First off, I honestly think the mods are doing a good job overall. I’m guilty of several pieces of fluff (I couldn’t resist a thread about Ramanujam’s Number, however!), but if the mods see threads that are taking up serious space and generally agreed to be extremely pointless, they have a right to act on it and make a couple policy suggestions.
Now, since this is the Pit:
You try taking my title, me bucko, I’ma come over there and mess you up. I am The Communist Bastard. 
Well, all I can say is, if post count parties are what defines this particular on-line community, lemme outta here! Pokemasters MB, here I come!
Yes- I will agree that "100"pcp are silly, and useless. And posting just to up your post count is childish drivel- BUT…
No. Being able to get a valid answer in a short time is what makes the SDMB GREAT- but stuff like PCP, flirting, and the genuine concern we have for one another is what makes us a COMMUNITY. When Wally passed away- I, and many others here- were truly saddened- we had lost a friend. Even tho few had ever met him, or knew his “real” name- wally was OUR friend. He was not our friend becuase he posted accurate answers in GQ, he was not our friend because of his debating style- he was our friend because he showed up at our “silly pcp”, joked with us, was concerned when we had problems, and roasted our ass when we needed it most. He was our buddy, not because of his brilliance- but because of the “mundane & pointless” stuff.
Everyone knows this Board has a “brain”- but we need a heart just as much.
Danny Boy …
You’re fixating on a symptom and not the disease, but since you do …
It’s a little irritating that you ressurect Wally to support yourself, especially after prefacing your comments pretty much agreeing with me. The reason Wally was so well respected was because he always had something to say and something constructive to add. That is what I’m railing for. Constructive conversation. I don’t mind the flirting (hint, hint…), love the jokes, the support we give each other is better than I’ve seen anywhere. But somewhere you have to draw the line.
In any other forum there are fairly strict guidelines for what is allowed and what is not. Because of the nature of MPSIMS, it tends to be considered a “junk-drawer” where people feel they can post just about anything. And in some situations, it’s getting out of control.
I can’t very well justify someone not being able to post an intelligent answer to a reasonable question in GQ because the server was too busy trying to manage a 1000 post thread, or because someone was trying to post a “Whoopee, 10 posts!!” thread.
I only used PCPs as one example, which you’ve chosen to fixate on. The problem is bigger than that, but let’s face facts: PPCs reinforce the tendancy towards “junk” posts.
[Edited by Eutychus55 on 01-16-2001 at 04:18 PM]
Oh yeah? Well no one has even given me any type of a post party…ever. Screw you guys, I’m going home!
You mean Lynn is going to eventually delete ALL the post parties? And the SDMB elite clique doesn’t think post parties are “cool” anymore?
Whoohoo!
Well,
I support the mods on this one. MPSIMS does seem rather bloated compared to the rest of the forums, considering the aim of the board and the intelligence of the discussion that goes on in the other forums. Personally, I celebrated my 100th post with a P.S note on an unrelated post.
While there are occasionally very interesting threads, like this in that forum, and while I recognise the need for somewhere for people to go to chill without clogging the other forums, I feel that the mods are right to discourage extra server pressure from pointless threads.
Y’all DO realize that if you do away with the post counts, people will start up with the “I’ve been here for seventeen months!” parties, right?
People are silly creatures, don’tcha know.
By the way… happy almost-1000, Eut’ems! ::evil grin::
Damn, missed the 496 post count party. It is a perfect number, meaning that all of it’s divisors add up to it when added. Next one is 8128. Better start posting lots more crap!
handy’s pretty close to that. Maybe you should start a thread in IMHO for him, as he seems to hang around thre more than anywhere else.
And I promise to stop posting so much crap. Just be glad I don’t start any PCPs for myself . . . I’m (sorta) coming up on 4,000.
Somebody told me there were moderators looking for nekkid horny chicks in here, so here I am!
