caine stuff

No, you're not getting your hidden board just for oldfags so you can be xenophobic and exclude all the newer members.  Stop asking me.  The more you ask the less I feel like doing it and the more I want to ask in return "What's wrong with posting on the regular boards?"

You forget that if it weren't for these newer members, CAINE would still be ten people meeting in front of Newcomb (or in the lobby, weather-dependent) for ten minutes, going to dinner, and then going back home.  That's not my idea of a fun night with an anime club.  There is no clear oldfag/newfag divide in CAINE.  No matter how you try to draw the line someone gets left out and it's extremely hypocritical to make an exception for just that one person.  That and "oldfag" and "newfag" are relative terms.  Each year's worth of members are oldfags in comparison to the next year's worth of members.

You also forget that I am one of the people you are mis-using the term "oldfag" to describe.  You have no unanimous consensus among your group because I disagree.  Also, I'm in control of what happens to the forums and it's a really horrible idea that would get shot down if you had the balls to bring it up publically.  Also, while I personally am against having an entire "introduce yourself" board, if the general club consensus is that one should be made, it shall be done.  Personally I think a stickied thread is enough, but I'm a rare responsible person in a position of power and thus I won't devalue the opinions of my constituents in favor of my own.  General club consensus is more than just Dave saying "make us an introduction board".

While I agree on some counts that this year's Jeopardy sucked, I don't agree on all of them.  There was way too much extremely niche stuff like seiyuu in there (that one seiyuu oricon chart bullshit clue comes to mind where L cheated and still got it wrong), and I half-agree about the CAINE History category not actually containing any CAINE History.  Your view of CAINE History is "before and including the time during which we had no meeting room".  This is completely inaccessible to most of our current members.  At the same time, it would have been nice to see some stuff in there that had happened previous to this year in CAINE, but wanting the info that current CAINE only knows as anecdotes from the club's darker days is extremely exclusionary.  Maybe one thing as the highest-point-reward double jeopardy clue, but nowhere else.

Also, it was my personal feeling that the western categories were way too difficult given that we only started re-integrating the western side of comics and animation this semester, and they will continue to be a minority demographic in the club for a while.  I'm not saying there can't be western stuff in there, but make the easy ones stuff that people with a base understanding can get and don't have a steep difficulty curve until the western demographic in the club is substantially larger.  There are those of us who really don't care, but as we step up our efforts to re-integrate that material into the club, the percentage of people who will actually know the extreme trivia questions will rise on its own and with the team format we use the problem is solved.

Re-integrating the western side back into the club will be really difficult.  It's not just as simple as telling people about it at the activities fair, having meetings discussing it, and showing a western series in showings.  There is a very large barrier to western stuff in CAINE currently that will never go away, even with our efforts to bring it back in.  I mentioned this previously, but CAINE still has a vast majority of anime/manga fans, most of which aren't terribly interested in western stuff.  Re-integration will have to go as slowly as we pick up new members who are primarily fans of the western stuff.  It will take a while.  It's not an instant thing, and it really can't go any faster than the increase in member interest.

Also, I hope to push into policy after the forum migration a rule that disallows scheduling non-club-sponsored events (such as parties at Tom's house, trips to King's Dominion, etc.) that conflict with meetings, showings, and official club events.  Forcing people to choose between going to a meeting/showing or some completely unrelated event isn't fair at all to the club.  When showings, which I will remind you are an official club event, get cancelled because Tom's having a party, something's wrong.  Not saying that Tom shouldn't have parties or that we shouldn't go to them, but they should be scheduled properly so that members will have a fair choice of what they want to do.  News flash: people who regularly attend showings will be unlikely to want to miss a single showing due to an unofficial event in another city taking precendence.  Especially when that showing happens to contain the final episodes of everything we're watching.

I know that this has been disastrous in the past, but I do think non-officers should have more of a say in what we watch in showings.  It's not much of an issue in practice since we're always open to suggestions (most of which happen informally), but having it codified into policy and made common knowledge would help tremendously.

Also regarding the forums, since they're largely my responsibility, it would be nice if the forums could have a dedicated section when we have policy meetings/votes.  The forums are basically integral to the club now, so my position as their most active administrator is similar to that of a club officer, and my area affects all club members (that use the forums) and thus deserves as much attention as showings, events, the collection, and the treasury.  Plus, if there's considerable desire within the club for a change or addition to the forums, I'd like to know about it so I can get it done, and having those desires presented formally while I take notes is the best way to do this.  I have a bad short term memory, so informal suggestions made at or after meetings/showings may not be remembered.

Once the migration is complete, deciding forum issues could in theory be done through polls on the forums, but not enough of the club uses the forums to generate relevant results.  While they're technically relevant to the subsection of the club that uses the forums, I'd prefer that all members know about potential changes to forum issues and know that as with everything else it's open to suggestion.  We should be pushing the forums upon everyone anyway since they're every member's way of staying in touch with every other member (and thus the club as a whole).  Perhaps remind people that if they don't have an internet name or one they want to associate with us, they can use their UVa email IDs as usernames and then just change their display name when they come up with something better.  Display names will still be supported after the migration, so it Just Works™.