Thank you tm and Enki for your posts that at least show some willingness to understand how things are for us, having been staff you'll know a bit better how important trust is behind-the-scenes.
I'd say closer to 5%.
One of the issues is that while there is a formal path for moderators through to administration, there isn't one for those who have the technical aptitude to help with server work.
In the past, the site has been lucky in that more than a few of the staff who were trusted enough and had the good judgment to become administrators were also handy with server administration. Think about how much selection, discussion and approval a single staff member has to go through to rise to Administrator.
Then try and consider a role that has complete, unrestricted server access. How do you vet someone for a role like that? Previously such decisions were made for us... as you've hinted to, in the coming year, there'll be some major changes to operations and hopefully this will mean the chance for more hands to work on these issues.
At times I've also found it frustrating that management of this site has erred on the side of paranoia when it comes to these roles, but after spending more than a year doing it, seeing what I have access to, what I could do to the site, to it's reputation with a single mistake, I'm beginning to understand how hard it is to pick people to take them on.
Or to sum it up in one sentence; who would you trust to not read private messages? How can you trust that I haven't? How, over a medium like the internet, can you ascertain enough about someone to make that decision? Considering that privacy and anonymity are such core foundations to enable the type of discussion BL allows, when you consider the repercussions of a violation of those principles, then you realise that when it comes to server access, there really is no such thing as paranoia.
On the bright side, one of the newest additions to the server is a de-personalised (no IPs, emails, PM's) copy of BL for testing purposes. This should make life a lot easier when it comes to testing new modules, I hope that early in the near year Tapatalk is something we can try on it.
I've taken a closer look at this thing since I made those comments. %)
Tapatalk is compatible with multiple smart phones. While it is still a native mobile application, the fact that clients are available for virtually all platforms and it's emergence as a de-facto mobile portal for vBulletin forums means there's no reason we shouldn't be looking at it.
I know vBulletin are working on their own iPhone app, and Tapatalk has it's competitors, but I think most people agree that this is probably the quickest and neatest solution, now and in the long-term, that BL should be looking at for mobile.
I'd say closer to 5%.
One of the issues is that while there is a formal path for moderators through to administration, there isn't one for those who have the technical aptitude to help with server work.
In the past, the site has been lucky in that more than a few of the staff who were trusted enough and had the good judgment to become administrators were also handy with server administration. Think about how much selection, discussion and approval a single staff member has to go through to rise to Administrator.
Then try and consider a role that has complete, unrestricted server access. How do you vet someone for a role like that? Previously such decisions were made for us... as you've hinted to, in the coming year, there'll be some major changes to operations and hopefully this will mean the chance for more hands to work on these issues.
At times I've also found it frustrating that management of this site has erred on the side of paranoia when it comes to these roles, but after spending more than a year doing it, seeing what I have access to, what I could do to the site, to it's reputation with a single mistake, I'm beginning to understand how hard it is to pick people to take them on.
Or to sum it up in one sentence; who would you trust to not read private messages? How can you trust that I haven't? How, over a medium like the internet, can you ascertain enough about someone to make that decision? Considering that privacy and anonymity are such core foundations to enable the type of discussion BL allows, when you consider the repercussions of a violation of those principles, then you realise that when it comes to server access, there really is no such thing as paranoia.
On the bright side, one of the newest additions to the server is a de-personalised (no IPs, emails, PM's) copy of BL for testing purposes. This should make life a lot easier when it comes to testing new modules, I hope that early in the near year Tapatalk is something we can try on it.
Enki said:
I've taken a closer look at this thing since I made those comments. %)
Tapatalk is compatible with multiple smart phones. While it is still a native mobile application, the fact that clients are available for virtually all platforms and it's emergence as a de-facto mobile portal for vBulletin forums means there's no reason we shouldn't be looking at it.
I know vBulletin are working on their own iPhone app, and Tapatalk has it's competitors, but I think most people agree that this is probably the quickest and neatest solution, now and in the long-term, that BL should be looking at for mobile.
They check here pretty regularly, so I'm sure we'll hear from one soon.
