Well, with the smashing success of the Barn House (:rolleyes: as many threads in 3 months as MPSIMS gets in a day; fewer total forum posts than a lot of threads in GD), I’m not so sure they’re even benefiting themselves. More like shooting themselves in the balls while fucking us in our asses and pouring sugar in our gastanks.
You forgot “pissing in our cornflakes.” By creating new Chicago forums, they’re pissing in our cornflakes. And giving us herpes. And I’m pretty sure those new forums are a direct cause of global warming.
And they’re the reason I never learned how to read!
Hey, if it accomplishes nothing but keeping those Bears and Cubs fans away from the rest of us, I’m all for it.
They fucking made me gay, for chissake.
There’s no way a wolf shirt cured your AIDS.
Have they said they’re willing to create a politics forum but technical difficulties are holding them back? If so, I rescind what I said, because it is really easy to create new forums in software like this, and that’s a stupid excuse.
If they haven’t created a politics forum because they’re not sure they want one, or they haven’t figured out how it would exist within the existing structure of the other forums from a content/moderation standpoint, that’s a different issue. Outside cafe society, the forums are set up by the nature of the post (is it a question, a rant, a personal tidbit, a poll, a comment on a column, etc) rather than the subject of the post, so it may be just that they haven’t (or don’t plan to) figure out how Politics would fit in with that structure. Given how much we discuss politics around here, getting that right would be important.
Whereas local forums for Chicago seem a lot more discrete and less likely to cause confusion.
It amuses me to note that there are now 68 posts in this thread to date, vs. 78 TOTAL posts in the 6 different Chicago forums.*
The real question though, is WWRD about these new Chicago forums?
- and 24 of these posts are in a joke thread,
"Is the South Side of Chicago the baddest part of town? "
An excellent suggestion. Also, those who are annoyed by the forums can click the arrow on the right side of the dark blue category dividers (for Side Conversations and SD Chicago) to keep the big bad unwanted forums from being offensive in thy sight.
Far as I’m concerned, if it helps the SDMB and doesn’t cause me or anyone else any inconvenience, I’m all for it. I mean, I’m as annoyed as others here regarding the ongoing search and technical issues (that search timeout is a real annoyance, especially when your first search times out and then you can’t make another one right away), but those issues are certainly not related to flipping a few switches in the vBulletin control panel. Any admin can create a new forum. Fixing serious database and/or hardware problems is a much bigger deal, and requires tinkering by an expert.
So if it’s easy to flip a switch and create new forums, why don’t they add everything we ever wanted? Presumably adding new forums requires not just user interest, but moderators as well. Maybe a Politics forum would be too much of a PITA to moderate – although personally I can’t immediately see how it’d differ from the various threads scattered in GD. I think a dedicated forum would’ve been very useful during the U.S. primaries and general election; now that they’re over, however, I don’t see much point in separating topics to such an extent. I have my own vB community and I kinda regret adding as many subforums as I have. It’s better to have too few than too many, organizationwise.
I’m only going in there if there’s a thread on Leroy Brown or a certain band popular in the 70s and 80s.
My thoughts exactly.
Look, I see what the Edmeister and TPTB are up do, and good on them for trying. I’m not convinced it will work, but if you’ve got the time, inclination, and ability to add six forums for a specific city in the US (for which there has been no call by anyone on the boards for a series of forums devoted to); then why the smeg wasn’t a “Politics” forum created at the same time?
Also, why six Chicago forums? Surely one would have sufficed for all three of the posters from that city…
Chicago, Chicago
We need more Chicago forums to tide us over until there are New York Straight Dope, Houston Straight Dope, Toronto Straight Dope and Isle of Man Straight Dope.
Other Chicago forums begging to be started:
*Chicago Pizza is Better Than New York Pizza - Discuss
Is The Windy City Really Windy? (Weather)
The Jesse Jackson Forum
Old Stockyard Myths
Movies and TV Shows Inspired by Chicago
Chicago Architecture
Chicago Landscape Design
The Chicago Drug Scene
*and on and on.
Every new Chicago forum means more revenue for the Dope, and we can finally work out all those kinks in Board operati
This from the person who predicted that the SDMB would no longer exist in April 2005.
I’ve had many business ideas in my life, most of which were pretty dumb and a few of which were ok. In just about all cases, friends and family told me the ideas were pretty dumb.
I think it’s just human nature. (1) It’s hard to tell in advance if an idea will bear fruit or not. (2) It’s natural to be critical of other peoples’ ideas.
So Ed, if you are reading this, Illegitimi non carborundum.
Having said that, it seems like a pretty dumb idea to me.
Still, if I were Ed, I would do the same thing. Why not? It costs little and it might work. People who get ahead usually aren’t afraid to look foolish now and then. Probably Ed knows that it’s a bit of a longshot.
This time I needn’t predict, but merely observe.
Then there will be a SDMB Miami, followed by SDMB New York, then SDMB Las Vegas.
Maybe it would help if Jerry could create an ignore list for entire forums (fora?), not just members.
I completely don’t get why there is any distubance at all over this. Who cares – just don’t visit a forum you don’t like. Is this overly complex?
I’m not trying to challenge you, but am honestly curious: were technical reasons ever given as a reason not to have a separate Politics forum? I don’t remember seeing that, but I may have just missed it.
Speaking only for myself as a poster, I’ve always liked the (mostly) non-subject based divisions for the board’s forums. I think Cafe Society was a necessary evil, but it’s the one forum I almost never read because it’s so focused on a subject in which I have limited interest. The Games forum was a way to lift a restriction on a fun subcategory of threads such as the Mafia threads to keep them from swamping MPSIMS, but the downside is that I think they get missed by more casual readers.
I myself wouldn’t read a Politics forum, even though I often get sucked into reading political threads in GD or the Pit, for the same reason I don’t visit politics-only message boards and blogs. Purely political forums in my experience attract a certain kind of die-hard and tend to chase away the more casual contributers. Plus, when we’re not in the middle of an election, what kind of threads would count as political discussions? Abortion? Separation of church and state? How to manage the economy? In some sense, everything in GD is politics except the purely philosophical and religious debates, and those are a pretty small minority.
This is it. It is what I posted on the ATMB thread. There is no Politics forum because people asked for it. You should start saying how happy you are that there is no politics forum and see them put one in a week.
Well, it was an attempt at a joke thread, but we’ve taken it seriously, so there’s actually discussion in there about street crime and how to avoid being a victim in some of the rougher areas of the city.
Sweet! It’ll be like our very own CSI!
(ftr: I think it’s ridiculous, but I don’t think it’ll hurt anything, so…er…Whynot?)