I appreciate you wading in on my behalf, Mari, but I don't care if Steve calls me El, or anything else, for that matter. I'm not going to have the energy or interest to wade through his reams of crap anyway, and I'll probably just skip over his posts to get to things that are actually interesting.

Steve, call me whatever, really. I'm pretty sure you're going to get bored and leave eventually when no one else will match your 300 to 1 posting ratio.

Oh, I realize that, Patrick. His response to you WAS rather rude, though, and I was just using it as one of my several examples. I am we'll aware you can take care of yourself around here. ;)

You poor thing... they shoulda given you hazard pay!

Nah, they just told us where we could order our own body armor from. As usual, Colorado was cutting its budget for higher education - the funding for combat pay had been cut the year before I was hired. ;)

No insults implied. You are just reading it the way you want to read it. No paybacks will be issued. No innuendos. Example: I may use the name "El" because I'll never remember his real name, and El is quick and easy to type. the "as far as I'm concerned" part mostly spoke to my poor memory for other than the name I see repeatedly on the screen. I even threw in a smiley face, to connote lightheartedness. And there is a similar explanation for every other so-called snide remark you posted, but who wants to read a paragraph explaining why I talk the way I do.

It's all good, mari, you seem like a decent person to me protecting your territory from interlopers. But a message board is like a melting-pot. Here I am melting!

Good luck with the move, btw.

Thanks, El. You may be right, or I may stay here for years.

Mari and Elspode are just confused, as I am, that you haven't yet figured out that vBulliten wasn't designed to support "scroll-board/democratic thread"-style communications. As far as I know, this could be some strange demonstration of political metaphor, since you never elected to answer my previous question as to why you want to continue your pattern of the previous four years at AG despite logging into a system that was clearly designed around a different posting methodology. Would you care to elaborate on your inability/refusal to adapt? Without an explanation, I think a lot of people here are just going to continue to chalk your actions up as being inconsiderate.

Shit, Happy M, I'll fess up to that just for the hell of it. Get wise noobs. This may appear to be an ethereal gathering but the rules of polite society apply just as strongly here as any physical forum.(Maybe even more so if you wanna keep running with the herd). You go bursting into any unsuspecting group with polarising opinions and you're an instant footnote.
And that's all I have to say about that.

Oh, sorry, you're right, I didn't intentionally ignore your question, Kit. I'm just juggling internet and work issues at the moment. No real aggressive politics involved for me. Everyday is a new one here. What I mean is, I'm not here to ruin your fun, or attack your board, which is now my board too. I have no subversive agenda.

My questions:

If a thread isn't interesting to you (the universal "you") then don't respond and watch it sink. Who does it bother?

Can you explain to me how "vBulliten" wasn't designed to support a more frenetic style of posting and multiple threads? I'm not being sarcastic. Is it a bandwith concern, or space on a server. I'm not really computer tech-savy, I don't even get what a "bandwidth" problem is.

Do the owners get upset, due to TECHNICAL reasons, if a person posts here 40 times a day? Or is it just the users that see it as an interruption of their natural flow?

I can adapt, probably will. Although I did say I won't change, truly I do not refuse to. Thinking back, I meant the spirit of how I post, my style is not to post nonsense spam BS posts all day. As you can see, I respond very well to those that want to know about me. But why should I adapt fully? And don't think I'm being rude (I hope I don't have to keep typing that) but, what would happen if I keep posting the things that interest me in the fashion I like to post them? What if I'm sort of sarcastic, but good-intentioned? What if my style of posting has merits not yet realized by the good people of the cellar?

I am not going to come in here and be sugar sweet to everyone. I'll just be myself. And I know, I may not make friends here. I'm here to post and get feedback, international feedback, humorous feedback, good news, bad news, etc.

I appreciate your clear well-worded post, Kit. Sorry if you or other people think I'm inconsiderate.

What if I don't want to run with the herd? May I still post here?

I've frequented Wakachan-driven boards and they work along the democratic model. Someone posts something, it gets bumped if it is supported ("saged" if it isn't), and threads can see their birth and death in less than a day. If you aren't around to participate, you'll completely miss what was being discussed, which is considered normal. Posts are quoted not by content, but by post number and are responded to as such.

vB and BB encourage people to take the time to piece through long posts, quote pieces of them, and reply to them. Posts are infrequent enough that replies are notified by e-mail to each user that is "subscribed" to the thread and nothing is "weighted" based upon interest or activity. Topics do get "bumped", but only in the sense that they filter to the top of what is more like an RSS-feed of recent activity instead of urgent or popular topics getting higher priority. In fact, it is common on vB board for topics from weeks, months, even several years ago will be ressurected and re-enter into recent activity. This isn't because they were weighted as more popular by system activity, but because content was deemed by the users to be interesting and worth retrieving. We have a lot of people, myself included, that might not visit this system in several days because of travel or job/school related pressure and we don't feel [extremely] overwhelmed when we return because it the style of post history on vB gives you time to catch up with discussions.

