- Mon Oct 29, 2018 9:10 am
#109815
The actual back story as best I can figure, based on having been on the board on Saturday is as follows.
Early Saturday morning one of the trollish assholes from the poli board wiped out the Sam's Forum by starting hundreds of new threads and pushing all the real ones off the bottom. This forum has a lot of dedicated participants and long-running, well-tended threads. One active contributor couple, HeelsMrMrs, had just reached one million views on their dedicated thread and admin graciously put up a congrats banner for them at the top of the site. Seems like this might have triggered the troll, who mentioned it sarcastically in some of his posts. Other trolls joined in the fun and discussed the "good old days" when board wipes were common and trolls would sometimes compete to see who could wipe a forum fastest. Probably in the IG0R days, when trolling was tacitly encouraged under a sort of free speech absolutism. Anyway, this act of destruction was apparently motivated by sheer cynical malice, causing pain for the fun of watching people suffer. (Sound familiar from political life?)
As this unfolded Saturday morning, many users called on admin to ban the malefactor and restore the forum from a backup. When I checked again late Saturday afternoon the board was closed, with the notification of system maintenance taking 2-3 hours, and it has stayed that way for nearly 48 hours now. I assume that admin shut it down in order to restore it from a backup and ran into difficulties they couldn't handle with limited in-house capacity relevant to the forum software platform. Raven, please correct me if I'm wrong.
If so, admin definitely did the right thing and I hope they can get this worked out. So thanks for that!
But I do think explanations and updates should be more transparent and trustworthy. Why say "2-3 hours" for 48 hours? Some of us still have PTSD from the June, 2012, site meltdown and the cosmically/comically abysmal communication from management that lasted for over a month while our homemade explicit photos and videos of our sex lives floated around unsecured somewhere under the control of patent idiots.
A somewhat tangential but interesting angle on these events, something I recently discovered, is that the RCBB sub-domain now accounts for 40% of the redclouds.com total web traffic. That's pretty astonishing. It was only 17% in 2013. I'm not sure how this translates into VW's income stream or relates to the steady reduction of contest prizes (now half of what they were in 2013), but it sure seems to suggest they might want to reconsider their longstanding prioritization of the contests over the boards and focus more than the current minimal level of tech capacity and consumer responsiveness toward the latter. I mean this in an entirely constructive spirit.