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Future of the Forum

Olowkow said:
This is all very upsetting, and if Darat is angry, I'm angry.

Darat should have been offered the position of total control of the forum years ago, having the power to choose his consultants, assistants and experts with a board consisting of elected members to oversee his management.
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I think Darat has done a fantastic job over the years; same for the rest of the admin/mod team. This entire situation is a spit in the face of everyone by the JREF board. No amount of sugar coating will change that.

Yeah, I'm a bit angry, too.
 
Ampulla of Vater said:
So why don't we all leave JREF then? Let icerat set up a new forum and we all head over there. I know people with seniority because of number of posts will not like it, but perhaps the new forum can import the JREF join date and number of posts, if the poster asks for it.
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Contrary to what some people believe, I don't give a **** about my post count. But losing the entire content of every debate and discussion ever had here would be a huge shame, in my opinion.
 
Ampulla of Vater said:
So why don't we all leave JREF then? Let icerat set up a new forum and we all head over there. I know people with seniority because of number of posts will not like it, but perhaps the new forum can import the JREF join date and number of posts, if the poster asks for it.
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And lose years and years of valuable discussion? I think not......
 
Darat said:
A real date of birth was only ever required for about 6 weeks 8 years ago. The DOB field is like all the other optional profile fields. Whether your DOB appears is a user option, on new accounts it defaults to not sharing it.
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I registered in 2011 and was required to provide a DOB as part of registration, so that is NOT the case.

It might have been decided not to require it but such a decision certainly was not implemented.
 
Digital Dan said:
Unfortunately for the new forum a big part of search engine rankings are incoming links, and those will be very likely be broken.
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I think we're using "value" differently. I did not mean monetizable value in terms of SEO. I meant more parochially, to we forumites who know how to use google to search for data on a specific site. The info in the archive is valuable *to me* as a resource/repositiry of useful info.
 
I don't care about my post counts or join date; I do care that the valuable resources and information contained in the years of discussion on this board might be lost.

I also care that Darat, Lisa and the rest of the admin/mod team have been treated in a very shabby way by the JREF, and I think they have every right to be pissed off. It's a despicable way to treat people who have donated their time and expertise freely over many years.
 
lionking said:
The treatment of Darat and the mods by the JREF has been shameful. Sharon, you should apologise to Darat on behalf of the Foundation.
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I don't care about being left out of the loop myself, I'm just a lowly mod, but "shameful" was the exact word I used in the Mod Area to describe how Darat has been treated. He has done yeoman's work over the last 13 years to make this place the valuable resource and entertaining community that it is, and to just be summarily discarded without even a "thanks for all the fish" is nothing less than shameful (and probably something more than shameful).
 
May I ask a practical question? Would there be any point in forum members politely emailing JREF asking that the forum be "fixed" as needed, but retained as part of the JREF mission? Would it matter if JREF received 2 emails? 200? 2000?
 
madurobob said:
I think we're using "value" differently. I did not mean monetizable value in terms of SEO. I meant more parochially, to we forumites who know how to use google to search for data on a specific site. The info in the archive is valuable *to me many of us* as a resource/repositiry of useful info.
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I will second this. Loss of the archive would be unfortunate. My Control Panel notepad contains links to various posts and threads to which I refer when needed. So not only do I want the archive of posts, I want the information I have saved in my profile. (And yes, I am aware I can copy the latter information and save it to my computer, and I will do that.)
 
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Startz said:
May I ask a practical question? Would there be any point in forum members politely emailing JREF asking that the forum be "fixed" as needed, but retained as part of the JREF mission? Would it matter if JREF received 2 emails? 200? 2000?
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No. The decision is done.
 
jasonpatterson said:
People have been talking about real names and such as important information, but honestly that crap is in the phone book.
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This thread is moving pretty fast, so I don't know if this inanity has already been addressed. On the off chance it hasn't:

The phone book is a context-free list of people that have addresses on the phone network.

That is a very different thing than a list of people that have accounts at the JREF Forums. I for one would greatly appreciate it if the custodians of my JREF account information did not take the attitude, "well, their names are in the phone book, so it's okay if we publish their association with the JREF Forums".
 
I'm honestly confused as to why exactly JREF started a forum to begin with at this point.
 
JoeBentley said:
I'm honestly confused as to why exactly JREF started a forum to begin with at this point.
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Its all been a very long, very carefully plotted practical joke and magic trick! Any minute now Randi will pop up and say "is this the card you were thinking of?"
 
jhunter1163 said:
I don't care about being left out of the loop myself, I'm just a lowly mod, but "shameful" was the exact word I used in the Mod Area to describe how Darat has been treated. He has done yeoman's work over the last 13 years to make this place the valuable resource and entertaining community that it is, and to just be summarily discarded without even a "thanks for all the fish" is nothing less than shameful (and probably something more than shameful).
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I'm glad you said that first part, because I feel the same way. (And about the rest too, of course.) I can't speak for all the mods, but I was never promised and never expected anything like a vote in policy decisions, or privileged information about future changes. The mods' work hasn't, as yet, been impugned or interfered with in any way. (The technical glitches from a few days ago don't count, and while shutting off the forum might be interpreted as interfering with moderation, it also makes moderation unnecessary.) It's mostly the admins who have really been treated badly here. I feel more mistreated, myself, as a member than as a mod.
 
I don't think that keeping an archive will need to be a path. Technically moving the forum as a whole, or moving the forum with some kind of opt-in or opt-out, or moving the forum and locking it as a static archive and starting fresh are all doable.

So it more boils down to issues of privacy and ownership and all that.

If it's decided that a clean slate has to happen because of privacy (or whatever), then keeping an archive would have the same questions (user data could be minimized, but posts would still be there and I presume that at least some people won't want their posts transferred, and a selective delete would undermine the point of an archive, depending on how many want their posts deleted I guess, but selective deleting means might as well do that in a migration).

If it's decided that privacy (or whatever) concerns can be managed via process (opt-in, opt-out, etc), then that can be done while migrating the existing database, so an archive wouldn't be necessary.

If the JREF were willing to host the archive then that would work (as nothing would change for privacy etc), but I doubt they are willing to (though hosting a static archive would require far less resources than an active forum).
 
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