You've already changed your reply-style to discuss this topic with me, so I don't see why you'll have any trouble at all adapting.

You don't have to adapt fully, but the way the board keeps track of what is "recent" (date and time driven) versus what is "interesting" (strictly user driven) ends up making posts issued in rapid succession viewed more as spam than discussion. Usually if a new user posts a new thread instead of first attempting to respond to existing ones, the entries are automatically wiped from the system because they get flagged as robots. This isn't to say anyone's posts are actual spam, but they appear that way if they're short and fast enough.

Then trust me, you'll fit in really, really well here. :)

Thanks! I hope you don't write off the community immediately, either, for their reactions. In recent years on vB style boards, spam and post-attacks have become common and are difficult to deal with at an administrative level. If the very first thing you did on here was join in and began slamming people for their political stance using inflammatory language in decent-sized/timed replies, you'd be cheered as a hero by at least half of the people here, but even the most well intentioned, quick, short posts set off enough warning flags that people become very suspicious.

It's just a matter of what people are used to and the methodology the system lends itself to. Nothing big.

Personally, not to long ago I was wondering when we'd get some new blood. It seemed like it had been awhile. (at least in the threads I frequent) If I wanted more of the EXACT same, I would never bother to refresh. Seems like the noobs (everytime i see that i read boobs)have settled down and will fit in nicely.

I have GOT to get back to work. When the boss is away...the Rat posts away.

Thank you Kit. You're my kind of message boardie, or cellarite, or dwellar. :)

Lab, I appreciate that thought, even if I wasn't the new blood you were looking for. ;) I know, I know... I'm really not that sensitive about this whole thing. We'll laugh about it someday. Anyway, thanks for being the first person on this board that I've seen post the word "boob". It's one of my favorite words. Well actually the plural version of it is.

::wonders if there's a boob forum here:: ::insert appropriate smiley here::

Just look for threads that include "NSFW" in the headline.

Methinks we need to bring back the "This IS porn" thread, again.

Not trying to be a nudge, but I still don't understand the answer to the above question. Is there a techie reason why it's bad to post multiple threads here at The Cellar?

It's called the signal to noise ratio.

You can post 40 times/day with no problem, as long as they're mostly replies. Creating many new threads in a day doesn't give weight to anything, floods the main boards, and pushes out active conversation. There is no techie reason why you can't, but it tends to look like spam on a vB board.

I find it actually pretty difficult to explain, but I guess I could say that it would be like browsing through the stacks at the library and finding slips of paper with text scratched on them scattered amoungst the novels. There are a lot of threads, here, that invite short replies (go check out Guess What It Is) but the boards, themselves, get difficult to sift through with lots of new threads. The threads are intended to carry over many days with the conversation going on inside rather than conversation being carried on in the form of new threads.

...and now I'm just trying to sound like I actually know what I'm talking about, so I'm going to shut up, slink off to find coffee, and maybe try my hand at working while in the office for once.

Work? Damn! This feels strange!

quick question @all: won't "bad" threads drop off the page automatically, if ignored? (I mean, not posted on)

Nope. One thread can get 2,000 replies and be very popular while 20 threads with 0 replies will push it off. The opposite is true.

@Kitsune: Right, but when the zero replies are recieved, each reply on the other thread will push it back up, a "bump" - isn't this a democratic process for "voting" on which threads are "good" and which are "bad"? I understand that new threads are initially at the top. (btw I still don't know what "saging" is)

Democratic? All it takes is one reply, and it's back to the top. They're ordered by most recent, not most popular. That's how a ton of nothing threads can keep the good ones down, especially if new ones keep being generated.

Yeah, or earlier less-successful attempts.

@Happy Monkey: I understand what you're saying, and maybe I'm just splitting hairs here, but, statistically speaking, the threads that "nobody" likes will be replaced by the theads that are active. One reply, one "vote" at a time, the board will take the shape of what the people who are actually posting there want it to be. This isn't a deliberate process, it's an automatic occurance.

I'd agree if the general layout encouraged it, but that doesn't seem to be how it works on the vB boards I've been on. Starting a plethora of threads on a scroll-style board has always been accepted while it generally gets viewed as spam on vB-style systems. Here, threads tend to appear in sparse numbers. If you scroll through the history of the board, you'll notice the pattern.

