First of all, let me just say that I don't roll out any changes to this site or these forums without good reason, and I always consider the well-being of GameBanshee as a whole before I do. This website has become a huge part of my life and all of the decisions I have to make are given much consideration before I make them.
With that said, I will confirm that I did remove the moderator status from two members earlier today. I'm not going to disclose the reasons why I made this decision, though I will say that there are several variables involved here that nobody aside from a few key members and myself are aware of. Please do not judge this decision by what you are hearing through outside conversations, as I can guarantee you that you do not have all of the facts. It's an unfortunate set of circumstances, and I truely regret having to remove their moderator tags.
Additionally, I would like to elaborate a bit on the recent post limit policy. I feel that the ultimate goal with the new policy has been misconstrued, and that the long-term results have been blown considerably out of proportion. There are four moderators for Speak Your Mind (that is vBulletin's moderator limit for a single forum, not some conspiracy as some seem to think), and all four of them were in support of the introduction of this policy. The moderators patrolling SYM have been here for many years, so when they tell me that something will make their lives easier, I listen.
But that's not the only reason this policy was introduced. This is a policy that exists on many forums around the internet, and when you do find a forum that doesn't have a policy like this in place, you'll probably find that it has less traffic than this one or doesn't have a resource-heavy website that exists on the same server as the message board. The performance hit involved with enormous threads has been confirmed by the vBulletin developers themselves, which is why many administrators choose to limit their size.
vBulletin Developer Mike Sullivan:
"Say you have a thread of 45 posts. I want to view the 3rd page of 15 posts (posts 31 - 45). You have to sort the 45 posts by post time, count up to 31, then start returning results. Now do that with 10,000 posts where you want to view one of the last pages.
This is the same reason that searching for a specific post in a 5 million post table is going to take longer than in a 10,000 post table. Binary search algorithms (how indexes work) are O(log[2]n). They still slow down as n increases. Of course, without an index, you're looking at O(n). For a 5 million row table, that's approx 22.25 vs 5,000,000; for a 10,000 post table, 13.29 vs 10,000."
vBulletin Developer Wayne Luke:
"When a thread is pulled for viewing, there is a query that pulls the post IDs of all posts within that thread. The system then figures out paging and pulls the appropriate page of posts. On very large threads this can cause a problem with resource usage."
These are just two developer quotes of many you'll find on the vBulletin forums. If you'd like to learn more about the benefits of limiting the number of posts per thread, I recommend that you do a little more digging there.
I apologize for any inconvenience this policy may be causing, but unless the performance issue is addressed in the future and/or moderating large threads becomes easier, it's most likely here to stay. I'd appreciate it if everyone could at least try to adjust to the new policy before writing it off as some sort of attempt to impose unnecessary restrictions. If I didn't feel that it possessed some sort of value for these forums, I wouldn't have rolled it out.