Quote:
Originally Posted by Mindi
As I told llamabeast, kindness and patience would go far in being heard. Threats will get you no where.
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Mindi, I have to say you're coming across as extremely defensive and basically attacking the people in this community who are overwhelmingly being polite and offering constructive criticism, and feedback on how they use the forum and their preferences (note: everyone should follow this example). Llamabeast's posts (as always) were extremely polite and he was voicing opinions which seem to be overwhelmingly the sentiment of the people I've talked to in the community. Responding with a "STFU, this is how it is and you can take it or leave it" is an astoundingly great way to get people to do exactly that. I'm a professional software developer myself (as are several members of our community), and am quite familiar with the unsatisfiable demands of unreasonable customers and the difficulty of having people criticize something you've just spent a lot of time and effort on. I'm also realize that well thought out feedback is absolute gold and telling your users that they should just do everything differently because it works fine for how you use it is a great way to alienate your user base.
It's perfectly valid to say "I hear what you're saying, but we can't do it that way because of technical/business reasons". You did that a couple times, but mostly what I'm hearing is "we decided to do it this way and its not open to discussion. Don't bug me with suggestions".
The people in this community are invested in it, and you've got to realize it feels a bit like somebody just came into the corner pub where we've been hanging out and remodeled everything, changing the beer on tap and the music played. The dart board's not there anymore and, well I'll stop the analogy there but the point is that we *want* to like the new board and simply telling us to get used to the new music is mind boggling if your intent is to keep the same community - which is what *everyone* here wants.
I don't want to beat a dead horse on the issues that have already been brought up, but the reason that people are complaining about the PMs is because this is a pretty central facet to the MP community. Chopping off functionality here is a dangerous thing, and it does seem a bit surprising given the cost of disk space and Llamabeast's suggestion to put up a donate button.
The reason people are complaining about not being able to modify their posts is that this also a central facet of this community, from keeping lists of strategy guides up to date to maintaining a hall of fame. I often update my posts for anything from typos and misspellings to revising a strategy guide in light of something new I learned. This gives people a sense of ownership for the things they post, and chopping out intangibles like this is a dangerous game.
The above two changes, at least to me, make this feel like a less intimate site. This is also I feel the root of many of the smaller complaints from the fixed width to the smaller number of visible posts to the cooler tones being used.
Anyway, I realize a whole lot of effort has gone into this change, please take these suggestions as feature requests from people who are invested in seeing the site and community flourish.