New Forum - Spikey Thoughts

I've taken the dog for her last walk, and am typing this before I take her back to her family Sob 

I'm not going to repeat what others have said, but

  • It's not NAS or NAS mod's fault. I put the blame firmly with whatever IT company has been hired. I hope that they do the moral thing and either charge less, or give a few years free support.
  • Blocked members. At least everyone who has been disgruntled here was able to get on in some way. My thoughts are with the people who got an abuse email, couldn't log on and have just run away. There are lots of regulars missing. F*m*ky, P*X*fx spring to mind, but there are others too.
  • Age rule. It should be 18, but I feel particularly bad for the regular member(s) who has had the rug severely pulled from beneath their feet. I hope that their life moves on and they have no need to come back next year, but if they do I will be happy to see them. 
Parents
  • It's not NAS or NAS mod's fault. I put the blame firmly with whatever IT company has been hired.

    Technically this is true, but it leaves a lot of the responsibility on NAS for failing in their risk analysis and planning part of their project work.

    They should have had a plan for what to do if the upgrade failed - essentially rolling back to the old site until the issues could be resolved.

    This is basic project management which anyone working in the field should have included. However it is often over-ridden by senior management as "failure is not an option" so sometimes you need to accept the risk and just push on through until it is working, which seems to be what happened here.

    So I'm afraid the responsibility lies squarely on NAS's shoulders - either they failed to plan which is also on senior management for not having brought in a project manager is the in-house staff were inexperienced or it is a concious decision from senior management that we were not deserving of service continuity in the event the upgrade failed.

    Any way you look at it, senior management at NAS are where the buck stops. We were clearly not important enough as a community to them to treat with enough respect to be given the consideration through basic project planning techniques.

    I would hope they come forward with an apology (from the management, not the moderators) and explanation but if they are true to form we will be ignored.

  • I can't believe it wasn't tested properly, in any commercial situation you'd never work again if you created this shambles, not that it would be allowed to happen, it would to disruptive and expensive to the business concerned and potentially fatal depending on what the program was for.

  • in any commercial situation you'd never work again if you created this shambles, not that it would be allowed to happen, it would to disruptive and expensive to the business concerned

    NAS are a charity and I always found charities don't take things like this nearly as seriously as businesses do. It sometimes feels like they are doing us a favour and we should be grateful for whatever we get (this isn't aimed at NAS but charities in general).

    I guess we need to manage our expectations better.

  • I guess we need to manage our expectations better.

    I think we do.

    I was on the Shutterstock forum and they found it difficult to manage regarding spam so they just got rid of it which was quite painful for regular users after years of its existence.

    NAS could do the same thing - just say, well, it's just not worth funding + maintaining out of our charitable funds + close it down.

Reply
  • I guess we need to manage our expectations better.

    I think we do.

    I was on the Shutterstock forum and they found it difficult to manage regarding spam so they just got rid of it which was quite painful for regular users after years of its existence.

    NAS could do the same thing - just say, well, it's just not worth funding + maintaining out of our charitable funds + close it down.

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