Life In 19x19

fwiffo wrote:I feel a little bad that Don has been badmouthed, and that he's pretty much lost a community that he created.

And he did an awesome job in helping shape this community in the first place.

xed_over wrote:

fwiffo wrote:I feel a little bad that Don has been badmouthed, and that he's pretty much lost a community that he created.

And he did an awesome job in helping shape this community in the first place.

Yes he did. But this is common in many start up ventures. Once it outgrows the founder, they often can't let it go to grow beyond their capabilities to lead.

To me, "Who knows" and "I am just fed up/Don't Care anymore" connotes more or less the same thing. And this is where most of the votes went to.

I think it's very sad that Don has been badmouthed, as I certainly don't think he deserved that with the time and effort he put in.

However, at the same time, he obviously doesn't have the capacity (time or energy) to steer the framework for the community any more, and I don't feel bad that we have all decided to move on. GoDiscussions.com was his baby, and he managed to make an excellent Go community when there just wasn't one. Now he can move on himself without having the stress of looking after a community he's no longer involved in, and we can have the community we've been wanting recently. Sounds like a win-win for me, and for my part I'm thankful for him for what he did - I'm not feeling guilty about the move though, it feels like a natural progression now.

topazg wrote:I think it's very sad that Don has been badmouthed, as I certainly don't think he deserved that with the time and effort he put in.

However, at the same time, he obviously doesn't have the capacity (time or energy) to steer the framework for the community any more, and I don't feel bad that we have all decided to move on. GoDiscussions.com was his baby, and he managed to make an excellent Go community when there just wasn't one. Now he can move on himself without having the stress of looking after a community he's no longer involved in, and we can have the community we've been wanting recently. Sounds like a win-win for me, and for my part I'm thankful for him for what he did - I'm not feeling guilty about the move though, it feels like a natural progression now.

This.

I completely agree.

For better or worse, we still need to thank Don for getting this community to the point it's at. If everybody hadn't been brought together and all become close, the sort of outpouring we're seeing on this forum (all the time and effort from a lot of different people!) wouldn't be here.

I still hope that Don does repair the database at some time. If only to resurrect the information...

Agree that Don deserves credit for getting a true alternative to RGG up and running.

But ... I have always had a few nagging thoughts, that I would not dare post on GD out of respect for what Don did there.

Now he can move on himself without having the stress of looking after a community he's no longer involved in,

... was he ever involved? Obviously I don't mean to suggest that he wasn't involved at all, he did much work on GD. But was he ever involved in Go the game, thinking about it, discussing it? I honestly cannot recall a single post by Don in a thread about playing Go, be it analysis, problems, what have you. I was sometimes left thinking, does he even play? And why start a Go forum, and call it "GoDiscussions," if you are not interested in discussing Go? I never really understood. I can't imagine he was getting rich on ads.

Perhaps if Don makes it here as member at large, we will have an answer about his actual interest in Go.

I suspect Don probably lost interest in Go.
Just like how I am the only sysop of Sudopedia and I lost interest in Sudoku. The owner of Sudopedia apparently lost all interest as well, and I don't have the rights to appoint other admins or sysops...
This is exactly the kind of experience that made me advocate moving GD to a place where transferring maintainership isn't a problem, and preferably with multiple admins. Thankfully, this is the case.

Don seemed to get progressively less active as time wore on. In the beginning he used to post quite a lot, perhaps he was always more of a reader? I have no idea how much he played Go in real life, and to be honest that doesn't matter to me anyway, I do think he deserves credit for creating a popular forum that totally replaced Rec.Flames.Go and in some ways SL.

OK, I searched his posts at GD, and found that at the beginning he did have some posts in Go-related threads. I guess I shoulda done that first .. sorry Don.

Yeah, people lose interest in things, it happens. As unkx80 and others say, community maintaintership may be better for this reason.

Actually, there was a community, in rgg. Too bad the "discussions" were often off-topic in peculiar ways. And the diagram and sgf functionality is much better here. But there definitely were some "persons" already frequenting and knowing each others in rgg.

I think a more pertinent question here is: What happens if/when GD does go back up? Do we all suddenly move back and repost moves on our Malkovich games and go about our lives?

I personally think it would depend on the nature of Don's reply. What if Don was willing to give the forum up to the active moderation staff, and step down?

Violence wrote:What if Don was willing to give the forum up to the active moderation staff, and step down?

That would essentially make it the same as this place, so in that case we could just have it redirect to here. All mods could be invited to be mods here, and nothing would change.

I don't want to be controversial but who has bad mouthed Don? Unless I missed it, I haven't seen anyone personally bad mouth him. I think we were justified in being fed up with a bad situation, that's why we're here, but it feels like we're eulogizing Don when it's the demise of godiscussions if anything that should be mourned.

Don obviously deserves all the credit and respect for starting godiscussions when it was desperately needed but no one has suggested anything to the contrary. I think we should focus instead on celebrating the new/not-so-new community. Let's give ourselves some credit here.

xed_over wrote:

fwiffo wrote:I feel a little bad that Don has been badmouthed, and that he's pretty much lost a community that he created.

And he did an awesome job in helping shape this community in the first place.

All he had to do was say "I'm a bit swamped. Would anybody care to help?" and he would have had competent programmers standing in line waiting to volunteer to help.

Sure, life gets complicated. We have to earn a living. We get ill. We have families. They get ill. Sometimes we just get bored. It wouldn't have mattered why he couldn't or wouldn't do it - all he had to do was ask. He could have even announced that he was going to sit on his laurels and that he wanted someone else to do the hard work. Somebody would have done it for him.

But by doing nothing, he pissed away a lot of goodwill that he had earned over the years.