I never said that. I what was meant was that a merging of the four OT forums will never happen largely in part to protests by you and mm. Also, if the MF were to disappear, Wacky would either have a meltdown or disappear as well (no offense meant, btw).
If Wacky disappeared, many others would too, possibly including the new owner. There's your dreams, and then there's reality. Sorry.
Wrong again. It was first thought of and nearly implimented permanently by GTC. I'm not sure if he meant it as a troll or not, but he was on to something.
It was a troll, he'll tell you the same. He may have really wanted it for reasons other than to giggle, he probably did. But the way he did it will ensure that we'll never know for sure (or believe him if he said so).
Now, I'm only making this jibe to make a point, so don't get all huffy about it.
Due to the underwhelming success of rEFCL, I don't think you are very qualified to say what will make a board work or not.
LOL, my huffmeter didn't budge, but your point wasn't very astute, either. I keep rEFCL open so that old friends who don't post anywhere anymore have a place to return and mingle. I never cared about growing it. I have the domain and the board is open, therefore it is a success. And now you know.
The point to merging all the OT forums would be to push people out of their ruts and into the ON TOPIC forums. Which, right now, have the lowest traffic on the board.
I see that as a cyclical thing. In the past those forums had more activity based on the mix of members at the time. If Speak Freely had a more concrete shape and wasn't overrun by the current band of gypsies, maybe the upforums would look more attractive. Maybe a lot of those threads should be in GFHH, or in some new forum called The Fragile Ego Pissing Party.
The case can be made that all the media we discuss in the MF should be discussed upstairs in the right forum. Personally I agree, and I should post up there more. But we're talking about, what, a dozen people? Yes, people in the MF are comfortable. It is what it is. If others have such a problem with that and it turns into real conflict, it will be a one-sided war. If there were no longer any way to co-exist, I'm not here to fight; I would hope that we could take the MF threads and spin them off to its own board. But the reality is that the MF is the only reason that several longtime members are here, and if it goes, they would probably go too. It's up to each of us to decide if that's a good or bad thing.
As for the un-modable comment, that's a crock of shit. With the current traffic, it would only take about five mods to handle it, with about three globals and keep the same number of admins. Right now, there are too many chiefs and not enough indians.
In terms of "too many chiefs" I agree. Somehow we started letting some fora have moderators beyond the core admins. To me, that was a left turn for TK. Forums live or die by the people who post in them, and TK's 33 shadow admins should deal with business. Visible moderators just kills the fun.
You and others like you are complacent and don't want any changes because it will make you slightly uncomfortable. The only way to improve is to make changes. Them's the breaks.
We're comfortable because this is what the Mine Field became. But the idea that this somehow takes away from the rest of the board is a mistaken one. We don't recruit or poach (we never cared about such things, which is a defining trait of the MF). Ultimately we have the same agenda as anyone else at TK: we want to freely express ourselves. The forum is the result of what people there want to express. Which is what every forum should be.
What irks some is that we're not trolls, yet this is supposed to be a troll board. I don't know what to say to that; if the trolls run us over, then it's done and we go somewhere else. But it that happens, I plan on going out with a bang.
If the rest of the board isn't what you want it to be, change the rest of the board. The Mine Field's growth is not at the expense of the rest of TK. It used to have that reputation only due to its huge relative size when we had bandwidth issues. That is no longer the case.
I'm all for improvement, and while I admit to being afraid of change in general, I don't stand in its way when it's a good idea. Flushing the lower decks in with Speak Freely or whatever other fora you have in mind is a bad idea that will drive away people, and the resulting mess of a forum will not make the board look more attractive to new people who take a first look, since they will have no idea what the hell to make of it. You will have gotten rid of the forums that have more traffic, yet the forums you wanted to keep and grow will still be what they are now. To me, this is not an improvement.
There are bigger debates that usually surface in all this, like "Is TK even a troll board anymore?" It still is, but I think some don't want to admit the fact that TK became more than that a long time ago. And that this is not a bad thing. Trolling is more than threatening the President or hunting down photos of people you don't like. If that's all you can do because you heard that annoys the staff, then you're a pretty lazy troll IMHO.
To be honest, I think you and Weevil are in the middle of performing The Great Nuclear Troll of All Time by joining the staff, and I'm still not convinced that there isn't a punchline coming.
But that's just scared little me...if I get driven off this board, well, I'll be disappointed, but ultimately I have bigger things to think about than this place. As should we all.