It was stickied, and then I unstuck it (see my reply to Antilogic above), so it gets more exposure. Though this does rely on the thread remaining active.
This is ridiculous. You know how fast individual threads fall off the front page, especially for the people who only have 20 threads/page in their preferences. Are you going to get better results from people if they know where it is, or if they give up in frustration because they can't find it?
Not to be a jerk, but why? CFC is not a church. It is not a massive corporation. It isn't some monolithic institution. Staff is what, a dozen people? 15? Making changes shouldn't be treated like the Reformation or something. You've been collecting data for years. I'm sure these same general themes have been discussed for AGES. If you don't want to make changes, it's because you're (staff, not you personally) either paralyzed at the concept of making a decision, or you aren't invested enough in the product to put forth a modicum of effort to do anything.
How many developers post here? If technology is a hangup, do you think you could just ask people for help?
Could not agree more.
Example: One of my acts as a moderator was to sticky the "Comings & Goings" thread. This was received favorably by the regular members, some of whom told me they'd been requesting this for YEARS.
It was not received favorably by the senior staff, who thought it should have been "discussed" first (no, I did not ask permission to do this). Well, I knew it would have been discussed and argued about, and the cries of "It's TRADITION" that we don't do x, y, and z!!!" would have drowned out any rational reasoning. So I did a Captain Kirk and "did it anyway." The only complaints I got were from senior staff - NOT the regular members.
And has the forum fallen apart? Any extra-onerous challenges presented to the staff other than occasionally reminding people not to use that thread as a chat room? No?
Then bravo. It was a change that was done, based on a couple of requests, some straightforward reasoning, and was well-received.
Now how about some similar actions on some other issues? The admin/moderators' manual isn't that hard to understand - I read it and got most of it (it's online, btw). For anything else that might be difficult, vBulletin has a good tech forum with scads of "how-to" threads. There are "bug" threads where problems are identified, discussed, and where people do their very best to come up with solutions. How often has the current staff ever bothered to check any of this out before just saying "No."? I include the admins in this question - there are FOUR of them. Yes, I know they have offline lives. I admin my own forums, and I know how challenging it can be to find time for everything. But at least I'm willing to try new things. If it works, great. If not, it's a learning experience.
The "like" button issue is one that can be used for good or ill. I know that, having been the victim of a targeted campaign to drive my score down past 0 (certain forum privileges and accesses were dependent on having a high enough score). However, I know the staff here are much more mature than the staff on that forum (one of the admins was in on this campaign), and would not allow people to be made targets like this.
I also know that the "like" button can make a person feel good, or at least vindicated, in what they have to say. It's like the "thumbs up" on ICHC, the Green Stars on Care2, and countless other methods of approval.
While this would at first seem to be strictly an OT issue (because only OT people are that vain, right?
), I'm sure there are other places on the forum where members would like the chance to "like" others' posts (yes, in the Civ areas, too).
As with all my comments on such issues - why not a trial period? If it works, wonderful. If it doesn't, just remove it. At least you will have
tried (and people will shut up about it).
(yes, I'm sure that's not what you meant, but it's how it comes across) Installing a "like" button (for example) is not remotely the same thing as what gmail has done in changing the very functionality of sending/replying to messages (they screwed it up, in my opinion). It's not like the Invision/Zetaboards fiasco, when some of the original boards got thoroughly wrecked when the changeover happened. It's not like ICHC, where the more they "fix" things, the more non-functional they make certain basic features. Please don't suggest that putting in the "like" feature will screw up our ability to do normal posting, normal PMing, using smileys, etc. It won't.
