- Joined
- Apr 20, 2018
- Messages
- 10,257
- Reaction score
- 4,161
- Location
- Washington, D.C.
- Gender
- Undisclosed
- Political Leaning
- Undisclosed
Preface:
Main Post:
Red:
Well, though I don't know that I dis-/agree about the five-minute limit being a poor vBulletin implementation choice, I will say that I've observed a host of DP vBulletin implementation decisions that strike me as, well, bizarre, for a discussion forum, particularly one focused on public policy and politics:
Am I defending DP's implementation of vBulletin? Hell, no -- the site administrator can do that for him-/herself. I'm merely commiserating and sharing some of my observations regarding said implementation.
COTO, I have placed my reply in a thread of my own creation ("Discussion Transfer") that is now in the "Feedback" section of the forum because the theme/tone of the discussion strikes me as content the moderators here will construe as pertaining to "moderation actions/decisions." I don't in fact see it that way, but that won't stop one or more of them from thinking it is and taking retributive action as a result. (I'd have moved it to "Where's My Binkie," but I don't know that you have access to that section of the forum.)
Main Post:
I won't have any difficulty creating polls from this point forward. I complain based on the principle that software tools are meant to facilitate use of a website, not hinder it. The 5-minute limit in particular is a poor implementation choice, and DP admin might consider extending it considerably. Not necessarily for my sake, since I now know how to work around the problem, but for newcomers who'll inevitably run into the same issue.
Thanks all the same to all who provided advice and assistance.
Red:
Well, though I don't know that I dis-/agree about the five-minute limit being a poor vBulletin implementation choice, I will say that I've observed a host of DP vBulletin implementation decisions that strike me as, well, bizarre, for a discussion forum, particularly one focused on public policy and politics:
- One's having to manually include in one's post the prior posts that are part of one's "conversation line" with another member. You can see an illustration of what I mean here: "Should Trump Resign?"
- Character limit --> Note the "official" work-around for that is to compose one's post outside of DP and then break it into multiple posts. You will find an example of that in posts 6-8 here -- "Is Quality of Life Actually Increasing?" -- and here: "Pragmatic, cultural and political etiologies of the Founders cognition on the 2nd Amendment." An alternative work-around is to write one's remarks in a MS Word document and attach the document as is done in the OP of "Is it logical to believe in God solely on the basis of the major arguments for His existence?"
- The character limit (5000 characters) including one's current content as well as the characters of the post to which one replies. (I don't know whether the character limit control can differentiate between prior and current content in any given post.)
- The character limit including the BB-code characters.
- The value of the character limit itself.
- The size limit on attachments (IIRC, less than 100 kB) as well as the document-type constraints on attachments.
- Absence of selective quoting -- You will notice that I use color-coding in some of my replies. The only reason I do that is to indicate to what statements my comments pertain, while also retaining another member's whole post so that future/other readers can see the whole context and rhetorical role of both my and the other member's comments.
Am I defending DP's implementation of vBulletin? Hell, no -- the site administrator can do that for him-/herself. I'm merely commiserating and sharing some of my observations regarding said implementation.