Architecht

Just a quick reminder, that if you had one and it's missing, you can PM me with what it was to get it put back.

I'd just try clearing your cache and cookies and logging back in.

Basically, PayPal has an agreement with you. That agreement says, hey - you can use our service to sell goods, and get the benefit of buyers who are more comfortable using PayPal as a payment method. The reason you get access to those people is because we provide all kinds of neat stuff like buyer protection, etc.. What we require of you is - if you want access to our customers, then you can't charge our customers differently. The 3% is your cost, and you should be HAPPY to pay it, because we delivered a customer to you who might not otherwise have considered buying from you. So their intent is this - if you don't want to absorb the cost of PayPal fees as a kind of "commission" to us for giving you a buyer, then you can't use our service -- because it hurts out business to make things more expensive for buyers by passing the fees on, and therefore gives a benefit to YOUR business (more buyers) for free. In their minds, and in their agreement - you are the one benefiting from a bigger market of buyers. And you hsould pay for it.

It's on "ok" feature, in my opinion. It would be better if it weren't called a leaderboard and/or didn't count up like for each person. It's the "scoring" of people I think that causes people to game the system. I think it's more valuable when it shows you posts that were liked alot than when it counts up liker for each poster. That helps you discover great posts that you missed because it was inside a thread you weren't reading.

The reasons have been covered a few times, but regardless, I upped the limit again.

See now, that would make a good custom title, too!

Seriously still running out of likes? How many do you think you would use in day?

Oh, those are good'uns!

In the office working on a big project. I also tend to contribute more when I'm tracking a thread where the community is actively giving good feedback / reflecting on the state of the boards, etc.. So once I'm engaged, I kind of track it through until it dies down a bit and people move on to other things.

I think it's pretty common for me to react to requests for changes and make them. I generally look for consensus / broad support for change requests though, but it's not a one dimensional decision like "Hey, if it's popular, do it!". It depends on these factors: How broadly supported is it? Is there a strong segment of members opposing it or simply remaining silent (indicating it's not beneficial to them)? Is it a self-evident win with no appreciable downside? What's the ratio? How costly / time consuming is the change? Where does its benefit/cost ratio fall in relation to other improvements being worked on? (remember, this area covers far more than changes to the boards) There are usually some passionate members around with a few ideas that they are convinced are clear wins - but they don't always consider the broader picture of all of the above factors. Or if they do, they weigh them differently than I do and/or than the CCG folks who actually set budget and priorities do. That can make the lack of reaction to a "sure fire win" (in one person's opinion) feel like complacency. If a bunch of people request is, there's no notable downside, few people are in opposition, and it's cheap and easy to do (making it not very competitive with other planned improvements) - those are easy. But most requests aren't that clearly a win. I would say between you and me, for example, that you can sometimes get pretty enthusiastic about some ideas that are mostly championed by you, and maybe endorsed by a couple of other people. When you don't see that self-evident improvement acted on quickly, it feels pretty bad. From my point of view, I read them, put them through the above set of considerations - and often just wait to see if they gain momentum. It doesn't mean they aren't good ideas. I mean, someone has to think of it first - lack of popularity doesn't mean it's bad - but it does effect priority. For example, on the likes system - many people at first didn't even want likes and wanted them removed. Should I have acted on that feedback? No. It wasn't universal. Over time, others came out and said they enjoyed the feature - and even more telling was the fact that many people were using them. We put like limits in place because they were being actively abused by some - both fake accounts, and people trying to treat it like a competition that they could/should rig. A few people noted it was restrictive. Also, I after watching the system for a while, it seemed that despite the competition rigging, the most popular posts would probably rise to the top despite the shenanigans to exchange likes. So we raised them and took advantage of an easy tweak to provide even more to long time / highly active members because it was an easy way to raise limits without incurring abuses from fake accounts. After that, many folks got quiet about it and seemed to not be hitting the limits much. In this thread, as the usage and popularity of the like system continued to grow, it seems that more people were legitimately hitting the like limits again. So I raised it again. It's just based on "watchful waiting" - which is a concept used in medicine because often it's better to see how the condition evolves than to do something more active and risk incurring more harm than good. It's like that for most product development / product management. You can't make all of the people happy all of the time. But you can keep improving within the boundaries of budget / priority you're given.

And the way the new software handles quotes - only quoting one post by default instead of nested quotes - and allowing you to easily highlight part of a post and quote just that - has really cut down on quote spam.

Although, I will point out that there's a cool little x in the upper right of every signature where you can choose to turn all sigs off OR just hide that person's sig. So when someone has a HUGE signature, you can ignore it.

