Sorry I can't participate in this thread as much as I'd like as I'm in the midst of a Busy Work Day.
If it's a case of we have to give up a thread to get a new thread, I'd also suggest
Veronica Mars
as a possible sacrifice. But I'd rather not have to shoot an old tired & faithful dog in order to bring a new puppy into the family, as it were.
And seriously, the prospects for VM being renewed seem slim (and Lost only somewhat better), so it may be a case of the threads finding a natural end-point anyway. They're both down to a relative trickle of posts at this point, while BS is a-burst.
In fact, I could see BSG or Supernatural or Eureka as other serious candidates for breakout threads, but I think that
Heroes
has the broadest community-building and -consensing appeal. Also, it has a blonde cheerleader and other Whedon-esque elements that renders it thematically congruent to our community's historic focus.
Oh, and it's also on major network broadcast TV, which once again speaks to the reason most Buffistas may find it literally accessible.
In closing, I'd also note that the last thread we added was over six months ago, so it's not like we're willy-nilly expanding the board without some time to see how the previous expansion has affected our server load and community cohesiveness.
Oh, you are too expanding all willy-nilly. Threads everywhere! Posters these days. It's like you don't even remember when we just had Buffy. Okay, Buffy and Angel. And Spike. And Bureau. And that young whippersnapper BHP just had to come in and usher us into the age of the Natters. Craxy! Out of control!
Erm. Excuse me. That is to say, I love Heroes, I'm still anti-proliferationista.
As much as I'd like to see a thread for just Heroes, I'm not sure we'll have the traffic to justify it. We've all seen what happens with a hit show that peters out relatively quickly, we end up with dead threads. I'm not saying Heroes will have that problem, but we've been awful quick to jump at the newest trend and finding later that people are laughing at the size of our pant hem or the height of our shoes. Eventually, we turn to self mockery to deflect the negative attention, but still, the posting volume goes way down and it seems a waste of space.
What I'd rather see is splitting Boxed Set into two or more threads. The traffic has gotten so heavy that because I watch 3 or 4 of the shows in there, if I miss one episode of something I have a tendency of staying out of the thread until I watch it. But then that means I miss the discussion of the shows that I do manage to catch for that week. I may end up hundreds of posts behind. Now, this is just me and what I think would be my optimal reading routine, but it does have merit. We could split it into two threads and do it alphabetically. We could mix and match so that each thread draws relatively the same volume based on past usage. If we close a couple of threads (I'm looking at you Lost and VM), it wouldn't be proliferating to repurpose the space used. Best of both worlds, maybe?
I like the way Boxed Set is now, with Heroes and BSG and Eureka and SPN andthe SGs and whatnot all peacefully coexisting. It's taken me a while to get used to how it (the thread) works, but now that I have it seems to work well.
I'm not ideologically opposed to a Heroes thread, but it doesn't seem necessary to me.
Adding a Heroes thread does have the possibility of adding load on the server. We could, in theory, add a whole new bunch of users who are Heroes fans. In a worst-case scenario, we could start attracting Heroes VIPs to the board, and increase the server load dramatically.
Do you really think that all that's holding the Heroes VIP's back from posting is that we haven't given them their own thread? That seems unlikely to me.
Given that Burrell, a long-time member, was unaware where we were discussing Heroes, yes I do.
Given that Burrell, a long-time member, was unaware where we were discussing Heroes, yes I do.
Are you replying to Rob? I haven't heard any word of Heroes VIPs knowing we exist.
We need to talk, then. Because I've been attributing slower query times to increased size of the table being queried. All the relevant queries are tuned as finely as I can get them.
But it's not clear how adding a thread increases the size of the table in a measurable way. I mean, Natter overwhelms any of the threads where proposing for the amount it contributes to table growth.
I thought Tom was replying about the necessity of the thread.
I don't think that the possibility of VIPs posting should have anything to do with whether or not we have a thread for a show. I wasn't aware that we had any connections that way to Heroes.
I think we should wait until we know it's fate before discussing closing the Veronica Mars thread.
