The Issue with Attachments

The condition of my hands won't allow me to make any long posts right now, but I have to say this is a bothersome and somewhat complex issue. It's not like I haven't looked into it and tried to solve it before, but the results never met my expectations.

Just don't forget there's two sides to this argument. Yes, such an amount of mindless leeching on a forum striving for quality discussion is bothersome. Yes, few leechers actually show any gratitude or even courtesy towards the favour that GFF is doing them, and some are just outright disrespectful (cf. the Tsobanian incident during the downtime).

Yet, on the other hand, the little VGM-centered sheet music sharing community that CH used to be would probably never have expanded this much were it not for our "acceptance" of leeching and the availability of attachment space. During the time it grew with little regulation, CH attracted countless leechers, but also dozens and dozens of valid contributors, whose gathering made the appearance of some pretty rare and interesting stuff possible.

I've always thought of leeching as a necessary evil. If for 100 leechers we get one boonsen or one Lousy, then by all means it is worth it.

I've also come to accept that not everybody is actually interested in discussing anything, and that trying to force people into it would yield poor results. So long as people contribute to the community, both words and files are fine. Recently my reasoning has been that if we want the discussion side of CH to develop, it ought to be carried forward by a few core members (Dull, you two, Wafer et al.), hopefully with the random passer-by joining up now and then. I believe many people have the potential to be interested but just stop at the "whatever, this place looks dead" first impression. Better prove them otherwise, especially now that GFF is back in business for good.

As for the attachments themselves, I don't think they'd actually be that much of a problem were it not for the indifference or lack of courtesy towards GFF shown by many concerthallers. I'd rather work on the latter part than remove the attachments altogether.

Damn, this came out longer than I intended.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

The thing is, after the last two or three crashes, I asked the administration each time about the sheet music attachments, suggesting they be hosted off-site if space was an issue. And, each time, I was told it wasn't, that they could be kept on-site. And suddenly this becomes a huge problem and we're under fire. Make up your minds, guys.

As for me, eh, I don't care either way, since I was about to resign from moderation as soon as GFF was restored anyway. So I guess I'll let you guys have fun with this mess.

How ya doing, buddy?