The damn dirty ones, of course, are still fair game.
Just to be a contrarian…
Since the board taint free no more, doesn’t VCO3 have a valid complaint if he’s bothered by the outages? He’s paying for a service and not getting it as often as he thinks he should. If he posted a thread going off on his cable company outages, most would give support- same thing here, right? For 120 bucks I expect my cable and internet to be working all day, everyday I don’t see the difference here…
Actually, Wee Bairn, that’s exactly what I was going to mention. While I expect my cable TV to work all the time, I don’t bother to pick up the phone and call them when, as last night during the Simpsons, the screen froze up.
It just doesn’t seem worth it for me to call them over something like that. I guess I calculate the amount I pay a month for it, and whether the value I get from the service, imperfect as it is, warrants that kind of payment. Comcast still gets my $130 or whatever a month. The Straight Dope still gets my much less than that per month.
Complaints about service may be valid, to the extent everyone would like perfection, but there is also a question of the degree of vitriol as compared with the problem.
Difference? Lessee, 120.00 minus 7.95…borrow the seven, carry the one…
That said, I don’t like the outages much, either.
Ooops, someone stepped on a hampster. It’s ok, just get another one out from the stock room.
Then there are the posters who have been here since the beginning of time and remember when the board would routinely quadruple post, when threads had to be closed when they got over 3 pages long because they’d get all out of order and shot to hell, when the board would be down for days and-- the granddaddy of all outages-- The Winter of Our Missed Content, when we actually had to migrate to a different board for, what, a month?
It was free at the time, so there’s that mitigating factor.
How does that work?
Looks more like he was sitting there hitting CTRL-V like a retard ape.
I just wanted to chime and say how much I completely despise that nerdy, stupid, dorky, irritating, cutesy, far too clever for its own good term - “winter of our missed content.” It sounds like the types of jokes and puns that Mensa members make among themselves to try to feel clever and superior but which just reveal them for the pathetic, lonely, former High School Drama Club Rocky Horror fans that they are. Seriously, can we crossbreed AIDS with cancer, make it airborne, and then give it to that term? Please?
Well, after my cable did stuff like that I told them to stuff it and got DishNetwork. It’s about 100 times more reliable, and when something does go wrong they answer right away. The reason I don’t dump SDMB is content - that is the Dopers, and the Mods.
That said, this is the least reliable site I ever visit. I was pretty fed up with the credit card service going out, in addition to the normal outages. I’d like to see uptime statistics, and mean time between outages. We don’t need 5 9s reliability, or even four, but I think we’re around 2 nines - and there is no excuse for that.
If you are serious and not whooshing me…
First, these are Windows conventions, and might differ for other OSes. If your cursor is in an editing window and blinking, Control-A (same as edit->select all) will “select all” text, and Control-C (same as edit->copy) will copy all selected text to a single, invisible location called the “clipboard”. It stays there until replaced or the computer is rebooted.
If something happens with a post and you lose the text on the screen, open a new edit/reply window, click in the text box to establish a cursor position, then hit Control-V (same as edit->paste) to paste the clipboard text in the edit box. You have just restored what you lost; continue as you were.
If you’re really paranoid, copy the text into a text or word processor (notepad, wordpad, etc.) and save as a disk file first, because if your computer hangs, the clipboard contents are lost on reboot.
The ^A, ^C, ^V shortcuts are so simple and handy they should be mastered by every beginning user before Day One of Computer 101 is over, IMHO.
The timeouts/downtimes have been so bad that I actually Ctrl-A, Ctrl-V, several times, all the time – while composing even the shortest of posts and especially right before I click Submit.
I’m laughing like a retarded ape over here! I can’t take it! VCO3, you are the uncrowned king (or queen, I’m not sure) of flaming, spittle flecked, vitriol and I salute you, you magnificent bastard (or bitch, as the case may be).
I sincerely hope you mean Ctrl-C rather than Ctrl-V, at least if you are copying TO the clipboard, not FROM it. Otherwise, you will wipe out your selection.
Glad to have helped you with your own sense of superiority, there VCO3. I’m sure it makes you feel all tingly inside.
Exactly. You know how mouth-foamy and apoplectic timeouts can make you. 
All I meant, Voyager, was that different people tolerate different levels of service on everything they pay for. Comcast haven’t got to the level of annoyance that would lead me to cancel them. Nor has SDMB. I am a pretty light user here, so I would imagine my tolerance level is higher than many.
It’s also the only message board I visit, so I honestly have no clue (and I am also a technical illiterate) what to expect. What I do know is that for the tiny amount of money I pay, this would be worth it (for me) if I could only access 2 hours a day. Other people have different threshholds.
I personally couldn’t raise that degree of vitriol over the lack of performance, but that could also be linked to the fact I don’t really know what level of performance is viable given the money available.
None of this, of course, lessens anyone’s “right” to complain about performance for something for which they are paying. Just noting that it doesn’t irk me to the level where I think it is worth complaining, even in a general Pit post kind of way.
Then again, I just spent 15 minutes cursing in my office because my freaking stapler misstapled a 19 page case 8 freaking times in a row. And the staples don’t cost me anything. We all have our triggers, I guess.
Fucking stapler! You fucking piece of shit! Fix this motherfucking stapler, you retarded apes!
There! Did that work? Or did it turn your stapler red?
best post of the day 
I think he was confused by the use of “^” to mean “CTRL”.