I appreciate you suggesting me! I would be interested but I'm not sure I would be able to do a great job right now. I have the site open a lot while I'm working but it's not something I feel I can focus on responsibly. I already split my time between my job, housework, and now I have private tutoring. Plus I'm gonna be moving and having a lot of life changes in general over the next few months.

I'll think about it in the summer once things calm down, haha.

Like Marie, I also don't like this volunteer job. I stepped down in 2015 and only came back because I was asked to help out. So now I basically log in, delete spam and ban spambots. On the rare occasion that there's an interesting post, I might comment. I understand that the mods are an easy group to blame for things, but think the apathy is all around here. For one thing, like a lot of old internet forums, this site just not very active. The owners of the site are apathetic about maintaining it, so making changes, including even changing mod status, is always a low priority at best. And in my experience, a lot of the members in general are ambivalent about this place as well.

A systematic way of working might be a little more time demanding, though not necessarily by that much. I think it would probably make the job of modding much more enjoyable by adding a stronger sense of purpose, unity and hopefully achievement if you're actually able to make some worthwhile changes.

And beating a dead horse, I still think mods should unionize and organize a strike. Demand things like a better spambot captcha and a vbulletin update. Using MB on a smart phone feels dumb compared to a more modern forum.

I appreciate your optimism about Advameg's responsiveness, but if they haven't made those updates to City Data, there's no way it's going to happen here.

Yac striking would be the only effective mode of that tbh. Now that the replacement doesn't really interact with the community, that's less likely. A mod strike would just overload the site with spam and ruin the member experience until it gets shut down once it begins taking up too much server space since it's low priority on their end. Ditching the defeatist approach and just communicating whatever changes we need to them would probably work better but we also shouldn't be surprised if the outcome is predictable.

I just figure if they're too apathetic to respond, then actually striking probably isn't much of a risk. Say you don't bust spambots for a week. What happens? Make it an experiment, announce it and we can watch what happens together.

We might learn or clarify a bit more regarding Advameg and their intentions and it might even be kinda fun. Or at least interesting.

Edit:

Oh and I'd like to vouch for Synthgirl who is terrific and we'd all be lucky to have her modding for whatever amount of time she can spare :)

All good points, especially the bolded.

You’d steal everyone’s PMs

Classic MB moment here.

:laughing: