Java, chill the fuck out. You asked a question that could easily be handled by an e-mail. You’ve been around long enough to know that and you’re not stupid.
Quit being such a wankmop.
Plus, Herbert Kornfeld kicks mucho ass.
"I learnt my freestyle accountin’ skeelz on da STREET!"
“Wankmop”? I might have to start using that on a daily basis.
I was just about to say, DON’T BE BREAKIN’ BAD on Herbert Kornfeld.
I Gots To Represent At the Motherfucking Company Picnic.
jarbaby
Coldie and Jar, I have no nit to pick with the H-Dog. He rocks.
Scratch, I think you went way over the top. It’s one thing to stomp someone who deliberately goes out on the attack, but it’s different to slam someone for questioning moderator actions. With due respect I think everyone here should be entitled to question moderator actions if it comes to that. All the rest of us are held accountable; leaders should be as well or it’s worse than anarchy.
I wouldn’t have posted this in the Pit, except that it seems to be the place where we’re supposed to do it. Weren’t threads of this type supposed to go in ATMB at one point?
Silver, the phrase the defense rests was directed not at Manny, but at Oldscratch. Context is the key here.
I take the Cornfeld reference as a compliment. Thank you.
No, the pit wasn’t the place to put it. As you can see from the posts in this thread. I tried to tell you that’s what would happen, but you, idioticly, forged ahead. The place to take it was http://www.hotmail.com where you would have typed in vanscoyoc for a user name, and whatever little password you would have used. You would have then gone and composed a message to Manhattan, and asked what reasons he had for closing your thread instead of moving them. If his response was, bite me wankmop, you would have then started a pit thread complaining about his closing your thread.
Got it fucker?
And I still giggle every time I read “how dare you use that tone with me” thanks for that one.
Sorry, javaman, but it just was not a General Question. We get a lot of “why is such and such so expensive” questions, and very few of them are actually General Questions. The fact that you answered you own question indicated to me that you simply wanted to see what other people thought. (You said “there are scores of attractive, equally accurate alternatives at a fraction of the price,” indicated that you already knew about differences in material such as gold, etc., and reflected that you already knew that a chip plant in Singapore can produce an accurate timekeeper for about 12 cents.)
So why didn’t I move it? At the time, I wasn’t about to move anything. It took me nearly 4 minutes to get into the thread, and another 4-5 to close it. Moving it would have taken months (well, OK, not months, but you know what I mean). This on an afternoon when there were 135 threads that had received comments since the last time Chronos or I had checked into the boards. There were (and presumably are) some threads further down that I didn’t bother to close, because I thought they were dead. If they come back, I’ll move or close them as appropriate. I do the best I can, but I have limited time. When there are 135 threads to go through, some stuff is going to give. 135 threads X (4 minutes to open + 1 or 2 minutes to read) = no trip to the driving range for manny.
Why do anything? Why not just leave it until the boards slowed down? Simply, because closing the thread was part of getting the board to slow down. Read the two responses you already received in the thread. Do you seriously think the thread would have been anything but responses of that ilk? I’ve been doing this for a while. If someone had posted something about workmanship or craftsmanship, someone else simply would have told a story about their grandfather’s 65-year old Timex or their dime-store watch that survived a plane crash and two weeks in the desert or whatever. The thread would quickly have become a 35-response monster with little or no substantive information in it. That means 35 database re-orgs that the board just doesn’t need when the server is doing it’s work-to-rule thing, or whatever it is.
Because here’s the thing. People are dying to post an answer in GQ. It’s part of the help-each-other culture that makes the SD such a great place. Careful observers will note that when the board is running well, I’ll sometimes leave a “borderline” thread in the forum for a while, because I know people want to answer there.
So there we are. Sorry if you still disagree, but that’s the call I made with the facts I had at the time I made it.
Finally, to Oldscratch. We the moderators appreciate the consistent support you have shown for us – really we do. But javaman didn’t flame me, and he opened the thread where we tell people to do it. I’d respectfully ask you to save your vitriol for the true trolls and the folks who call us “nazi” and the chronic complainers and whatnot. Thanks.
OH fine. 
Though I still stand by everything I’ve said in this thread. If someone wants a direct response from a moderater on why something happened to a thread, they should email them. If someone wants to open a thread for discussion of a moderaters actions and be called a wankmop by TwistofFate, they should do that here.
As for the fucker, don’t take it personally. If Silver Fire or someone else who I actually like had opened this thread, I would have also called em a fucker.
Makes sense to me now. I make my living in a field where even slightly different ways of saying something can cause wildly different outcomes. Sometimes we have problems when
applying this principle to informal language.
Thanks for taking the time.
What kind of net access do you have? I know you voulunteer your services as board administrator (probably not at your regular job [with T1 access?]) Is DSL available in your area? Would the Chicago Reader (or Cecil) subsidise?
Heh. At the time, I had come down to my office to do some paperwork. I was posting on a T-1 and since the office was closed, competing with no one for bandwidth.
No, sadly, the bottleneck was on the SD side of things.
Ah. I have noticed that. I work for a BellSouth subsidiary and we have pretty good access speeds and, yes, I have been very frustrated by response times from the Straightdope message board (I thought it was just the firewall administrator monitoring me!)
This probably isn’t the place but, thanks for the rapid response (from a mod no less) I think this is the third response in all of 47 posts. (Inferiority complex?)