Quote: @"Mike Olson" said:
I miss a lot of folks that left over the politics thing, and those that have moved on in life for other reasons. I truly miss everyone and never had any real beef with anyone. There are comments made in here that underscore why the decision was made. There are also some technological reasons behind it. We had a SWEET setup a couple formats ago that I hand tweaked. Then that software became unsupported AND a security risk for users. I thought I had a software program that would allow us to move forward but it didn't and it didn't allow us to have people filter out topics that they didn't want to view. That frankly sucked. Then I found some new software that we are using now that allowed me to get pretty darn near close to the old system that we had.
I will say that in addition to having software that allowed folks to filter out political or sensitive topics there was another piece that needed to be instituted which was to keep people that couldn't handle those conversations without degrading into name calling and fighting that spilled into other topics. That was a bit hard for folks to swallow and I understand that. But as I said there are comments in here that underscore that people didn't want that spilling over and into the football related posts.
In the end it took me longer than anticipated to get a working system up and also folks wanted the open sandbox approach where anything goes. I don't begrudge anyone for it. I get it. I miss all of those folks. I do and I wish that you all had the ability to be able to post together and frequent one place.
My biggest regret for this place is knowing that I played a part in that.
Don't be that hard on yourself Mike. The Admin job is thankless by and large. As I have said before, the board split was more a Pepsi and Coke thing...it depends on what product you're looking for. The politics thing was kind of the final straw for many (poor Tempe who had to roll out the announcement) but it was also indicative of a general change in philosophy for this board...from being primarily a message board...to a concentration on original content. If you look at the result, the number of hits to this site are way up...and the number of threads and posts are way down. It's much like visiting VikingUpdate / PurplePTSD for me...I visit for the content...and than jump back to another board for interaction. Conversely, the Viking Horn generates more posting activity in a day than this board.
It does suck. Like many, I still have many friends over here (including the artist formerly known as Somewhat Awesome).
Come say hi from time to time. I'll do the same.
