Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Jan. 19 2008, 05:06 |
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I don't even honestly remember exactly when it was that we did all the shuffling around, and who made what decisions (I know that this topic is from January last year, but I have a feeling the reshuffle was a little time before that).
As I remember, there was concern at the time that the forum was getting too big, and that there was too much stuff on it. Part of the solution we arrived at was to get rid of some of the areas which overlapped too much with others, as well as some of those which just weren't being used. Out of those which overlapped, we moved a fair number of topics to other places, but we did sit down and ask "Is anyone going to want to read this again?". I really don't remember how many cases there were where we answered "no" and in the cases where we did, I don't completely remember why we arrived at that answer - all I can say is that it seemed logical at the time (and they were mostly ones which hadn't been touched for at least a year).
I remember there were certain cases of members who spent their time exclusively in things like the hurt and heal polls and appeared to be there for no reason other than bumping up their post counts. I'm aware that they were in the minority, but it did cause some antagonism, so I think it would be fair to say that we weren't totally happy with the direction that some of those topics were headed in. I'm afraid I don't remember the specifics of exactly who the people in question were, or what topics were involved, but I believe that's the kind of direction that the thinking behind the decisions was in.
We would have reviewed those topics and discussed whether they had content which made them worth keeping, and I'd suppose that we felt that if anything in there was worth reading, nobody would bother trawling through all the other posts to find it - we could well have been wrong there, but like I said, we did feel a wee bit antagonised by them, so perhaps weren't in the most charitable of moods when it came to making that decision. If you're thinking that doesn't sound like a terribly healthy situation, I think I'd probably agree with you - I kept a very low profile here for about a year afterwards, staying very much behind the scenes, as I felt without a bit of distance, I was going to end up making things worse.
I do understand how people feel about the topics here and how it can feel rather like their contribution to the community isn't valued when they're deleted; we're sorry if anyone feels that way in connection with this situation.
It does make it helpful for future reference if topics are kept nicely organised - give them a nice, descriptive title and try to not let it wander too far off topic (of course a little bit of wandering is natural, and indeed can lead to interesting things, and the odd bit of irrelevance can be fun), that way it'll be much easier to find when you go looking for in in a few years' time, and the chances of it getting mistaken for something irrelevant are infinitely smaller.
The support of Mike and Universal is very welcome. We very much hope that our collaboration with them will bring interesting things for the coming year and beyond.
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