<Looks around…> shrug oh well, I guess maybe they’re next door. <Leaves>
One: by definition, the Moderator is not wrong. This is not a smart-ass remark, but the truth. Maybe all us full-of-ourselves posters need to remember that this thing is put up, free of charge, by the Chicago Reader, who does take a loss on the damn thing, for the purpose of promoting the Straight Dope. The community is wonderful; I’ve gotten to be friends with people I would have never met in offline life, and I thank God daily (well, almost) that Mike, Ed, and the rest of the Reader crew find this worth doing, and that Lynn, David, Tuba, and the other wandering admins and moderators are willing to volunteer their time to keep it running.
Two: MPSIMS has a very important function. The people we debate with, ask GQs to and answer GQs for, dispute Cecil’s articles with,and so on, are real human beings with other life concerns. Some of which get discussed in MPSIMS – and the most-rage-inducing of them here in the Pit. It helps to know that LlamaFucker’s been a bastard in his remarks lately, unlike his normal argumentative but placid self, because his grandfather is dying of incurable cancer. And to offer him sympathy, even if he does have some lame-ass ideas about what the Constitution means and how to interpret the Bible. Happens I was able to do a good deed lately: a fairly new poster from the same area as me lost his job at the same time as the company I work for lost the guy who did the same sort of work. Reading about his job loss, I told him to send me his resume and passed it on to the woman who manages that part of the company. He’s one of two qualified candidates for the job as things stand. And neither he nor I would have had a clue that he and the vacancy here fit if it hadn’t been for MPSIMS.
I’ve never had a post party. I never plan to. I try to make what I say useful to others, or at least witty (sometimes only half so, I’m afraid :o ). And I think that following the guidelines that the people who run this establishment set for it is, generally speaking, a good idea. If I think that a guideline is well-intentioned but gonna cause problems, I’m not afraid to say so – direct to the admin. in question, not fishing for support from others unless I have questions on whether I’ve gauged public reaction right and therefore post my disagreement in ATMB or here, as appropriate, to get my thinking confirmed or corrected.
If the servers at the Reader need easing, or simply if a volunteer Moderator needs some help doing the thankless and unpaid job he agreed to, I’ll be ready to cooperate.
May I encourage that on you and everybody else?
I’m proud to present to you our new Poster of the Week, Polycarp!
Hey, PCPs are addicting.
That said, I couldn’t agree more. A lot of threads are such a waste of time, it’s almost embarrassing. If your thread isn’t popular enough to get a post to it at least once every three hours it will die and die quickly in MPSIMS. That’s about how long it takes to loop over to the next page and it’s an obscenely quick period of time if you’re not online 24-7.
I’ve only done two “look at how many posts I have” threads. One at 100, where I told a bit about myself, and one at 1000, where I gave a reflection on the time I’ve spent on this board. Neither were that well attended, but that’s probably because I tried starting a conversation, not having monkey butlers serve bubbly from a glass slipper.
And, Ender, you had some very intelligent things to say about this board and life here at post 1000, rather than simply making post #1000 a celebration of having made 1000 posts. Which might be the solution to what’s going on:
How about a standard that when Poster X reaches milestone Y, he starts a thread (if he wants to) on some aspect of the board that he approves, disapproves, has found rewarding, wishes would happen or whatever? It gives people their moment in the sun and fosters some intelligent discussion at the same time. And intelligent discussion is what we’re supposed to be doing here, isn’t it?
Well for heaven’s sake, Euty! I’m one of your virtual wives! If you want it, you gotta ask!
Sheesh!
Mother of Fuck Poly you’re just talking crazy talk now.
OHMIGOD! For those of you who don’t know, oldscratch and I share a computer… that last post attributed to me, Polycarp, was from oldscratch!
Sorry for any confusion.
Yowza! And here I thought you were just the one who did the cooking!
**
This is the only part where I beg to differ with your eloquent post, Polycarp.
The people many are talking about here don’t tend to participate in anything but MPSIMS and IMHO. And that’s probably a good thing – but a bad thing for MPSIMS and IMHO when it becomes cumulative.
Anyone who posts with any regularity in GQ has thrown out a WAG to a question posed there from time to time. But it’s become a trend to get WAG answers there that aren’t identified as such, and that has somewhat killed my joy in participating there. Because it can tend to get snippy or debate-ish if you call someone on their bovine excrement.