[hambil]

Originally Posted by Marco van Herwaarden

I do have a lot of experience with psychologists, does that also count?

More serious i will respond to the issue you seem to be trying to raise in this thread.

A lot is in the way of communicating, from both sides! As already mentioned our staff are mostly admins and coders themself, not trained PR staff. The question is however: do you really want to have a PR professional who will just deny requests in nicer words? I doubt that.

Reaction given by staff are always (let's cover my ass: often) sincere and honest, often with a personal touch to it. What i see happening a lot is that if there is an issue, the issue is not raised in a constructive manner, but in a way that make staff feel under attack from the start.

Let me give an example based on this thread:


How do you expect someone to react on this?

You are making a lot of assumptions and acquisations in a single sentence, and yes people might give a personal (and sometimes emotional) reaction to this, instead of a nicely worded PR response.

The sentence above is not a representation of how things are.
- With the site overhaul all of our rules and policies where reviewed and we have notified the members that there have been changes.
- The policy on handling a report of a vulnerability is already in place for a long time, this is nothing new. In fact it has been announced in the past and there have been member discussions on this topic. This is not something that was put up hasty. It has maybe been reworded, but overall it is still the same policy we are already using for at least a year.

Also by putting it in the way you did, we are now focussing our attention on things then the reason you have started this thread (ie. discuss how staff handles critisism). What i also notice a lot is that arguments are repeated over and over again. Even when there has been a response (which could have been "no, because..", "yes, good suggestion" or "we will need to rethink, this might take some time") people keep repeating things like it has not been mentioned before. Result of this is that new information or points of view that might be in the same post quickly get overlooked.

Finally not all suggestion, how good they may sound, can be implemented. If people want to have an adult discussion on changes, then they must also accept that they will not always get what they want.

PS On a side note: We have already responded a few times that we are/have been listening to the remarks on the current procedure for vulnerabilities and are prepairing improvements. This however gets ignored by some () and they keep posting like nothing is happening. Well they are right, nothing is happening as we spend all the time reading the same story over and over again.

So now you have a (small) rant from me. Please take those things from this post that you can use to help us make vBulletin.org a better place for all.

Thank you for a calm response to a post that (as I myself stated) may not have been worded as well as I'd liked.

I've been in the coder discussion forum since it was formed. I know the old policy was to ask the author to fix a hack, and then only after they didn't (for a very long time in some cases) would it get either fixed by a staff, or have the files removed (but left in place, not zoomed off to a graveyard). This is exactly what happened with the shoutbox.

So, at some point either the policy was changed, or it was decided to follow the policy in place much more strictly. Either way, I don't recall it ever being discussed in the coder's forum.

Given the reactions we've gotten recently (from me and others) I can't imagine that if it had been discussed we would have just said "sounds good - thumbs up!". The things being addressed now would have been addressed then instead, and handled before they ever became an issue.

Now, I am not saying it is a one way street, and I agree with all the points you made, but there does need to be more open discussion. And moderators should perhaps be more aggressive in dealing with people who can't discuss things politely.

As for repeating things, it often happens because the staff response is "that's the policy and I don't see it changing anytime soon". It's almost become a mantra. In fact, it was said about some of the things that *are* now changing.

Nobody is perfect, and being staff can be hard at times, by that is why you have multiple staff so they can support each other when one tires or overreacts (and I don't mean support the overreaction, I mean step in and calm the waters). Mistakes will be made, but the overall atmosphere should be one of collaboration and cooperation, and it hasn't felt like that in a long while (IMHO).