AaronFW wrote:Is there a reason that the posting of the daily APOD to C&F isn't automated?
AaronFW wrote:I think having a human post it also adds value too.
You're right; current Admin would find it problematic if it were automated. But never mind us - consider the ultimately awkward dilemma of posts in your username that were not posted by you at all: in one sense, you would be like an absentee landlord; in another sense, you would be hostage to the automation program. The first sense would be the main thrust of Admin objection; the second should well be your own. On a personal level, it certainly would be mine: Once automated, I cannot be free.
Your second comment above is on board with our thinking. From the beginning (well before anyone ever even dreamt of Facebook and Twitter) C&F was and still is intended, in its way, as a social website above all, and automation is not social. As you have guessed, whatever form this socialization takes, the persons behind it are key. Even if few members ever post replies on the APOD thread, it is still an offering to all, and when manually submitted, each post expresses something of its author in a way that automation cannot. Automation erases the personal element, and therein lies our objection to the notion: Once automated, the project no longer has any Dave-ness about it; his authorship becomes fundamentally irrelevant, and would have as much meaning for the spirit of C&F as the banner ads do, which is to say none at all. Arguably, it would be little better than spam, then. Instead, the present APOD thread is a living personal project, a direct act of creativity; it also happens to be an extension of a previous project in the same vein (hence the '
"He's your son!!" of...'), the original first founded by Denny, one of our members who has since passed on and is greatly missed. As such, Dave's act of taking up the reins not only honors Denny's memory; on its own, it too bears the living personal stamp of its present author, who saw the project as worth perpetuating. As things presently stand, if for any reason Dave were to discontinue posting on the thread and no one else were to continue the tradition in some way, that would be the end of that, and we all move on, the APOD project becoming a marker in the course of C&F history.
As you can see, this insistence on the social standard is a matter of longstanding Board philosophy, conceived and implemented from the first by its originator and mastermind, Dale Wisely (aka The Undisputed). We still hope to see C&F continue in this spirit, as least as we interpret it. Dave's thoughts on automating the APOD thread after him are interesting and worth consideration, but we can cross that bridge when we get to it; I confess that my gut personal preference would be to have someone continue posting it manually. As we might have said in days of yore, it's the Chiffy thing to do.
IIRC, Denny himself was perfectly capable of automating his original APOD thread, because he had resources, if not the exact chops. He chose not to, which I think says something - but then he never could resist the opportunity to insert personal commentary, and the wryer, the better.