With what’s left? I’ll be surprised if two dozen people leave over this. Y’all are vocal, but I doubt there’s a lot of people quietly leaving.
And frankly, once y’all leave, the level of overwrought complaining is gonna diminish, which is going to make it a far less ugly place.
Thanks for the post, Ed. ERL, turns out you do understand what I’m saying, and just choose to be insulting to me about it, for reasons I cannot fathom. Whatever.
Daniel
This thread needs to be shot in the head. Now.
Amen.
Mynn
I wish you “I’m leaving and I’m taking my friends with me” types would just shut the hell up already. We get it - you’re leaving, and you’re going to remind us of that fact every chance you get for the next month, or however.
Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s ass how you feel about the place anymore. At one point you might have had a valid point; now my eyes glaze over. Fourteen pages on this topic? You have got to be fucking kidding me. If you’re that pissed about it, fuck it, leave now. You won’t be missed
What, we’re all supposed to back off now that we’ve been told how indispensable TD is?
Ed said
Given what the response has been, your letter doesn’t give me the feeling that you’re listening or that you care. It amounts to ‘We need TD, and those of you who don’t like my decision can just suck it up!’
But they’ve still got 58 cents worth of subscription left. Stopping now would show them up as unthrifty!
Oh nonono, far from it. It’s just that I’ve been praying for Travis Coates to show up and blast this thread into confetti with a 12 gauge ever since its inception and personally think that it’s only good for engendering seriously bad juju.
No, I didn’t say that. I said that after a long and difficult attempt to do the right thing and having no luck because of reasons that had nothing to do with the actual offence, she saw SM whining in LJ about why had he been banned? and lost her temper.
You may consider that “going vigilante”, I don’t. I would have considered it “going vigilante” if, after it was clear there was to be no justice from the authorities, she had gone on LJ and posted what she did for no other reason than to post that link. Again, I make a distinction between the two things. You may not agree with me.
No, I can’t. Which is extremely frustrating for ME, and in many ways the crux of the matter. It is pretty hard to defend yourself when you can’t ethically present facts that might help to explain why you lost your temper and made a huge mistake.
You raise a legitimate point. Obviously we survived the past month, and we could do so for longer if we had to. As it is TubaDiva knows she has become a lightning rod for controversy. She and I have talked about it a bit, and she has suggested that perhaps she ought to shift into more of a background role. We may do that. More generally, many of the staff have served for years in what is obviously a high-stress job, and an unpaid one at that. I think everyone here agrees we’re overdue to get in some new blood. We’ve brought in a number of people over the past year or two who have done a great job, but we could stand to have a lot more. We’ll be working on that over the next few weeks.
To clarify a matter that has come up a lot, Tuba is not, and never was, the network administrator. That’s Jerry’s job. He’s the one with access to all the really sensitive data. (He’s not the only one; the Reader is a good-sized company, and other people are involved. But he’s the point guy as far as the SDMB is concerned.) He’s a full-time employee and works at the Reader office. I don’t say this to minimize anything that happened in connection with the present incident, but we need to keep matters in perspective.
I’m not sure what in particular you find alarming, but I know what most concerns me, the staff, and probably my bosses is that I’m a hands-off manager much of the time. This is a part-time job for me; there’s a lot on my plate. I get everything taken care of eventually, but often there’s an uncomfortably long lag - you see an example of it just now. The economics won’t support making a full-time job out of this. I’m not sure what the solution is, but in the meantime I’d ask everyone not to interpret silence as apathy, disdain, etc. - the truth is I’m probably putting out a fire somewhere else.
Glad to see an official response that backs up my claim that TubaDiva got away with this because getting rid of her would make things more difficult for the board administration.
So, is her ‘stipend’ going to be reduced for her 30 days off duty? Or was she truly off duty? Sounds like a lot of the behind-the-scenes work you are talking about could have been easily handled by her while her main account was suspended. Did the fact that firing her might cause financial hardship for a long-time board participant effect the decision?
