT department usually falls under the Chief Financial Officer. (Why this has been so, I don’t know. I think it had something to do with the fact that office computers were originally very important to the accounting and financial operations.) If Jerry is in charge of the computer systems, which, correct me if I’m mistaken, I believe we’ve been told numerous times is why he has so very little time to spare for the message board, then he most likely answers to the CFO. That raises the question, then, of whether Jerry is in charge of the SDMB, or for that matter, whether the SDMB is even considered to be a part of the company’s general IT department. Now, I believe that there have been clues as to who is in charge of the SDMB. It was not Jerry who came in blustering about rules changes, scattering the membership hither and yon, telling people to leave if they didn’t like it, and acting all in-chargish. Rather, that was Ed. If his position over the board has changed, there has been not only no announcement, but no hint of any kind. Neither would it make sense for the CFO to assign Jerry to bother with something that does not provide the company with P&L statements, balance sheets, general ledgers, and things like that. So, while it is possible that the CFO (or even the CEO) has taken an interest in the board, it isn’t all that likely from a business standpoint. Ed started the whole Chicago forum and sub forums simply because he wanted to. He could have started a politics forum, but did not. He has a vision for the board, and it doesn’t really involve the core membership because if it did, then we would hear from him what with all this pushing up the pipe that is going on. None of us can know, of course, but if I were to speculate as you have done, I would say that the new owners have told Ed to make the board profitable or cut it off. But he doesn’t know how to do that. And he isn’t interested in our ideas.
I see why you’re so negative. Most children have dollars left for them by the tooth fairy; your way has left you traumatized, jaded and mistrusting.
Amen.
Regardless of what happens to the request, the tone of this thread has degenerated beyond what’s reasonable and expected for ATMB. This is a Mod Notice to stop. If you want to discuss this further until we get word on the decision, keep it civil in both senses.
Really? Asking for a standard function to be turned on in a calm, if slightly exacerbated way, is nothing like a child having a tantrum. But as the mod has made a note, I shouldn’t address obvious insults along this line further in this thread.
Yes, really. And BTW, the mod has a point.
It is against the rules to respond to the mod, but I can respond to you, and say that I disagree. There is a single poster who is degenerating the tone of this thread. Others are still making points without personal assaults or whiny jabs. See my response to Qadgop, for instance. And CarnalK, given the assaults on him by ScissorJack, has been as civil as humanly possible. So, there is no general degeneration (a claim often made as a precursor to a thread shut-down). Instead, there is a single threadshitter who should be called out and stopped.
And the appropriate forum to call him out is The Pit. If you wish to argue with my mod notice above, I’m not going to be hardheaded about it, but I’d appreciate it if the two of us could resolve it in PMs?
All of my posts in this thread have been general observations and neither personal nor assaults: if I have violated the rules of this forum, I should be pleased to be shown exactly where; and if CarnalK or anyone else sees my remarks as being applicable to him, there’s probably quite a good reason for that.
With due respect, only Der Trihs gets away with calling posters (those who are faithful) “delusional”. It’s sort of like the special rules for Michael Jordan. If you got close enough to him, it was a foul. And if he knocked you down to dunk as you stood still under the basket, it wasn’t charging; it was a personal foul on the defender.
> TWEEEET !!! < ::: Moderator blows whistle for attention :::
OK, this has gone on WAY too long. And this is the second moderator calling for “cut the crap.” This is NOT the Pit. This is NOT a forum where personal insults are allowed. This is NOT a forum for “joke” threads. ALL of you need to notch it down several tones.
Liberal, saying “with due respect” isn’t a permission clause. Personal insults, against people who aren’t even posting here, are not permitted.
Everyone else: insulting large groups of people often becomes problematic. “People who support Politician X are stupid” is usually fair game for insult. However, that sort of depends on context: if it’s a response to a specific poster who has just endorsed Politician X, then it can be (situationally) a personal insult. And when the group of people being insulted are all posters (“those who want a poll” or “those who don’t want a poll”), with no non-posters in the group, then I don’t see any excuse for that. We’ve probably been lax in the past, but, at least in this forum, that’s over. NO PERSONAL INSULTS, not against individual posters and not against groups of posters.
Discussions like this have ALWAYS been in ATMB. This wasn’t changed by the rules revisions. This is a discussion about features of the boards. It will henceforth be conducted civilly and respectfully of other posters’ opinions, or I will indeed move it to the Pit – where content will be irrelevant, and no moderators (aside from Pit Moderators) will read it, and no action will be taken.
Now, it’s already been stated that this is in process. There’s nothing more to report. This is the week of school starting, and Ed is busy with family stuff. He’ll get to it when he gets to it.
I would normally close such a thread, but then there would be massive crabbing about how we don’t allow free speech. SO, yeah, I’ll leave it open. But “free speech” does NOT include personal insults, side-swipes, veiled insults, etc.
I have asked him, twice, some time ago, what his vision is. He said that he wasn’t prepared to talk about it. Either he doesn’t want to share it with us, or he hasn’t got one.
Please accept my apology, which I extend also to Der Trihs.
I’m skipping all the posts in this thread, because an argument about enabling polls drastic enough to require moderator intervention is not an efficient use of my eyeball fluid. However, I would like to say that, while I love polls, when they are enabled on forums they tend to get over-used.
People post a thread as usual, and then when they get to the “submit” button they see those shiny “add a poll” options, and they lose their minds. So you get something like
“I saw a cool cat today.
Do you like that I saw a cool cat?
Yes======_____ (2 votes)
No=========_ (3 votes)”
That doesn’t do anybody any good.
There are plenty of free poll-taking websites you can link to if you really want to host a poll.
But how many of them can poll the people on the SDMB? As far as I know, we can’t post links to other websites like that without mod permission. If we can, then that would practically solve the problem. We could just put vote buttons (i.e. links) in the OP.
That is sometimes true. However, your position is inconsistent. You wish for posters to decide whether to run your scripts, but oppose letting them decide whether to have polls — on the most flimsy philosophical basis possible: that they wouldn’t do anybody any good.
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” — Henry David Thoreau
Well, yeah, but I think this is all on the basis that turning on polls will add undue strain on the already-labored servers. What I meant is that I don’t think it’s worth the performance cost, given that it will largely be frittered away on nonsense polls.
On what basis do you say that turning on polls will add “undue strain” on the “already-labored servers”? Granted, they are already-labored, but polls would add no undue strain or frankly strain of any kind. They’re just arrays of radio buttons, each of which transmits either nothing or else a byte value. (It’s really a bit, but a whole byte field is used.) So taking a poll with ordinary polling buttons takes load off the server whenever polls (already permitted and assigned to IMHO) are instead verbose in nature. Just a post answering “Yes” takes more load than a radio element post (HTML post). So does answering “No”. It actually saves server resources.
I participate on lots of boards that have polls turned on (probably all of them besides this one) and I sure don’t see polls being overused at all.
I hate when the polling feature is activated on other message boards. Thats one of the nice things about here. No clutter like polls or avitars.