Site icon Brent Ozar

Here’s Why My #SQLPASS Blog Posts are So Angry

Brent

Yesterday, as PASS ballots went out via email, people started asking why they weren’t getting ballots:

https://twitter.com/GavinPayneUK/status/515035419936038912

So how did this happen? Well, back in January, PASS changed the way people could vote. Bill Graziano explained on the PASS blog:

“All members who complete their profiles – including the new fields – by June 1, 2014, will receive a ballot to vote in the PASS elections…”

I actually thought this was a brilliant idea – but the key was communicating the change to members, and that’s where it fell down. PASS sent emails to members, but the emails didn’t arrive.

The key was revealed in a comment on that very blog post back in January:

Comments on the Post

PASS emails had been going to members’ spam/junk mail folders because PASS hadn’t configured something called an SPF record. (I’m sadly familiar with this problem because I’ve struggled with the same mailing list problems over the years.)

No one from PASS responded to the comments, and the SPF records still aren’t correct, so many members will never see PASS’s email communications.

People often say to me, “Brent, why do you get so fired up and post these rant-y blog posts? Why can’t you go through normal channels?” Now you start to understand why: PASS simply doesn’t respond on official channels. Anybody who runs a blog will tell you that you have to read your comments and respond to them – comments are massively important.

This isn’t an isolated incident, either:

And that’s why I changed my approach this year. Yep, I’m calling out issues publicly, and getting more aggressive. No, I’m certainly not happy about it – I don’t enjoy writing things like this, and I am fully aware that I am taking risks and burning bridges while I do it. Nobody wants to see their work criticized in public, whether they’re a paid employee or a volunteer, but at the end of the day, community work means serving the community.

Mike Fal sums it up well:

Rather than trying to win over a new fashionable crowd, PASS needs to realize that they have an incredible growth opportunity in their own local user groups.

Walk into any local user group and ask for a show of hands of how many people have attended the PASS Summit. I know, because I do it – I evangelize PASS when I volunteer at local user groups all over America and Europe. The raised hand count is pretty darned low – and that seems like a great opportunity for growth.

But instead of raising memberships, PASS actually decreased membership by letting their emails drift into spam folders and letting less people to vote.

And these are exactly the kind of SQL Server people we can’t afford to lose:

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