River ,'Objects In Space'
A thread to discuss naming threads, board policy, new thread suggestions, and anything else that has to do with board administration and maintenance. Guaranteed to include lively debate and polls. Natter discouraged, but not deleted.
Current Stompy Feet: ita, Jon B, DXMachina, P.M. Marcontell, Liese S., amych
(It's vaguely amusing to me to have heard that some of the TWoP mods have lurked here before, but I think they stick to the show threads.)
(I thought of that, as I was posting, but decided I didn't give a good darn, either. Let them eat cake. Or something.)
(Also - I hope Strega lurks long enough to overcome the extremely wrong attitude s/he has about Wesley.)
(Also - I hope Strega lurks long enough to overcome the extremely wrong attitude s/he has about Wesley.)
(She, I think.)
(Suspect she had to choose between stubborn and right a while back, and stuck with stubborn.)
t /natter, honest.
Umm, WX is kind of back, but apparently has a new limit for threads that aren't active. Will this affect it's use as a contingency area?
sumi, I checked and they still allow you to mark a thread "permanent", which means it won't be automatically deleted. All of our threads are marked as permanent. The only change they made was to lower the maximum number of days for an inactive non-permanent thread to hang around before it's killed.
Whew.
Allyson just posted this link in Natter, but vis a vis the discussion we've sort of been having in fits and starts lately, about who we are and how we function, I think it's really interesting and relevant.
I was just coming over with that 'Suela. Instead, I'll just drop some quotes that made me go "Ah."
he was driving himself crazy, in the colloquial sense of the term, trying to figure out whether or not he should be looking at the situation as: Are these individuals taking action on their own? Or is this a coordinated group?
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So there's this question "What is required to make a large, long-lived online group successful?" and I think I can now answer with some confidence: "It depends." I'm hoping to flesh that answer out a little bit in the next ten years.
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Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
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The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group
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The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in.
I do disagree, however, with his "things to design for" section.
Isn't the ID numbers a way of determining an "Old Hat" ita?
There's also backchannel. It's all so familiar. At the Bronze, people used shout out lists as a way to sort of announce how long they've been there. Status. Or announcing that they've been around forever, frequently.
I'm sorry that he doesn't talk about death-by-obsolescence as well as death-by-flameout, though.