I couldn't explain on a technical level why the interface seems to encourage the post style it does, but it seems to work that way at most places like this and I tend to think that this is what the system was designed to accommodate. New threads are few, posts tend to run relatively long, and more time is invested in the content. I don't doubt that the community has a great deal of influence, too, but I just don't see scroll-style content on most vB/phpBB boards.

I can't say you're free to do as you wish here (I don't run this place, or any other), but I can say that creating a high number of threads in a short period of time is generally viewed as spam because it isn't what people expect. If that's your thing, I suppose you can do it, but I'm not sure you should expect the warmest reception.

As for SAGEing, I was once on an image board running Wakachan (mostly used for image posts, namely anime artwork) that recognized "SAGE" as the opposite of "BUMP" -- it would actively push the thread down in the list if people didn't approve of it, allowing for a vote. Digg uses thumbs-up/down to push comments down.

hahaha @ SAGEing! hahahaha! that is classic! We needed that at AG, just for laughs.

@Kitsune: Again, splitting hairs here, but isn't this a "scroll style" board? If not, why not? New posts and responded posts go to the top, unresponded posts sink to the bottom. Is that not "scrolling" or am I missing something?

I was going to ask the same thing. This seems like a scroll style board to me.

I think Kit is being very helpful and patient with us. Thank God for someone that answers questions from newbies. Sorry if it's interfering with work (but isn't that what message boards do?)

It was actually really useful, as threads that were inappropriate or didn't meet the subject of the board didn't last long. The entire place could police itself fairly well just by what the users bumped/saged. If spam was posted, there were plenty of times you never even saw it -- the stuff was gone in the blink of an eye because it would be attacked. One problem with that, however, is that controversial topics would get burried by a couple people that opposed the discussion. Democracy, at least on that board, didn't encourage discussion very well. It was great for art and photographs, though.

Hell, I'm at work right now too. So is Steve. :::cha-ching::: ha ha ha

I'm really hitting my head on the desk, here, trying to think of a good way to explain it. Honestly, I can't. You really could flood the board with new threads and maybe it really is a community preference to not act as a scroll-style board. I just know that every vB board I've ever been on avoided that and even the site that designs it operates much in the same way The Cellar does. The replies method, quotes, interface, all seem to lend themselves to less threads/more content. (at least, to me they do)

Ah, I'm still 'new' to this board, in a way. I have a fair amount of posts, but I'm certainly not part of the close-knit community of the original and long-standing members. I just kind of float in, post something in the debates, people get mad, and I return some days later to find the debate has caught fire and switched topics entirely or boiled down to basic insults. It's awesome.

Work? What work? Oh that work. ...but it is nearly beer o'clock and skipping out early today sounds oh-so-sweet.

I'm with you Kit, it's gorgeous out today. And I'm waiting for a friend to call me for happy hour today. (C'mon already, Joe!) Outdoor drinking, on the sidewalk in NYC, drinking big margaritas.... if we dont get it done today, I have it set for tomorrow as well.

Grrrr... already it's getting cool out too. I vote for half day at work tomorrow for everybody.

Unless you read everything, a ton of nothing posts can drown out a more substantial one before you get a chance to see it. If you do read everything, a ton of nothing posts is annoying in a completely different way.

I've got the whole day off.

Of course, I'm also getting a filling, so that mitigates it a bit.

I was off all day yesterday. Went to the baby doctor with my wife (expecting), then when to the dentist, then went to get our taxes done. We got money back, which was unexpected, and then Guitar Center called to say a hardware packeage had come in for me, so I went down there and bought a hydraulic throne and a new Pearl signature Steve Ferrone snare drum (re-creation of an old Ludwig Black Beauty snare, but with chrome tube lugs and gold-plated hoops!)

I think your day off will win, unless the filling turns out to be a lot of fun. I may do taxes as well.

Oh, well, I'll open the windows at least.

I am so excited about my new snare drum. You don't even want to get me started.

How about posting a picture of it in the "Images" section, I'd like to see that.
My buddy has a black Ludwig setup like Bonzo's with a double base. :drummer:

Looks like Rich has some company. If I could play something it would be the drums. I spent 3 years trying to learn the guitar and absolutely sucked at it. I still have the guitar, tho. Just can't bring myself to sell it.

What is it with this "T" word?..... it's still March! loads of time...... :o

I WANT TO EAT THEM NOW !!!:yum:

this thread has lasted way too long ;)

I won a GREAT Gibson guitar on MTV's Remote Control in 1989. Still have it, still love it. I make myself happy when I play it, but no one else.

So how much has been raised for the misplaced AG'ers fund by now... :p