No one is reading anyone’s pm’s (can look at the logs of whos viewed what) and I feel it has been stated numerous times that we had this capability and I reminded everyone to use encrypted pm’s a month or two ago.
so if i turned on that passphrase encrypted pms admins can’t see them or can?
Encrypted PMs go straight to the NSA.
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They can not. It is real end-to-end encryption.
And if an admin did start reading your non-encrypted PM’s, the logs of that would be visible to both other admins and every moderator as well. So while an admin can access them, they are unlikely to get away with it for long.
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It’s kinda hot knowing that the mods are sneaking peeks at the dick pics I’ve been sending Beetlejuice.
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Only admins have access, not mods.
They cannot
Is it possible to have multiple admins who share the load and one generic “admin” account that they all have access to? What if no one outside of the admin team knew 100% for sure who had access to the admin account and they only dealt with technical issues?
No. There have been many variations of the “just do the technical stuff” suggestions, and they all fail to appreciate that there is going to be exactly one person with their actual name on actual accounts, and that person is ultimately going to be responsible for everything. As such, that person is obviously going to pay closer attention to everything that goes on with the site.
And as the only other person who has ever done that, I can assure you it it annoying as fuck to inevitably get sucked into all the never ending drama bullshit.
There isn’t a technical solution. This community either stops making being an admin such a shitty job that literally nobody wants to do it (including every single person who ever has), or this community will always struggle to find somebody willing to fill the role.
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I enjoy this community, so don’t want to see it fail. I’ve also mostly ignored the forum drama.
Is there a reason we can’t have multiple admins?
What are examples of the things you get pulled into as admin that you don’t want to be pulled into?
Right now there are 2 people with access to the Discourse software admin panel for Unstuck: the account I’m posting on now and the admin account that jmakin uses. There are three people with access to the DigitalOcean account where Unstuck is hosted: me, jmakin and spidercrab. If the server stopped working, I don’t think either spider or I could get it up again, but if there were no new admin and jmakin refused to help. I would email micro and give him access and get him to fix it. If he refused I’d hit up suzzer on 2p2.
As ggoreo just noted, we do have multiple admins and always have. But in addition to the technical side, there is the server account itself. It has to be leased to a real person, under their real name. Whoever that is is going to feel obligated to monitor the site more closely. It’s easy to say, “oh, just don’t pay attention to the drama stuff”, but it’s damn near impossible to do when you’re actually in that role.
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Due to liability concerns?
Good to know we have multiple admins already as I wasn’t really paying enough attention to notice that. Don’t know how to solve the other issue.
It’s just human nature. You’re the captain of the ship.
I don’t know if I understand. I thought you both were not happy with the direction of the site, and therefore not motivated to continue doing the work required. And that’s understandable. But at the same time the site is never going to reflect exactly what a single person envisions unless the site is run much differently, and then it will die anyway.
But now I’m not sure I’m exactly understanding what you are saying.
I didn’t want the drama to exist because ldo it is always stupid and bad for the community, and I also didn’t want to be involved with it, or even aware of it. Yet I would constantly find myself spending far too much of my time on it, including thinking about it even when I wasn’t using the site at all. It made the job very unenjoyable.
I liked doing the technical part. I hated everything else that came with it. I tried to separate the two and found I could not do so. It sounds to me like jmakin ended up in the exact same place.
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As much as there is the facade of a “community driven” site, there is at least currently no real check on isolated drama or animus in the community towards the volunteers who otherwise have the support of the community, except for escallating bans that largely don’t work. There is nothing that would obligate aggrieved members to begrudgingly stfu about their grievances outside of a permanent ban. As much as the mods try to insulate the admins from complaints, everyone ultimately knows that the buck stops not with the community, not with the mods, but with the admin(s). With things as we have them now, there isn’t insulation between angry community members and admins outside of largely unpopular permanent bans.
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Yeah I could get it going again.