I’m a member of a pay-to-post website (Not SD) that recently revamped itself (they went to a Vbulletin format) and it is hilariously fucked up. I keep getting logged out AFTER posting (thus losing what I posted), everyone is still listed as a “guest” (and so cannot use the “edit” function, which we all felt strongly we wanted) and numerous other glitches remain–BUT the vast majority of posts on the “technical issues” part of the site are devoted to the most intense asskissing of the mods on the site I can imagine–“You guys are doing SUCH a great job!” “Thanks for all the hard work” “You’re the best!!” ad nauseum–now, while I have no doubt that the mods and admins here are super-terrific people and that they are working very hard, I totally don’t get why they’re being singled out for overwhelming praise in the face of some of the most fucked-up and incompetent website management I’ve ever seen. I mean, they announced that the site would be changed soon–this was last summer, and they responded not by changing the site within a few weeks but by announcing half a year later that they now had a deadline in mind of a few months away, then they failed to meet that deadline, and when they finally rolled it out late THIS summer (that’s “soon”?), it had more bugs than a NYC tenement. And while some posters are trying to help by pointing out the issues they’re dealing with in navigating the new site, the vast majority of responses are of the abject asskissing variety.
Could you suggest a reason for this mode of response? It just seems totally wacky to me. Stockholm syndrome? Human nature?
They realize that mods usually have no control over the mechanics of board operation, and yet they volunteer to stick round to do the best they can anyway?
Assuming the mods are volunteers, chances are they are fielding questions from a decent number of angry posters, for no compensation. There’s nothing wrong with being appreciative of that.
People who are being paid, perhaps the admin who fouled up the changes, are more responsible for the issues. However, they are also human beings who are likely trying their best to fix it, and already feel a lot of pressure over the problems. They deserve encouragement rather than ridicule.
To be honest, I wouldn’t go so far as to claim the admin of a buggy site was doing a “great” job, I would focus on my confidence that they’ll get the bugs ironed out.
Because they are very likely not working nights, and even if you tell people of an outage in advance, they get shitty because it interferes with their browsing times. And god forbid something unforeseen goes wrong and the outage needs to go on longer than scheduled.
Also, there’s a lot of bad software out there that is like a Jenga puzzle. You modify one chunk of code to fix a bug and that might shift the blocks and the whole thing goes down. Better to know that 8/10 features are working correctly and keeping it that way is less dangerous than looking at the other 2 issues and maybe screwing the other 8 working features up.
In addition, looking at your post, I’m guessing that they didn’t hire appropriately trained staff to fix the problem. Or their staff is just getting accustomed to vBulletin. Or, unbeknownst to you, the programmer is also the IT guy on staff and he’s busy fixing the printer before the boss fires him.
Hell, they might not even be paying their site ops team.
Some people are appreciative of what they have, even if it’s imperfect, instead of constantly trying desperately to find new things to bitch and moan about. Weird.