You parsed their attitude wrong. It’s not, “we don’t need you (all)”, it’s “we don’t need you, catsix”. Any clearer?
Not true. I don’t get any sense that the administration of the boards wants anybody to leave or in any way doesn’t care about the feelings of the posters. Rather, this message board is operated within certain constraints due to the reality of being owned and managed by a private business, and I think some posters misinterpret the mods and admins’ inability to go beyond those constraints as a lack of interest in posters’ opinions or preferences. The opposite is true – the mods and admins are constantly discussing concerns raised by posters. However, there’s only so much we can do. If a poster is fundamentally unhappy with the way the Reader runs the boards, there’s a point beyond which we can’t help you. We don’t want you to leave, but neither can we make you stay if you require more than we can provide.
I for one hope people find this place entertaining enough to make it worth the annual subscription fee. And honestly, if you have suggestions for how to improve the experience here, don’t hesitate to raise them, either in a thread or on email. I can’t promise they’ll be implemented but they are always heard.
If that were the real case, then they could ban me couldn’t they?
Or did they anoint you to speak for them?
Well, yes, but it was a double-secret anointing, which I am not at liberty to discuss…
I post here all the time and I missed it.
Ok, here’s a suggestion:
Seeing that this hamster phenomenon appears to be getting worse, and is alleged to be caused by an excessive load on the server; Copy the 2004 and earlier archived threads, delete them from the overtaxed system and restore them when a better server that can handle the load is found.
They frown on the revival of old threads, so why not just temporarilly get rid of them? IMHO, they’re not worth the time-out errors they cause.
Why would you assume that accessing old threads is the cause of the server slowdown? Unless you can produce server statistics to support this dubious theory, I don’t think there is any reason to assume that we access old threads more than we access new threads.
It’s not about what we’re accessing, it’s about the size of the database. The server can manage a 500 MB database a lot more easily than a 5000 MB database.
Plus, there have been a half-dozen threads I’ve seen in the past month that amounted to huge server search engine hogs–people were searching for all the users with similar names by searching for all threads by somebody with part of their user name; somebody else wanted to make a list of all the users who had ever been pitted by searching the BBQ Pit for all threads with user names in them… it’s not entirely the server’s fault that it’s slow. We can be dumb sometimes.
However, it doesn’t take long to hit Reply, alt-tab to your notepad document, copy the text that says “I’m sorry, we can’t answer questions like that. This has been addressed before; please read the stickies in ATMB,” then hit Reply.
At this point, he wasn’t asking for financial information. All he wanted to find out was why nobody even bothered to say “No, we’re not going to answer that.” I realize we’re not paying much for this service, but we are paying for this service.
Pardon me for being baffled by any customer who continues to support a business that they have continued problems with. Especially when there are a multitude of free options available.
It’s the Reader’s business. If they’re business practices drive customers away, it’s their loss. Luckily it appears there are sufficient people who will pony up money for the privilege of bitching about the exact thing their ponying up money for.
It matters not to me what the Reader’s attitude is, the minute I don’t like how I’m treated, I’ll leave, rather than bitching about it over and over. The Reader makes final decisions about information they wish to release to “customers”, and the mods are bound by that decision. If it offends you so much to be kept in the dark about the Reader’s financial situation, may I suggest you either learn to relax or leave.
Dropping back in for a couple of (hopefully) brief responses …
To Gaudere and Giraffe, thanks for your input. I see your point and I get why you didn’t post anything in that thread. My thread title may have used a bit of a broad brush when I said ‘admin’. Sorry.
I believe that the mods and admins of this board do care, and don’t want posters to leave. But I’d wager the Chicago Reader doesn’t really much of a toss about the board, which I can actually understand for at least one viewpoint. Maybe we should make the distinction between the CR and the mods/admins more often, maybe we should be looking for some kind of indication from the Reader their plans for the board but I doubt that’ll be forthcoming.
To JohnBckWLD and those that responded to him, there’s no doubt that getting rid of the archives somehow would speed up the board, TubaDiva says this herself in the ATMB thread. Of course this brings lots of problems, if you ‘disappear’ the archives for the moment then you break all the existing links to them (notable Threadspotting) and deprive the board of one of it’s main hooks to get new subscribers. Not to mention depriving paying subscribers of one of the things they paid for. So you’d have to mirror the archives somewhere and adjust the links and probably do a bit more vBulletin fritzing to make stuff work, by no means a big job but you’d have to have the server/bandwidth available to put the archives on. And whilst it’s not a big job, it’s still a job and it’s clear that the Reader staff don’t have the spare time/resources to do it for a bit.
If we’re suggesting stuff I’d suggest re-enabling google crawl of the board so people can use google to search the board. This has several advantages, first googles search is far superior to the in-built one (well I always found it to be so, I never used the board search before I had to). Second people will be brought to the board by google search results, for pay-to-post to work we need to bring in people. Third it’ll reduce the load on the server if we encourage people to use google instead. Now, I know, that search is one of the perks of subscription but I think that a bit of weighing of the pros and cons could be done here. Maybe the admins could open a thread about it to solicit opinions …
Finally:
I’m sorry, but there isn’t a free alternative where you’ll find SpaceDog, Hamlet and Slacker, for example. I keep saying this but I view this place as a community, and I can understand why people would be reluctant to leave despite any problems they may perceive. Once you accept that you can see why people might want to try to improve things before just upping sticks and starting again somewhere else. If it was just a message board then everyone would’ve left when we went pay-to-post, no? People where prepared to pay to stay here, that should show you that there’s some level of commitment, and everyone’s line is probably different, doesn’t make any of them necessarily wrong, just different.
Thanks to everyone for their responses, it’s a lot of food for thought.
SD
I think you hit the nail on the head there. I also consider this place a community. As technology becomes more advanced and ubiquitous, I think most people will develop a message board community just like they develop real-life club memberships, and I am glad to be part of a community with as high a quality as this one.