I agree, a lot of the changes have been good, and xenforo looks nice. What I didn't like was the pushiness of it. Also, I never really got a good reason why vBulletin needed to be upgraded and if it would help anything , and there needed to be more research put into that. Let's just hope there aren't any major changes too quickly (well, aside from moving the board over, I guess. That's pretty major.)
Lanz, thank you for all the time and effort you've put into the place. It's a thankless job sometimes and your work was appreciated. Thank you to Tamar as well for her dedication to this site. I hope you make it through your medical issues OK. Anc, congrats and I look forward to seeing some more of your ideas carried out. You have a solid group behind you, I like the idea of a split ownership. I haven't had much time to spend here lately, but I'll be sure to raise some hell whenever I have free time. I might give Testesforge a try out this weekend to see if I can break anything.
You highlight a couple issues that have been raised before so I'll go ahead and address them as straight forward as possible. Major Changes Coming Up Aside from the board upgrade and adding new staff there are no major changes in the works for the board. There are no plans for any other major changes. There are no ideas tickling the back of my mind for any other major changes. There are smaller ones. For me (other horsemen have their own ideas for improving the board/user experience) they are: 1) Have heavy hitters in various forums take ownership over the forum. By that I mean appoint them as mod (although honestly, how much modding is done outside of the Red Room and Media Central) and task them with finding interesting topics and posting their own on topic original content. When they get tired replace them with other heavy hitters from that forum. Try to generate more discussion on a whole. For the regular community member this should have no effect (except hopefully a better forum experience). 2) Hold staff to a higher standard. One of the good things about a large number of staff on hand, and getting in the habit of a kind of informal rotation where people come in and out is that hopefully we won't get beholden to a few staff members that are carrying all the weight so can't really be told to stop doing whatever they are doing. If someone crosses a line they can be removed for a bit and then brought back later. In our minds staff shouldn't even get close to the line. If keep do keep getting close they will be talked to behind closed doors the first time and the second time they'll go back to being a regular community member, no hard feelings and we'll probably ask them to come back in a few months as other members burn out/get busy/etc. Again I don't think this will have much of an effect on the membership as a whole, except for hopefully less 3) We need to do a better job of marketing/outreach. Putting a link in your signature on other boards doesn't cut it. You have to personally PM or email a person, invite them to the board and explain why they will likely be a good fit. It has to be personal. Also we need to go back and contact ex-members. Gul and Demuirge came back b/c I emailed them. Aurora came back b/c I caused a scene in the 9th Anniversary thread and got Tamar to unban her and send her a personal invite back. It works. Once we get the board upgraded and under control I'd like to work with people on emailing ex-members that they had a connection with. I have some other marketing ideas centered around other TBBS spinoff boards (and going further if it works) that I'm working with a couple of members on. But yeah, this is mostly just external marketing. The only impact it will have on the regular community member is that I'll be asking for volunteers to help, and maybe we'll get some new members and a better experience. And that is about it. I think. If I have mentioned any other ideas to other members you have my permission to chime in and remind me of them. Major Changes in the Past Yes, I did advocate for rather radical changes in the past. To understand why, you need to understand the idea of the Overton Window. Basically at any given time there is a window of options available to any leader that people will accept. Those options are actually more important than the leaders own preferences. As I was not a leader (and thus could not choose an option) my only course of action to accomplish change was to shift the window of options in the direction I wanted. To do that I had to take pretty radical stances and argue them fiercely. But not too radical as I had to be able to argue them coherently and to organize others to support them, thus moving the window of acceptability. For instance, I did not want to get WF down to 3 or 4 forums. I only argued that to shift the window. What WF has now is basically what I was going for the whole time. We have no plans to get rid of any forums. In fact Nick has convinced me that it's worthwhile to bring back the Announcements forum for the change, as when we make a fix or figure out how to do something, we'll want an easy way to get that out. It should only be temporary, although instead of deleting it we'll probably just hide it until we need to use it again. Pretty much every other issue where I took a radical stance and pushed it stridently falls in that category. I never planned to be owner, but I really did think the board was in trouble (posting really has dropped 40% in the last 5 years) and we needed to try and stabilize it. (Thankfully the decline has slowed, hopefully we can turn the corner and get some increases) I think pretty much everything I was trying to get accomplished up to the board upgrade and outreach campaign has already been taken care of, thus, no big changes on the horizon. Hope this helps clear up things for those with doubts.
