Apologies, but this post and its follow up are going to be terse and likely contain errors. This is because, hilariously, I spent over three hours considering and writing up a series of responses… and I didn't put them anywhere with a save button. They're gone, now.
You have had, in the past, a multitude of highly skilled technical assets that were positively begging to be allowed to do this. [+ two following paragraphs]
This is all true. It also stopped being the case two years ago. We went through a lot of effort to make that happen. I mean, you refer to the 'best days' of the site, which, alright, but almost none of us were even members them, or not staff.
This includes me, which makes this sentence:
What were you afraid of, that they would show you up and render you inconsequential?
…seem really, really odd. I mean, even if by 'you' you mean 'most staff', 'most staff' also weren't involved in that, so… I no longer know what you're referring to. Perhaps I am missing something.
You already know what the people who stonewalled you were afraid of; they were highly paranoid about change. You referenced that already, at least in part ("they were treated with mistrust and accused of trying to orchestrate a takeover"). Almost all of them are now gone and the remainder have recanted.
So why even … like, say that?
Well, of course not. With your site migration plan dead in the water and the people who tried to champion that cause utterly demoralized, of course there was no need for the hardcore conservatives to stonewall anything. It's like saying that burglaries in your neighborhood have gone down when everyone's abandoned their homes and nothing but empty buildings remain.
Except it died in the water the second time after the stonewalling was removed, and not because it was stonewalled. This is all demonstrated even by the threads you link later in the thread; you see a lot of us not knowing what to do or not having the staffpower, not a lot of us saying 'don't do this' because staff stopped saying 'don't do this' mid-2012.
You're implying these hardcore conservatives are still around, haven't changed, and would stonewall anything that actually came up. I just don't see any evidence for this..
Do you, now? [+ following paragraph]
Not too many, but 'some' is more than 'zlich', which was the result of the 2010-2012 era. This is all I meant. We have a few. Too few. But I covered that, again.
How many of them can you trust to always be there for you, no matter how much you mistreat them, for the entire lifetime of this community?
Besides you specifically, none of the technically skilled staff we have recruited in the past couple years have received or reported any sort of mistreatment, to my knowledge.
As for you, that was extremely regrettable, a sentiment I have publicly expressed many times.
Your past technical assets gave you detailed plans for what had to happen in order for site migration to occur, set down to the tiniest detail. Did you simply never listen to them at all?
…You know what happened here. The plans were ignored, stonewalled, and then after the stonewalling was ended and the plans endorsed by administration, still fell through due to lack of skilled users and interest from the people with the skill.
I'm just not sure what this rhetoric is about. This was all hashed out repeatedly in public on O5; almost everyone still participating in this thread already knows it. You're talking like this is a question that hasn't already been answered.
Overworked staff and an ass-backwards site structure that doesn't allow for effective management is a cyclical problem. Without fixing one, you won't ever fix the other.
Well, alright. We are trying to fix this. Any and all suggestions are welcome.
Perhaps if you actually had an effective staff structure and ended your nonsensical policy of publicly shaming anyone who steps even slightly out of line, you wouldn't have such a horrible rate of burnout. [etc]
This is a good point, and something we've recently been trying — with highly mixed success — to address. I am particularly culpable here as well. This is a poison from our past history, and one I didn't see as a huge problem until recently, mainly because I had to go through it and I still became 'successful' on the site; however, I'm starting to see that logic is faulty.
It's also part and parcel of the 'we tear newbies new assholes' thing, which we've also been cutting down on.
Perhaps if you actually did things like brand protection, effective community outreach, and groomed the member base to be prospective veterans and staff members, you wouldn't have put yourself into this situation. There are people who have been warning you of this for years, and you didn't listen. Who is to blame for that?
Obviously, staff is to blame, as that's our job. However, past the problems we genuinely do have, we've also had quite the flood of contradictory feedback.
Additionally, two things:
(1) People have been warning us of many things over the years that turned out to be complete nonsense.
(2) We have tried to address many of those problems. Anyone who reads O5 knows that in the past year, and to a lesser extent the past two years, we have put a fuckton of work to staff doing a lot more as staff. You know this very well. But you're saying we just didn't listen, as opposed to listened, and came up with solutions, but the solutions weren't effective enough, and we're still trying.
I expect this peculiar representation is why Bryx (IMO incorrectly) took your words as unnecessarily venomous. I don't see them that way, myself; I see them as merely unfair.
It's disappointing that all you can offer are empty excuses and misrepresentations of past events.
Well, alright, though I'm not sure what I misrepresented.
The community deserves to know why the administration continues to shuffle their feet when a site migration was planned years ago,
I agree, which is why I literally just explained why. My entire post is an attempt to discuss with the community; I'm not sure where the accusations of dishonesty are coming from.
Okay. That covers approximately 1/3 of what I'd previously written. The rest of it covered a number of suggested solutions we've received, and explanations to the people reading why we have or have not implemented them (from my own point of view, of course, which like all points of view, has flaws). Time allowing, I will attempt to write this up again, though it may end up being tl;dr'd into other posts.
Though one discouraging issue is that barely any people are discussing this topic whatsoever. Although, hell, since so much of this is re-legislating the errors of two years ago (this is not to say this is necessarily wrong, since they were pretty damn damaging errors), and most current staff — for better or for worse — aren't really fully up-to-date on the ins-and-outs of the Shit They Weren't Here For, and so don't really have a lot to add.
Right, one last thing, staff discouragement at the top and feet-dragging as a result of that has definitely been an issue as well, and I didn't intend to underplay that. Particularly since I feel that discouragement myself quite strongly.
But there's no policy that says "migration off wikidot won't happen" and there's no present intentional blocking of the project. It's dead in the water, for now, for the reasons I explained.