I’m disgusted to see that she is continuing to be paid to administer this board. I’ll admit I was strongly considering not subscribing before this post, now that I know that a portion of my membership fees will go into her pocket, it’s decided.
Ed, don’t think everyone who hasn’t spouted up in support of Tuba doesn’t care. I for one, and I suspect a lot of other people, don’t really want to get in an ass-kicking contest with a tar-baby.
How is this any of your business?
Clue: It’s not.
That’s the most encouraging thing I’ve seen you post. Live long and prosper. (As long as you do it somewhere else)
OH, NO!!! OH, PLEASE DON’T GO!!! PUH-LEEESE! WHAT WILL WE EVER DO WITHOUT YOU?? THE PLACE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME…BOO-HOO-HOO…
Schmuck.
A member of a community has an interest in seeing that it’s laws are enforced justly. I have reason to suspect that we were misled when it came to the punishment given and the reasons for the type of punishment given, and that the nature of the punishee’s relationship with the punisher has been obfuscated.
If Ed will admittedly give TubaDiva a lesser punishment than given to other ‘volunteers’ for lesser offenses at least in part because of her special status as an administrator, and that he felt her contribution was important enough to pay her for it, I see no reason to believe that he would have truly stopped her from administering the board during the 30 days she was supposedly suspended. Since we are discussing how we feel about the nature of her punishment, it makes a difference if she was still administering the board in that time.
And since this is a pay site, whether or not the employee being punished was being paid during the suspension is of importance to those who pay her employers, and those who may be deciding whether or not to be a customer. Why do you think news reports about policemen and other people in position of power who get punished for wrongdoings usually will state whether they were suspended with or without pay? It’s because that distinction is important in determining whether or not justice has been served.
If an employee of a company violates it’s policy and treats their customers like shit, whether or not I bring my business to that company is strongly dependent on how that employee is punished. If I find out that the short order cook who spat on my fries got a paid vacation after being told by the manager they would be punished, I’m not going back.
Any chance we can talk you into early retirement? The perks are great. Really. For starters, the stress of posting on such a horribly administered board will evaporate.
IIRC, from the beginning of the suspension it was made clear that TubaDiva would still be performing in her capacity with regards to thread spotting and Weird Earl’s. We were told about that up front, so I see no reason to get outraged over it now.
Except that it wasn’t your fries that were spat upon. Or was it?
And, folks, here we have the proverbial silver lining.
The inmates provide both the content and funding that keeps the prison going. It is good policy not to ignore the concerns of those who maintain your existance.
Burning their bridges? Getting the last word in? The cynical business man in me would wait until the grandfathered half-price accounts had lapsed, then announce a bunch of accommodating changes. Even if only 50% of them are lured back, you’ll still break even. Monitarily, anyway. You’ll still lose the content generation.
I don’t know if you know this, but Cindy’s husband committed suicide not too long ago and she’s really sensitive about it.
If you try for a really long time to “do the right thing” and the higher/proper authority on the matter isn’t having any part of what you’re trying to do… I’d take that as a sign that you’re not trying to “do the right thing”. It could be that it was a good plan, but for reasons the police aren’t going to share with some random person off the internet (E.G. details of an ongoing operation), choose not to act. Could be that it only looked evil when you colored everything with the RSO brush… something the police had the ability not to do.
Maybe whatever confidential information you have completely blows that bit of speculation out of the water, but you can’t share it with us… so 
Here’s how I’d react… the TubaDiva account would be stripped down to a regular user. She can use it to post and participate in the community as a normal user. A second acount would be created with sufficient access to allow her to do her job keeping the boards operating… it would not be used for community participation or actions affecting individual users.
If she abuses the admin account, she loses it.
If she abuses the regular account, she loses it and the admin account.
If she can’t compartmentalize and keep the roles of the two accounts seperate, she loses the tech-admin account.
Referring to TD’s suspension.
Aren’t you calling Ed a liar here? If that’s what you think, I see little recourse for you except to boogie on down the road right now, today.
If I had knowledge of something like that happening to someone else, then I wouldn’t take my business there.