I'm sure that you know that it makes no sense from a business standpoint. You have twice the overhead. You know that the operations and the software both have to be merged.
Overhead is low enough that doubling it is not a problem.
As a software engineer, I know that merging systems that have grown organically and seperately is a nearly impossible task.
Not always. For example, there aren't a lot of different approaches to message-board databases possible. Have 100 different programmers make message-board databases, and something along the lines of 90% of the design would be identical on all 100 systems. There are only so many "right" ways to do it. For example, do you have any doubt that every message board site out there has a message table and a user table and uses a join between the two to get the screen name of the author of a post?
IMO, you will not be able to retain the SI membership, because the style of management at iHub does not fit into the mindset of SI users.
When has it been said that the style of management at iHub will be applied here.
It won't be.
BTW, do you intend to make a general public announcement to SI users? Something along the line of a home-page announcement and link, and private message to all users? Nothing more needed than a cheery "Hi, we're the new management! We think we bought a great place, and we'd like to hear how we can make it better."
Odd as it might sound, I'm too tied up with higher priorities, word is getting out well enough as it is, and I don't want to do anything yet like messing around with even a single line of the GSP that runs the place. I'll eventually have to, just to get advertising running again, and to make subscriptions possible again, but until them, I'm more focused on the database. Keep in mind that I don't know Unix or GSP (I'm slowly coming up to speed) and don't have a development environment. It's all production. However, I was noting yesterday that the webservers aren't even close to breaking a sweat (it wasn't until yesterday that I even knew how to check), so I'm going to take one of them out of the loop to use for development and let the site run on the other two. That should happen next week and then some minor changes to the GSP will happen, including, likely, a box on the homepage explaining what's happened.
Don't you think your new users deserve that? Why hasn't it been done? Why did those of us who know have to find out by following rumors to the source?
I don't know about "deserve". What I mean is I don't know what harm is being done to anyone by not already having done as you suggest. Did you suffer much when you found out by word of mouth?
Word of mouth is pretty effective.
It's just one of those things I'll have to get to when I can and in the priority order I've set. We obviously don't agree on what those priorities should be, but we don't have to. |
