this forum is stuck in a sort of schizophrenic limbo between "it's the community's responsibility" and "it's an extension of PR/tech support/whatever".
Well, that's probably true. A year or two ago, Jordan had suggested that we could take the forum and have it be a totally community supported thing, and offered to get me the vBulletin license. At that time, I raised a number of practical concerns, because, as a businessman, I could see future problems. Jordan never did provide the license. And I asked some questions, such as how to deal with trademark issues, because at a certain point, if we were "freenasforums.org", and CxO or marketing at iXsystems became unhappy, the obvious route to attack an external entity over which they had no direct control would be the legal process. Despite what Jordan said at the time, I was left with the impression that iX would rather have some control over it. (And, FWIW, I think that makes *sense*. From their PoV.)
The reality is that Dru was properly positioned as a community relations person to manage the forum, but that the sheer volume of traffic on the forum, and her background as a technical writer responsible for documentation rather than being a techno-jockey, probably means she's not the right person to actually be providing support or intervening in threads to guide them in a positive direction.
The problem is that everything is under the wish of the company higher employees, which is not a big problem if the company just host the forum. But as Eric said, if they start to touch the forum then that should be clear.
The touch has already been there, and the problem is that we've typically lost good people, great contributors, in the process. I'm sure that wasn't the intended result.
As for the forums and the iron fist, eh, not so much. There are good days and bad days.
That's why I think it'd be interesting to have a strategy where someone who was part of the community was given the time to actually guide things in a more positive direction. I think that's infinitely better than some arbitrary random third party outsiders being made the forum police.
The only thing which bugs me periodically are when a thread becomes locked just because someone responds to it after it's 3 months without a posting. If it were just someone trying to get attention, fine, but that isn't always the case.
Um, I've been doing a lot of thread locking and asking people not to necropost, and more recently I've been evicting their posts into new threads when I sense that it doesn't fit or something like that - in fact, right now,
we're in one of those threads!
I'm not quite clear on what it is that bugs you about this. Please feel free to elaborate. I can take constructive criticism. I started marking when I did this with "moderator notes" when someone else noted that something I did this to ended up making poor contextual sense, and so I'm trying to be more careful in that direction to. The thread edits are not intended to be a negative thing.