Haltingly Forward

Thursday, 27 May 2010 04:27

 I guess you guys have been wondering if this anniversary season is ever going to get off the ground. I’ve been wondering that, too. My plans lie around me in ruins. This slow,  halting progress does not even remotely resemble what I had in mind.

As soon as AS2 kicked off, my boss suddenly decided she desperately needed me to be around a lot more, my partner’s work situation finally made the turn that would allow us to start planning a small business, the pollen in this godforsaken place forced me into start living in an allergy medication-induced fog, and the muse started knocking urgently on my door, begging for attention.

So here I sit, still looking for the time when I’ll feel less overwhelmed. My calendar is giving me very little hope. So I’ll just keep going, try to balance the burdens on my shoulders, and cross my fingers for an opening sometime soon.

I’ve been using a lot of my TCFL time putting out fires lately, as I’m sure you’ve all seen. (Well, technically, you’ve only seen maybe half of it, considering how much was handled privately.) But I have managed to knock out a few little things in between. So here’s the update:

* The new forums are slowly getting their feet up under them. Old threads relevant to these topics are being shifted into new homes a little at a time and new threads are making their way there. All three of these new forums were started on a trial basis. If any of them “bomb” and don’t earn enough content to keep them afloat, the threads will be moved back to the Pub and the forum deleted. It’s too early to tell, but I think it’s likely at least 2 of these forums will survive the trial period.

*  The effort to save our archive continues. As time allows, we’re going through old threads and editing them, to try to lighten the load on our database. What we’ve found so far is that the problem of single emote/single word posts pales in comparison to a much larger problem: Gigantic quotes. People who are quoting giant chunks of previous posts to reply to only a small portion of those quotes are a big part of our problem. PLEASE quote only the text you need, folks. The six paragraphs composed by the poster before you do NOT need to be in our database twice.

* I just did another clean out of our member list tonight. You may have noticed the count dropped by nearly 50. The accounts I deleted were those of members who registered, but stopped visiting, and never posted. (I only knock out zero post accounts that have not logged in for at least 3 months on these sessions.) The accounts are considered abandoned, and are deleted with no ill will. Those folks are welcome to create new accounts if they ever return to TCFL. I just detest having artificially inflated membership numbers. Judging by the large number of zero post accounts that are younger than 3 months old, I’m betting I’ll have a lot more deleting to do in the coming months, depending of course on if those members come back and visit.

* There are 3 founder accounts that have zero posts, and I refuse to delete those. I’ve instead tagged them with the “Founding Member” rank line, as a reminder to preserve them. As I stated last year, if any founder would like this rank line to replace the post count-based rank titles (student, wisdom seeker, etc.), drop me a PM and I’ll change it for you.

* As you’ve probably seen, TCFL is currently dealing with a troll problem. The staff is currently discussing a few possible options to better protect TCFL, including changes to our registration settings. Things may not be running too smoothly for a bit. Just hang on for the ride guys. We’ll get through this soon enough.

More Later.

~Stacey

 

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