It’s December 28th, which means it’s peak “Year in Review” season. What happened at the Dope in 2008?
1. Return to free posting
The SDMB once again opened its arms to anyone who liked the community here but didn’t want to pay for the privilege of posting (and searching). Many former Dopers who had left with whatever degree of huffiness when we went PTP have returned, some making brief cameos and others sticking around to teem along with the rest of us.
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2. New server*
A bigger and more powerful server has decreased (though not eliminated) the number of outages and delays. Other bells and whistles have been added and subtracted as the fine-tuning continues.
One side story to the new server was Amnesia Weekend, while the new server was put online. Rather than make us go Dope-free while the transition took place, the Boards were left up, but without posts being archived. This led, with the Mods’ blessings, to Amnesia Weekend, an anarchic free-for-all in which people posted whatever the fuck they wanted with the knowledge that the posts – if not the memory of them – would disappear come Monday morning.
3. New fora
The first was the long-agitated-for Game Room in February, which has been enthusiastically received by the sports-and-games obsessed among us. It’s nice to no longer be limited in the number of game threads allowed! There’s always at least one Mafia game in process and the Feud fad (with daily games ably run and scored by Dolores Reborn, og bless her) continues going strong. Other games pop up and either sink or swim; sports chat seems to be keeping the sports fan happy; and the presence of the Celebrity Death Pool there (let’s not forget a shout-out to **amarone **for running it) guarantees even non-fans stop by once in a while.
Less well received was Ed’s new forum for The Barn House, which, after howls of outrage, was moved from the main boards to a Side Conversation. Joining it there at the end of the year was a new Chicago-oriented sub-board.
- Uproar at Creative Loafing***
All of these are associated with the fact that the owner of the SDMB, Creative Loafing, has filed for bankruptcy. At this point there are no stated plans to pull the plug on us, but there is a concern that we make money for CL lest they do. The various upgrades are associated with the efforts to increase traffic to the site to increase ad revenue. Periodic efforts by the teeming millions to suggest other ways to increase revenue (such as an Amazon click-through, which frankly seems like a total no-brainer) have been ignored without acknowledgement.
5. In memoriam
We lost the beloved Doper David Simmons after a long illness. We also got word of the death of Askia (who had died in 2007).
