I do see the "ex cathedra" box on the comment you link.Yep, I fixed that, 'a non mouse, a cow herd' was not seeing things when they made that comment
which, to me, why??? why is it so hard to edit? View source seems to make it look like one line of CSS or HTML? Why can only one person edit it? What if they get hit by a bus?
And, to get back to the original thought of this post, why are we still having the same issues all the time? The "flag" thing took how many years? Publishing BIPOC minutes got to over a year. We're still waiting on a community created cookbook for how long now? The initial excuse was that the community member who was going to do it had things come up. Yet, at least one other volunteered to take over but was shut down to let the first person still attempt to finish.The code of the current site is a mess and done using a lot techniques from an earlier era of coding, where a lot of current practices just did not exist. Roughly speaking as an a non-developer, I think that analogy is this: Previously everything was hand coded, and I do mean everything, even seemingly common elements (like a footer,) were reproduced a number of times (the footer is at the bottom of
every page).
Now imagine having to go into every single one of those different pages that the footer appears on, just to change one or two links. That
may be decided to not be worth the time for part time developer to do, especially when there's other stuff going on.
Nowadays templates are built into a content management system (CMS), so that a non-developer has access to a single page where the template is and can just go into that one page to edit that template and those changes are immediately applied wherever that template is being used on the site.
That MetaFilter is more like the former, than the latter is frustrating for everyone, but it is what it is. That's not me being flip, just recognizing that a lot of things with the current site are what they are and are not going to change, hence rebuilding the site.
I think a lot of that also influenced general practices with the staff over time. A "we can't move fast, so we don't move fast". That is my personal opinion and expect that'll change with the new site (note how quickly the missing line around an official mod note was changed and as the person who made the change, it was super easy), which will allow general staff to change things on the site without having to go through a part-time developer aka much quicker.
There are number of complaints mentioned in your comment and I can't reply to every single one because I don't know all the details. But I will express my opinion about late things with the BIPOC Board.
Yes, it took a while and that was frustrating, but I think it's ok, while also noting the Board has changed its practice of doing meeting minutes, they're much more concise.
But asking or demanding that a group that is dedicated to helping people who may feel silenced in life and on this site to 'be quicker' isn't all that helpful to those people. In fact those very public demands may encourage people to disengage and move slower. Not a great result, sure, but a very human one.
Finally, I do think things are getting better.
The very comment and "broken promise" that prompted this MeTa post were actually part of a longer comment where I was talking about working on document to make information users were requesting more visible.
So yes, something was promised and didn't happen. But work and improvements are being done and happening and I would encourage everyone to think of things on a larger site level scale and opposed to always focusing on one particular thing. That doesn't mean mistakes shouldn't be publicly called out. Just try to look at the large picture and when improvements are being made, to note that publically also.