By default this means that Dayton is the new mod of the Blue Room. So when does Clyde get the sack then?
You did a good job, Lanz. From someone who knows what it's like, I can say that you were good for the board. I also understand how draining it can be to run a place and it can plain wear you down over time - or make you jaded at the least. Your tenure was good, and I wouldn't say so if I didn't think so. Hopefully your successor(s) will do just as well. Enjoy your "retirement."
40% drop in posting and failing software for over a year. That's what I call a resounding success. Fact is that Lanzman should have given up the place when outside matters became the priority. The decline may not have been so greta had new blood come in earlier.
The drop in posting is due to the smallness and somewhat staleness of this place (no new blood). That's not something Lanz (or anyone individually) could fix. It's been a constant problem here. Newbies come, see some of the behaviors and go "fuck this." There is no hook other than the community and that only seems to work for those already here. As for the board issues, well shit happens. And new blood isn't always good blood - not a slap at the new owners btw. I'm sure they'll do fine. - Sometimes stability is good.
Hey Bonz -- The next time you drop the banhammer on someone over at Trek because they got one of your mod's panties in a wad simply for thinking a little more to the right then they do, send them over here, will ya? We'll make them feel right at home*. *After accusing them of being duals and running them through their paces, of course.
In other words, we've got our own Obama! You, too, gentle Wordforger can be a community organizer in the great experiment. And don't worry, there won't be any real changes...just like Obamacare! Now go forth and drag people you know in by the hair and get those percentages up and look to your shining examples of perfect posters...the staff.. who will lead the way to a bright, shiny new era of community and unity, their threads the template of all you should be in the loving [-]village[/-] city that is Wordforge.
Lanz, you've done well, and thank you for all the hard work and giving us a place to play. To the new owners, I wish you well and success.
the only caution I would express about any of this is this: I would be careful about making staff changes in direct response to shitstorms - lest you encourage more shitstorms which, if noting else, serve to alienate the visiting public. I would suggest a staff violation would have to be blindingly obviously over the line for a dismissal to be obviously tied to the occurrence of a shitstorm. In fact...it might not be the worst idea to have a sub-forum specifically for staff complaints that wasn't visible to new posters until they had, say, 50 or 100 posts.
There's at least two worthwhile considerations on that point. 1. self-referential stuff. Newbies will always feel like an outsider if too much material requires an extensive knowledge of our board history to grok. 2. Aren't we beating the parody-thread trope to death at this point?
I'm intrigued by this notion some have expressed that ancalagon's and my politics would somehow impact board management. I mean, seriously, Ancalagon might be a filthy hippy, but we aren't installing the smell-it plug-in on the new board, so no worries on that score. Board management is not about political positions. I know this might not be true for all, but I love the diversity of opinions at Wordforge. It's one of the few politics boards I know of that isn't a star chamber. I would never stake out a position designed to alienate conservatives from participation. I want to grow the board, not shrink it. And speaking for myself as a member, I wouldn't be here if it was a liberal sounding board. There are hundreds of boards like that, and they all suck.
Feh. All the posts are floaty-in-the-ether-y. You give the board one good shake and all the words will spill out the sides. He's not an Obama until he starts banning people who refuse to use the latest versions of Internet Exploder for their healthcare. Or something like that.
Yeah, it's a pretty narrow perspective, and might say something about what those people would do in charge. We talk all the time about various things on Twitter and Facebook, Tex and I have met various times, watched football games. Ancalagon has been a guest in my home, I shagged his wife for christsake! The last thing we're going to do is try to change the political makeup of the board.
