Why didn't I announce the closure of the JMMB?

Because I didn't feel that it was my place to. The JMMB was more of an extension of J2C since it would be nothing on its own without J2C. I feel that's the only reason that the JCMB went under. (anyone remember that? The Jazz Central Message Board, I believe) J2C was bigger at the time and as a result, the JMMB was to, and more people went there instead of the JCMB, which eventually went under (not necessarily only because of that reason, but it sure didn't help any). With that being said, the close of the JMMB was basically the official mark of the death of J2C as well. So since J2C was founded solely by Dethman, I found it fitting to let him post the final words for when the JMMB was closed. The JMMB wouldn't exist without him after all. Besides, he's a better speaker than I am anyway. I didn't tell him what to say when it closed though. He chose his own words for that.

As for Derby... I can't remember if he was a member or not. If he did, then the only reason that he wasn't an admin was because I didn't know of his l33t moderator skillz. Had I known, the JMMB might have been around longer. It's quite possible. But with the moderators and admins that we had, though they were excellent, they were still taxed to the limit. And the JMMB started to fill up with junk that slowly led to its death. They just couldn't keep up.

hehe, man I wish I had 10 Derby's back then for admins. They'd have kicked some serious butt. It's not that the JMMB was more relaxed in its moderation, it's just that we couldn't moderate the same volume of stuff that's being moderated here. In fact, I think that the JMMB had stricter rules... they were over a page long in total. But we couldn't keep up. Oh well, there's not much we could do about it. And I don't believe that there was more bad eggs back in those days, it's just that the moderators couldn't keep up.

Kinda like how people break the law less when there's more cops around. You know, that sort of thing. :-) If they can see that they're going to get away with something, they're more likely to try it.

Personally, I'd have liked to see it stay alive. If it was moderated as well as this one (and it had a better host) I'm sure it would have stayed around much longer than it did. We didn't shut it down because everything was just perfect with it. We shut it down because it had some serious problems developing with it. Ask the admins/moderators that did try to keep up with it all.

I guess in retrospect, there should have been a bit more warning. But in reality, would it have mattered? Seriously. Think about it. We post a message saying something like: "Due to the declining level of support for the JMMB and the increasing abuse of it, we will be forced to close the JMMB in 3 weeks. Sorry for the inconvenience." But what happens next? There's 3 dozen threads started that say "don't close the JMMB, we'll be good." So we keep it open. And people are good for a week or two, then the junk starts flooding in again. So we post another message and get another "we'll be good" response, but people don't stay that way for long. Yes there are people who have always been good, but do we really want them visiting a message board with swearing, spamming, and hateful messages can't be kept in check? Honestly, no. I couldn't bear to see some of the crap that was being posted where younger people were going to be reading it. Now this stuff is fine on a *mature* level, but that's not how it was being posted. And you could have warned people to the ends of the earth to stop it, but in the end you'd have only slowed it down. Like I said, we closed it to stop the bleeding.

Look... we did what we had to do. Now my view of this whole thing is from the top since I pretty much ran things. I saw it decline, I saw a lack of self-moderation from the community, and I saw how hard it was to keep the JMMB running on its own. (in the early days, I could fix the JMMB when it broke in minutes usually... in the end, it took from hours to days to fix it. Believe me, it was NOT an easy thing to keep working properly.) You have to understand, we did not close it because it had to do with a lack of Christian values. We closed it because we had to, for many reasons that the general public just didn't see.

How about this. If you feel that I made the wrong choice, step into my shoes and tell me how you would have done things differently. You know, if nothing else, maybe the suggestions could somehow be used to improve the JCF. (maybe now, maybe in the future. Who knows.... it's just ideas at this point) Or maybe there was some big point that I just overlooked that could have made things all better should my decisions have gone another way. In any case, let me know how you'd have done things. I'm genuinely curious about this one.