Originally posted by @Fatso
Someone wants to be a mod.
This is presently a mum and dad operation, in which bletch takes the role of responsible mother and I take the role of wayward reckless poster abusing father with a drink problem.
We are naturally suited to the roles
I say all that, because despite Jack Schitt’s verbose and glowing analysis of this place, there are still a lot of things I think we can improve on. On the development front, I have been trialling the next upgrade of the forum software. tbh, many of the improvements they’ve made are ones that I had to make when this place was crawling on its arse performance wise. The text editor is an off-the-shelf jobbie, so we can probably get some improvements there by just upgrading. Preview is definitely do-able, even if it has to be custom developed.
Forum-wise, I’d like a bit more poster retention. We’ve got loads of the old crowd that have signed up, said hello and disappeared into the ether. I’m glad they’ve got accounts, like - but it’d be nice to see them around a bit more.
This place has got constraints and I’m definitely one of them. There are some people that’ll never sign up because I run the place, and I can generally live with that. They probs wouldn’t be too constructive. There have been people that I’ve pissed off, have sworn off and that’ll happen too. Soz.
However, I’ve also seen (through the admin panel) people that have got a load of downvotes and sworn off the place too, so voting may not necessarily be the self-moderating panacea Jack has painted it as. I definitely think it does more good than ill, though.
There are two other huge constraints. First, it’s the choice to allow really bad language. Some people have plenty of answers to Cartman’s brilliant question “What’s the big fucking deal, bitch?”. “It’s rude. I don’t like it. You can use better words, y’know.” Fuck 'em. If it’s good enough for RAWK, we can do it too.
Finally, and I make no apologies for this, it’s the barrier to entry. We’ve got a lot of quality contributors that write some fairly intelligent shit. That can be intimidating for some people, but again, it probably does more good than ill. Probably deters people from joining up just to start shite.