Right. The problem with SO is that you don't actually get to ask any questions; so reason would suggest anything is at least as good as SO-- even asking a house plant, or Siri, or whatever. Something that actually answers your question would obviously be a better option.
Stack Overflow brought their irrelevance on themselves, I suspect.
It is my experience that school administrators can be quite illogical.
This is the part of your comment I should have quoted, sorry. This gives the impression that school administrators are somehow set apart from the general population's propensity to being illogical.
The only better occupation to learn to be a good fascist than the military is the police.
Is that what you think this quoted sentence means?
Legal ramifications in what way? And do we know that there was a dialog about this with the community mods? The one I looked at has rules against directly linking to infringing content, so it seem-- at least from where I'm sitting-- that blocking would not be an appropriate first step, instead opening a dialog with the mods/admins to moderate any offending content.
And, in case it needs saying-- US copyright law is not global copyright law, and discussing copyright infringement is not illegal.
Though, more to the point, this kind of poor communication-- if not the actions themselves-- makes me wonder if I should move to a new instance. I don't want to, but I also don't want admins making decisions without communicating them to the userbase, whether I personally agree with the decision or not. It certainly doesn't give the impression of transparency.
You seem to be under the impression that school administration are an exception and not the rule.
They will fight you to get you to conform.
Stripping out the somewhat bizarre manipulative language, yes, of course any organization is going to want you to use their systems to streamline their processes; it's far more efficient to have everyone using the same the system than for it to be a hodgepodge of different methods to achieve the same goal. Does that really strike you as odd?
You didn't add anything new to the discussion. I understand that sometimes bureaucracies-- like the public school system-- can implement poorly thought out policies, but again, I assure you that there will be a way to pick up that hypothetical kid without an app or smart phone. Because, again, the alternative is that the kid doesn't get picked up and... what? Stays at the school?
There will be a backup method. The guy I initially responded to probably just did like most of us would do and installed the app without question.
That's not a change in cancellation policy; that's a change in package pricing and availability.
I'm not reading it for the same reason you aren't, but I can't help but wonder if there's something similar to the game "Myst" from the 90s going on, because 10 minutes seems way too short. For reference, in Myst, the entire game was essentially puzzles to solve other puzzle to solve other puzzles, but once you had gone through it once, you could "beat it" in like 5 minutes because the you could just go to the last puzzle and solve it using your knowledge from a previous run.
Maybe there's something you can do very early on that ends the game without having to progress through the actual game. I'm bookmarking the article to read after I beat the game.
There are reasons besides "being poor" for not have smart phone access at pickup time. I assure you the answer won't be "I guess this kid is spending the night here".
There is a backup method.
Edit: minor rewording for clarity.
What does this even mean?
I literally cannot retrieve my child from school without a smartphone.
I'm positive there is a backup method; did you ask about one, or did you simply install the app?
I truly don't mean to be dense, but I don't follow. We're talking about piracy, right? What images are of concern there, and why does the first step to resolving it have to be blocking instead of communication?