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Ladies and gentlemen, there are going to be some changes to the boards functionality running through in the next few days. Some of it will be fairly minor stuff and you should barely notice it. Other bits of it are more enormous and will probably not work very well or piss large numbers of people off initially. Please don't feel that these changes represent a fait accompli - they will probably be extremely unbalanced initially and result in problems for some users and, basically, we'll just have to work on fixing those issues. Initial functioning must be considered to be highly experimental and potentially doomed to be irritating, but you can rest assured that it will be a priority to fix any problems should the emerge. So can I ask you all to be patient, accomodating and not too initially judgemental if you're not keen on what appears to be going on technically.
Some people are also going to have some more philosophical problems with the solutions that we're suggesting/testing. All I can say is that pragmatics and ideal board mechanics are at loggerheads here. There are things we'd like to do that we can't do completely openly and yet if we don't do them at all, the board will gradually suffer and die. These changes are a structured compromise designed to help stop that happening... We'll see if they work, and if they don't we'll change them.
I have to say, I'm tremendously excited by some of this stuff. It'll be the biggest shift in using the board since we moved to distributed moderation models in the first place, and hopefully it's one step towards a greater distribution of power to members throughout the site rather than just to the moderators. |
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