Still a bad idea

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OK. So we’ve got some clarification on the closing of only certain boards. But I still think this move is a bad idea.

Do you really want to improve the boards? Then don’t just shutter a few of them. Get rid of them all.

More correctly, replace the entire board system. We all know that it’s out of date. No one knows better than the programmers at FoolHQ how hard this system is to maintain. And migration of the 20+ years of posts is nigh unto impossible. Certainly not financially feasible.

So get an all new system of forums in place. Use modern, up to date programming. Programming that can be more easily maintained and monitored. Then do a complete cut over. Take the new system live. Put the old one on ice, leaving it available only for reading.

THAT would be an actual improvement.

–Peter

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IMO, they are really after Political Asylum and any others (I personally d/n/k) like it.

Ken

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Hi Peter,

Now you’ve hit on step two. The entire board system is being refreshed but we don’t know the timing quite yet. There is a pilot program going on right now (since November actually) and we’re taking what we’ve learned there and doing design changes. I would guess maybe this summer but from your post you clearly understand the work involved so that might slip.

And the work has already been done behind the scenes to migrate the data to the new system…so posts on this board and all the other financial related boards will be migrated. The boards being closed will still be in read-only mode as mentioned in the announcement.

Jen

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IMO, they are really after Political Asylum and any others (I personally d/n/k) like it.

I agree. But this isn’t going to solve the problem.

The problem is lack of actual moderators. Two of the most successful and popular boards here (at least on the free side of things) are METAR and Saul’s. Those boards are definitely moderated. METAR is kept on track by Wendy, who I have compared to an iron fist in a velvet glove. Saul dispenses with the velvet glove for his board.

PA and similar are, frankly, barely moderated. Anything and everything goes - almost. There are a few minimal standards, standards that don’t always include civility. Moderation only happens via reported posts, and the response to such reporting is inconsistent and irregular. That makes the moderation utterly ineffective.

Most other boards, including stock boards, simply don’t get enough traffic to generate much concern. Things way out of bounds for those boards get either reported or ignored (or both). And on those boards, the responses to reported posts seem to be much more effective in keeping the boards on their rails.

After the cutoff date, the undesirable posts and/or posters will continue on other boards. Any place they can garner the attention they desire. METAR and Saul will pretty quickly dispense with these undesirables, but other boards may not.

The bottom line for me is that self-policing isn’t going to work consistently. Undesirable posts will infiltrate some boards, but will get policed out of others. And if they get entrenched on some particular board, the self-policing idea will utterly disappear. That’s already happened on two boards which have had to be reclassified from investing to political - the two flavors of Retire Early.

Years ago, there was only one retire early board, and it discussed retiring early. (Strange, that). But then political posts began to be tolerated on that board, and then only one side of political discussions was tolerated. So a second board was opened - ostensibly to get back to early retirement discussions, but in reality it just became the home for a different side of the political debate. Eventually, both were turned completely over to politics and classified as such.

The same thing will happen after certain non-financial boards are closed. The political debates will move elsewhere and will grow unless moderated out. If TMF doesn’t want that to happen, they need to provide adequate moderation to prevent it from happening. And if they’re willing to do that, they could just keep all of the existing boards open.

So I am not optimistic that these changes will have the desired outcome. But I will stick around to see what happens.

–Peter

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And the work has already been done behind the scenes to migrate the data to the new system…so posts on this board and all the other financial related boards will be migrated.

Being an IT guy myself, I can appreciate the complexities to migrate and/or reformat data to a new database. I can also assume that TMF has done a ton of programming to accommodate the data migration. But once that code has been written, it can be applied to 100, 200, even 500 boards with little incremental effort. So I think claiming massive additional effort to migrate the social boards has little to do with the real reason. My two cents.

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Being an IT guy myself, I can appreciate the complexities to migrate and/or reformat data to a new database.

As an accountant, I’d question the need to incur such costs at all. Leave the old data in place in a read-only format, and gather new data in the new format. That works particularly well for something like discussion boards, where you really aren’t going to do anything with the post content anyway (other than perhaps search it, which is something that was given up on long, LONG ago).

–Peter

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BHM:
So I think claiming massive additional effort to migrate the social boards has little to do with the real reason. My two cents.

I’m guessing, but the meetings @TMF about the decision to pull this plug were highly acrimonious, and very far from unanimous. (Even a true majority???)

With lots of grumbling and folks walking away and figuring how they were going to get decisions reversed.

Previous life, and granted, wholly different company, but that’s what I remember.

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There is a pilot program going on right now (since November actually) and we’re taking what we’ve learned there and doing design changes.

If I may boldly offer a suggestion there. As you hone in on the new board software, invite some current users to take a look and offer suggestions. Overlooking this step has happened at almost every update to the current boards over the years, resulting in lots of negative feedback from the overall user base.

If you want to look at some of those errors, just sort this board by recs and start reading around those most recommended posts. From the top of my head, memorable flops have included:

-fixed width boards that didn’t work with certain browsers, notably Safari, which made lots of Apple users unhappy.
-WYSIWYG post creation that didn’t work with certain browsers and also dropped support for certain HTML tags that had previously been allowed. Strangely, that one also left Apple users unable to post. There seems to be a theme here - test things on Macs.
-pay to play boards (with some comp’d users, thanks!) Lost a bunch of users at that point, and eventually went back to fully free.
-the clear loss of a test environment. So testing happened on the live boards. Those days were LOTS of fun, waking up on Thursday to the Wednesday night updates. Never know exactly what’s going to change and what will be broken.
-How could I forget adding an activity feed to the user’s profiles. So every post rec became public information. We used to rec in private. All those rec’s became public info. Lost a lot of trust on that one.

That’s just a few. I’m sure there are more.

Cutting to the bottom line, you have a great asset in your current user base. There are lots of users who sincerely want to make your product better. Use them as beta testers. I’m sure many would be thrilled to help. You’ve already spilled the beans on a major transition to new board software coming up. So confidentiality is officially out the window. But I’m sure you can find current posters who can keep things mostly quiet. You probably already know who they are.

I’d certainly get feedback from potential new users as well. After all, they are probably why TMF management is willing to invest in a major board upgrade. But your existing users are also important. Give them the ability to have some input in the process and they will help you as well. There’s lots of institutional knowledge there that you could easily put to use. I’m not saying that existing users must get their way, but if they have input into the process, you will almost certainly get more buy-in from them than if you exclude them entirely. It’s a balancing process.

Anyway, I hope it all works out well in the end. I’m looking forward to the improvements.

–Peter

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And the work has already been done behind the scenes to migrate the data to the new system…so posts on this board and all the other financial related boards will be migrated. The boards being closed will still be in read-only mode as mentioned in the announcement.

Instead of just shutting off the non-migrating boards, you could create new boards with the same names with the first post being a link back to the read only boards.

AJ

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