Right. I assume by now everybody's been somewhat clued in via PMs and e-mails and whatever other means about what happened on Friday. But we might as well air this all out in public so we're all on the same page.
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Simply put, I over-reacted.
Aside from Alfdogg, I think I'm right in saying I'm the only one here who really uses the rest of the board regularly. But I don't profess to know much about board history. So when I logged on to see Alf banned and the mess going on in Site Feedback with Leena, my intitial reaction was "this could be bad". And since the only one of us who really knew what the fuck was going on was Alfdogg and he wasn't around at the time, I made the decision to start covering our asses incase things went downhill from there. So, I passed my over-reaction on to Zack.
I guess Zack had the same "cover our asses" attitude I did, or just sensed mine, because while I was scrambling around with other shit he quickly got into contact with the guy running The Pit about getting some board space should we need it. By the time the mess here at TSM got sorted out and everything got back to normal, Ron had very quickly bailed us out (potentially) and things had developed from there at a pretty impressive pace. So that's why there's an OAOAST folder at The Pit now.
Even though the whole thing turned out to be a 'joke', it kinda woke us up to a couple of things. One, we should probably be archiving shows anyway, which I've actually been doing for a couple of years with the most recent shows. We're now covered from 05-09 and I'll be working on 2004 when I next get spare time. Two, forums aren't as stable as you think. I think we all expect when we log on for TSM to come up no problems, it'll always be there. But it's not just the board drama that threatens that. There's always the potential for posts or posters to accidently get lost and on more than one ocassion the board's been down or under maintenance when I've come on to post something. So naturally it makes sense to have a second option if things go wrong. Yes, you could argue it never has before on a big scale so why worry, but the point is it could and a second base isn't neccessarily vital, but it'll be a help.
Turn out, we might have lucked out from the mess.
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So.
Since it would be an extremely dick move to suddenly back out on The Pit after the guys running it were so helpful on Friday, we're going to try and push on. Zack is of the opinion that being there could be beneficial to us and I'm inclined to agree.
That doesn't mean we're suddenly leaving TSM! I've already told CWM (MWN now I guess?) that we understand the situation a little better now and now that it's blown over, we're not intending to cut and run at first possible opportunity, just keeping our options open.
I understand the majority of people are going to be comfortable here at TSM still. But let's face it, a change of scenery... well, 'adding of new scenery'... it might be good for everyone. For the time being at least, I think we should be trying to run operations at both boards as much as possible and see how things work out. Then we can evaluate a little later. Let's face it, it's not like we post much on the board during a week anyway, so cross-posting should hardly be a major hassle. I'm happy to take care of posting all the shows there once Patty's posted them here. At the moment everybody seems to be messing around with the OAO thread and that's fine. Once everything's been discussed and things settle down we can go from there.
Once we've given it a try, then we can all consider where we go from there.
Anyway, that's my take. The point of this thread is to see what everybody else thinks. So consider this a chance to sound off. If you've got any suggestions or reservations or anything then say so. If you want to waste 15 minutes of your life typing up something as long as this like I just have, feel free. It'd be good to get everybody's views on this, considering it just happened between me and Zack due to the speed of it. So, please, vent away.
I know Alf and Ed are already registered over there, if anyone else else needs it here's the link to The Pit. http://www.thepitforums.com/index.php
