And security, which I’m more than willing to praise them for.
As far as naming you a mod, Arnold, you’re right…you were an Admin back when I started here (yeah, I’ve been here THAT LONG!) and my brain still sees that title under your name. Sorry.
But I have to admit, if you’re not speaking as an Admin or mod, what are you talking about, “we”? Who’s doing this shaping? The staff, or “we” the board members? I can see the staff being seen as shaping, because it is they who create new fora and decide what the fora will be about. However…they don’t populate those fora.
To shift to a garden analogy, the board staff create the hardscaping: the paths and rock garden areas and garden walls and raised beds and such. And we appreciate that. And sometimes that’s all a garden is…look at Zen meditation gardens. But to most people, in most venues that people think of as “gardens”, that’s not enough. You need flowers, you need plants, you need water features. This is a garden that the Reader was nice enough to dig out for us, but it would be three acres of dirt without the members bringing and growing plants and flowers and things like that.
I repeat, in the new analogy, that without the members, the advertising opportunities are limited to the top three fora, which pretty much constitute a couple of shade trees next to a water fountain. The staff is great at what they do, but what they do isn’t what’s bringing people to this board. People come to this board because of two things: The Straight Dope column and content by members.
You can claim that it’s the staff’s impeccable taste that makes this place a success, but that’s not true. It’s OUR taste, the collective taste of the SDMB, that makes this place a success. That’s a taste that ranges from substantive discussions of opera to threads about poo-splatter patterns. People come as much for the lowest of the MPSIMS low as they do for the highest-brow of Cafe Society and Great Debates. And every last bit of it is created by us, no matter how it’s “shaped” by staff.
