psst... "rumor control" on TB

This is rumor control.

As you have probably heard by now, the format conversion which occurred this week on The Nest national boards is not going as smoothly as had been hoped for. In addition to slow loading times, the site developers are scrambling to discover why threads and replies within threads are disappearing/reappearing randomly, why mod's accesses to tools on their boards are turning off and on, as well as the usual off formatting bugs that were expected.

Nest Dani and Bump Kathleen, in addition to the regular customer support staff have had their hands full dealing with the chaos that has followed. This does include a surge in opportunistic spamminess, however the lion's share has been caused by community members themselves.

In one case, an entire Nest board moved en mass and took over a Bump board. In fact, it was a sponsored board and their behavior there was frankly stunning. While it all seemed in good fun at the beginning, it soon became so bad and rife with TOU violations that almost every post for several hours had to be deleted. Ultimately, what I saw was that they took 'the audacity of the Nest for changing its format' as a personal assault. Eventually, they moved their entire group en mass to an independent outside message board. As is their right. However, I feel I should mention it here for one very specific reason.

(This next part is my opinion, and not rumor control)

Their group did not have any real connection to or need for new members, and their members behaved in a way that expressed an extreme sense of entitlement. Our group is by very definition, transitory and supportive. Some certainly are forced by the betrayal of their bodies to stay much longer than they'd like, but most TTCALers move through in a matter of months. If TTCAL moves out next week en mass, this board will survive, new members will roll through all the time. However, what makes this board special and valuable to the loss community will have been lost.

For this reason, I ask that we all come to play next week with our BGPs on. Expect to be inconvenienced. Expect to hate the new format. Expect posts to disappear and reappear randomly. If you can't handle it, take a week off and come back the following week. But do come back.

Also, all their shenanigans wasted many man-hours of staff that could have been spent sorting through reports of glitches and fixing them.

A fellow mod who is 'older than dirt' and has been active since the beginning wrote on her board...

"You do realize that there is always a huge clustermess right around the time of conversions, right?

Here's how it goes:

A new format is rolled out.
Chaos ensues, so many problems are pointed out, etc.
Everyone b!tches, whines, freaks out, threatens to leave, etc.
In a few days, everything settles down, everyone gets used to the new format, everything gets back to normal. "



I've been around here and on other communities long enough to see the truth in the statement.

(back to rumor control)

There are things to be addressed...

1) Individual post counts (and therefore status as bronze, silver, etc) may go down until the entire Knot/Nest/Bump collective communities have finished the conversion. The reason is that some post counts are only available on the old format side of the servers. Once the format conversion is complete, these will be reunified and your individual post count/status will be restored. The only expected exception is that if any portion of your post count is old enough to have been archived (very early, like 2004 early), the archived portion will not be reunited.

2) The new emoticons pretty much suck. They are fugly and are basically second gen AOL in appearance. For example, smileysadwink. I will point out that spiffy emoticons from other sources are super easy to copy and paste into your OPs and replies. That's how I do my [lovestruck] and [lol] and [hug] . I think it's a safe guess that upgrading these will not be a particularly high priority for some time to come, so if you like your emoticons, I suggest saving the ones you like to a separate document to have as reference. But, they do have both a whole and a broken heart finally.

3) The BMBs for 2013 will be created as soon as the dust begins to settle after the conversion next week. It is already a high programming priority. Jan 2013 is currently accessible from the Bump Communities home page, if you find yourself in need of it in the near future.

4) If you need to report a glitch or problem to The Bump, please send an email to community@thebump.com or page me to see if I know if it's already being worked on.

5) During the earliest part of the conversion, expect that every sticky post ever created on this board will show up at the top of the new board. It will take time to have them removed again, and other than being of mild historic interest, they probably won't carry much relevance now. I will do my utmost to hijack one of them and edit it to become a "READ THIS BEFORE POSTING HERE" sticky, including the board view on phishing and drivebys.

6) Some glitches appear to be related to Chrome. Using FireFox appears to work better. This dichotomy in board performance by browser has been reported to the developers. A lot.

7) All hell broke lose on the Nest. People took advantage of the chaos to launch personal attacks against people they held grudges against. Including one individual who posted someone's full personal information to several boards. Expect swift bans for shenanigans along these lines.

8) EDIT YOUR SIGGIES NOW. It's not that you won't be able to later, it's all about the code. The new format does not accept or support [*IMG] HTML code. Make sure that all your images in your siggy use <*a href=...> code. If you do not currently have your images uploaded to a hosting site like TinyPic.com, it's easy to do so and grab the <*a href=...> code. Doing it now will make the transition more seamless.



Basically, this transition will be what we make of it. It can be a reason to act like spoiled brats, or it can be what is, after all we've been through personally, a minor hiccup in our lives. I vote for mid-day margaritas and a sense of humor.

Have a Happy Weekend, see you next week.

someone else posted it first

Wowwwwww

damn, my first heath. i didn't see it already. sorry.

Now *this* is the type of sincere comment we at the Bump encourage. See how much better behaved my wards are than yours Nest Dani?

This was me, while reading:

Correct. And look how nicely my Bumpies responded, compared to you hooligans from Married Life.

That was a fun read.

And yeah, I don't know why I quoted there. I'm still getting used to this shit.

Their boards will fill back up. I get why they are so unconcerned.

But they still suck cock for money.

Nothing like a good calming message from your friendly neighborhood dictator to fight the fires

Spoiled brats? Yeah, how dare the customers of a commercial website express dissatisfaction with a product they were loyal to getting completely fucked.

I'm curious...does anyone know of any actual users of TN or TB were consulted about the format changes before the staff stated working on it? Was there any kind of focus group? Based on the total fuckery of the new format, I'd have to assume no. And it that case, I sincerely hope their business goes under. It deserves to.

LOL, I love the idea of the local boards as a test, considering they were all but abandoned after the change.

Doesn't testing something usually imply that you pay attention to the results?

I am NOT fucking older than dirt. harumph.