The problem is we want some of those spiders. We'd just like them to be polite and not hit the boards with the equivalent of 400 users constantly browsing the site. Some spiders are polite, some you can give hints about how fast you'd like them hit the site, and some (like Baidu) don't care what you think. If you ban them, you lose search engine traffic. I would just up the server resource for LEGIT spiders, but telling legit from bad actors can be a real chore, AND we're already at the top end of the cloud hosted plan provided by the boards. But if we have regular problems due to server load, we'll definitely either cut back on the spiders or break through to a new class of hosting as needed. But not if it was a temporary blip.

Nothing that I know about. That cloudflare Ray ID isn't actually an error message. More like a tracking code for the servers involved, I think. Usually when you see a cloudflare error, it means that the servers BEHIND cloudflare aren't responding in a timely manner so cloudflare gave up. Unfortunately, that also means that you as the user (and me as an admin) don't get to see the real error message. But if it isn't continuing to happen, it may have just been a temporary issue with server load. A while back, we were getting spammed by some keyword research scraping spider that was pounding the boards. We banned those IP addresses, but lately, I've been seeing the number of guest accounts spiking upwards. I can see right now that some Chinese computers are hammering at the servers. Could be the Baidu (Chinese search engine spider), or it might just be a customer of theirs buying server space in their cloud offering.

The year you joined the boards: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/0274cb18-92af-42e5-a0e8-8a34e248a7d8 Now... whenever now is: https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/6c0dd545-6e9e-4f0f-9155-a0cfc46ac227

Fair point. I do view these things from the long perspective, so the sentiments of the moment are always in that context for me, and that can make it feel like I'm not listening. That said, part of the reason I have a list of these threads at all is because I do listen. I know they exist because I care about how people are feeling. These boards are great, and the knowledgeable people rummaging around here are a treasure. The community is supportive, and has camaraderie and friendships, and drama, and all the things you see in a vibrant, caring group. You guys should all be proud of the community you have created, and proud of being members of it.

Time to update the end is coming thread? Sadly, some of the old links don't work, and I couldn't identify them all Ironically, each successive thread about how the boards are past their prime has more replies than the previous versions. That said, I do think the growth of social media, and things like facebook groups have reduced the "market share" of conversations that message boards have. A dedicated message board like this is still the best way to have long form conversations among aficionados, but some of the other avenues for discussion have soaked up some users. I always read these threads with interest (even though I am being a little tongue in cheek about it with the below thread), because there is a real ebb and flow to the community that is important to respect. I'm always interested in how I can help the community grow, either by leading, following or getting out of the way. Oh, and by the way - like limits raised a bit.

But it was briefly taken away...and you lost the ...aaaarrrgh! There's a weird behavior in the boards that we have tried to get the software vendor to fix. Basically, when someone passes the post count threshold, they become a seasoned vet. But because it's a boards-only permissions group, when you log out and back in, it resets you to a "member". As soon as you make another post, it promotes you again. It's a bit annoying.

Well, that's one view. Granted, sometimes the creation of a sub forum for which there isn't interest creates a ghost town. But sometimes it allow people with interest in a topic to gather together and feed off of each other's enthusiasm.

I'm not opposed to raising like limits. I just think it's better to find a number that's needed by most users, than to take the cap off entirely. Ideally, abusers would hit the limit, but most legitimate users wouldn't notice that there is one. Seasoned vets have a higher limit because they aren't going to be fake accounts liking things to be disruptive, but because some switch flips when you hit 10k posts and you are now better at liking. It was just a convenient pre-existing group to grant more likes. We already raised the limits once. We'll probably do it again if the cap is being run into repeatedly by normal users. It's just that, as Marwood says when he brought it up previously (and we raised the cap at that time), after that "I thought I had some good points really, but no one joined me in the fight so I gave up." -- It didn't seem like many people were running into the limit. So it seems we're somewhat close to where the limit should be. Maybe a little low.

Would it help to create a sub forum of some sort based around story discussions? It might feel a little like the movies sub forum. I could see focusing it a few different ways: Threads about the story line of anything newly released Threads about any story line that you are currently reading right now Other?

Good point. I revised the approach. If you check out the first post on this thread, you will now find a link that shows you all of those threads, and allows you to click on the black dot to jump to new posts. Basically, if you add an "infinite" tag to a post, it will show up in that link. https://www.cgccomics.com/boards/search/?&type=forums_topic&tags=infinite

You are correct sir. I just tried it myself and that no longer works. We filed a ticket with the boards maker to tell them jumping to a new PM works in the pop up, but not on the all messages screen... they apparently resolved that inconsistency by removing the function from the pop up.... @Scott =)