Who runs this site? (Page 2 of 5)

when we first started we had an amazing amount of mods.  before it went public everyone was a mod.  we had to ask who didn't want to be one.  which was pretty much everyone.

now we have a few

how would more mods help?

what would active mods be doing? 

these are important things to consider.

Only nice thing about being a mod is the section other user don't have access to, Otherwise it's a ton of work with no thank you's and a high level of expectation that you have immediacy in dealing with internet troubles.

I think a few more mods would be a good idea.  There's plenty of level headed people who have been around for a while that could help out I think.

The only advantage to more moderators would be additional perspective. I'm not trying to imply that that is even needed either. I think the mods who are active do a phenomenal job of keeping this place consistant.

However, it does seem redundant and dare I say hypocritical that most mods aren't even active here in any sense of the word, while its clear they are still active in the scene. I feel, somehow, betrayed. I came to this site because it was insanely helpful. People were really cool and more than that, diverse. (Looking at you saskrotch.) You could sense the relief everyone had from 8bc being over. It was great having the two parralels when both were still active.

Now I check this site multiple times a day. Its just another release that has potential but nobody cares about (however that new wizwars is amazing). Stuff about FM synths that I don't really understand/care about (my problem, not yours). And a healthy dose of just plain wtf is going on.

My original question still stands though: who owns this site? Someone is paying for it. Where is trash80? Is it under active development? What happened to the twitter feed? I think that was a great way to keep everyone on the same page. Weird as it may sound it felt like someone was watching down and in charge.

Is it possible that the chipmusic scene is just too big to really be contained in one community any more? A suggestion I would have would be to form a web ring of other related sites that serve a more specific interest.

I hope I don't sound like I'm just complaining, I'm just trying to understand what is going on and how we got here.

The basic structure is, me and trash80 are the administrators, meaning full access to the server etc. Then there's a bunch of moderators, some of which I haven't been active for a while now.

Here's a list, also linked at the bottom of every page: http://chipmusic.org/forums/users/?mods

When the site was created, it was created in the ashes of 8bc, which was at the time going down the shitter. The moderation team mostly carried over from 8bc, and we were determined to not be 8bc and not make the same mistakes as that site. One thing we decided on was to disable post counts and use titles in order to try to avoid entitlement from being a regular or moderator. Of course, that has had the side effect that it might be unclear who's in charge.

Then there's the question of user behavior. At least *I* want this sit to be serious in nature. I want to be a place where people come and discuss music and other topics so as to be a useful resource. This is not something one person can wave a magic wand and fix. In the end, everyone, or a majority, would have to agree about this spirit to keep the site going in that direction. And so I will be called a fascist mod and idiot for closing people's joke threads, but what do you do?

Me and trash80 are also supposed to be in charge of development. Trash80 actually coded the majority of the side, and I've contributed a few small things, But because I've announced my changes, it might be easy to get the impression that I'm the major contributor. And trash80 is uper busy in his life. That is one of the causes of the stagnation of the site atm. Originally, the ite was planned to be much more feature rich, an integrated community with a calendar and other specialized features, and not just a forum with a music section tucked on top. And beyond improvements, the sites may need some tuning and optimization to avoid memory problem. All in all, what's lacking is a lot of work hours.

One possible way of solving this problem is by allowing other people to volunteer with development, but that would require finding people we trust.

Another thing is funding. Currently, the site is paid for by trash80 and is running on a slightly underpowered server. It's sort of fine atm, but there's the question, how to proceed? There are a couple of options here.

Ads: No. Donations: The thing with donations is that they're charity and usually targeted at a specific, immediate need. What would be needed for cm is continuity. It would be much more useful if people could continually donate even 50 cents a month (assuming that's not completely consumed by fees) if enough people did it, than donation drives where fewer people donate a bigger sum. A different approach to this would be to offer paid accounts with extra features, but what would those extra features be, and how do you avoid making the site less open in doing so?

But anyway, that's not an immediate problem atm anyway. Just speculating.

I just came out of my chip hiatus about 6 months ago after a few years of not being involved. My initial plan was to avoid these forums entirely because I remembered how much of a nightmare 8bc was.

But I'm glad I came back. I like the way these forums are moderated and the quality of the discussions being had. I also prefer forum based discussion as opposed to other sites like Twitter or FB.