[thelist] [theforum] evolt.org admin question

[Matt Warden]

> I was once told by an unnamed admin that this was slightly marred by
> several instances of admin members discussing the rest of us behind
> our backs in extremely unprofessional and offensive ways.  If true,
> that would certainly be one reason for about three years of
> evolt.org's history having been completely blown away.  And perhaps
> someone didn't want the new appointees to see what the list they'd
> just joined had been saying the month before.

That's ridiculous. Please slap whomever told you that. admin certainly
was no prime example of professionalism, and it was never meant to be.
admin was theforum, thesite, content, and -- don't forget -- thechat.
thechat came out of a realization that there is a very special social
side to the admin, and the rest of the membership does not have a
venue for that. BUT, that doesn't mean that admin was some secret
gossip mill where we badmouthed our general membership. If such
discussions ever happened, it was because we were considering a new
admin member or we (all of evolt) were having a problem with a member
of the community and trying to decide how to deal with them.

By the way, I still have all the emails from admin since the time when
I joined in ~2001. I was an email pack-rat way before gmail. No, you
cannot see these emails; they were written in a private environment
and archives were not publicly available.

(As a side note, the obsessive splitting out of lists made sense at
the time and I don't agree that it was overkill. We had a huge volume
of work, and individuals on admin began to specialize. Instead of
scanning 100 messages looking for the 5 one cared about, one could
subscribe to the 1 or 2 lists where things one cared about were
actually discussed. The lists were combined again to an extent when
the volume fell. If you recall, we had the exact same struggle with
thelist, when thelist had HUGE volumes -- e.g. 763 posts in a week in
mid Sept 2001 -- and we kicked around the idea of splitting it into
specialized lists... which again confuses me when people say we have
not seen a reduction in volume on thelist...)

-- 
Matt Warden
Cincinnati, OH, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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