1 new of 236 responses total.
I agree with slynne. I don't get where people make the conceptual jump from, ``there are problems'' to ``change for the sake of change.'' Clearly, there are some things that need to be changed. Among them: 1) Stagnation and apathy within the community. I think this is hard to guage for people *in* the community, but consider that the membership level has nearly halved in the past few years. It needs to be asked, ``why is that?'' Do people perceive that as a problem? If so, is it worth fixing? If not, why not? If peole are content with the community as it is, why bother turning on newuser? Is grex supposed to be about an *actively growing* community, or the same group of people who have always been here? 2) The spam problem and email in general. Grex email, when it works, has some serious problems. Come on, grex can do better than that. 3) The newuser thing and abuse. Once again, grex can do better than that. 4) The various staff issues. Points (2) and (3) can only be addressed with the assistance of staff, but there aren't staff resources available to address them in any real way. I've outlined several ways in which I think that at least the spam problem can be (partially) addressed (including: making email opt-in, doing automated verification via paypal and `sponsorship' of users by members to allow off-site email, putting in spam and virus filtering), but there's no one on staff with the necessary combination of time *and* experience to make any of those things happen. Is this something grex should try and correct? If so, how? Clearly some long-time users and contributers are disillusioned and unsatisfied with the direction the system is taking. Instead of just saying that they're insulting and writing them off, perhaps a better course of action is to ask *why* they're so frustrated and dissatisfied, and work from there.
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