Friends. Romans. Countrymen. I beseech you: lend me your ears.
paul now dons his wading boots, and slings a snorkel over his shoulder just in case.
i can't decide whether it's good, bad, or philadelphia that i've run across this thread at this late stage, where it appears to finally be lightening up and moving on. however, i know you've all been on pins and needles waiting to hear the words from on high, to know what your lugubrious co-head-gardener has to say on all this. or not.
my first inclination is simply to say "Crikey! She's a feisty crock, i'nt she!". But that wouldn't be right, so i won't.
okay, now i've gotten my own form of 'fluff' out of my system, so here goes.
i can't speak for tombstone on this. we've only *very* briefly discussed these matters. generally we don't need to discuss in depth - tombstone and i are as close as two unrelated people can be to being Brothers as is humanly possible, so a lot can go unsaid but still understood. by and large i think i can safely say though that we are in agreement on what i'm about to write (finally, i'm getting to it).
i see nothing at all wrong, unethical, immoral, shady, sneaky, underhanded, etc, about the creation and existence of madchatters, nor of the use of PM's to "enlist" (a lousy word for it in this context) users for madchatters. i think it's great, on a couple of different levels, not least of which is that it caused a bit of an epiphany for us, realizing how far out of control things had spiralled.
as others have said, nobody 'owns' forumgarden users. when you sign up for FG, there's no 'exclusivity' clause. fact is, many of the most prolific early forumgardeners came from other forums. they liked it here, so decided to set up the tent and make it home. which was and is very gratifying for us.
there are a LOT of forums out there on the net. a lot. in fact, there's probably tens of thousands of them. maybe hundreds of thousands of them. a great many are highly focused for specific interest groups, rather than general interest forums like FG. but still - we are not unique in the genre such as it is. here's a little something that might blow your minds, it blew mine when i ran across it:
http://rankings.big-boards.com/?p=all
check out some of the numbers there. gaia online is approaching two-thirds of a billion posts and nearly 4 million members. we haven't even reached one-third of a million posts, with 4 thousand members. we don't rank on the list - the bottom of this list is at half a million posts.
so forumgarden is just a tiny little watering hole on the internet.
i seem to have digressed, perish the thought.
i took pains to point out, in my one post over on madchatters, that i did not want to disrupt their place, nor interfere, nor create any trouble by pointing out that we were aware that some of our 'best' users had become disaffected, and wanted a 'safe' place elsewhere to congregate. my only intention ws to let them know that we've been feeling it too, and we wanted to change that disaffection.
tombstone and i could never be accused of being overbearing or meddling as moderators. our philosophy for the longest time has been to 'practice' benign neglect. we've always felt that it's best - in the main - for the community to manage itself. every post has the little 'report this post' thingie, so if something seems beyond the pale, then users have recourse. we may not always act upon such reports - in fact, i'd say that only about a quarter of them are acted upon. part of that is simply that tombstone and i have Other Things To Do - FG is not our only endeavor.
on the other hand, we can certainly stand criticism for taking benign neglect too far. since we are people just like you - i know, shocker - we are also just as prone to being influenced unduly by factors that shouldn't in fairness have influence. favoritism? yes. not a good thing, but i think everyone is guilty of it in some form, fashion, or degree. coupled with neglect, it can - and did - make for a situation where a raging bull unfortunately went unyoked for too long, and what efforts we made in that pursuit were less than what should have been obviously demanded. that's our little failure that we get to live with.
i do seem to love the sound of my own keyboard tapping, don't i. so, where was this all going.....madchatters -
http://www.madchatters.com for those of you scoring along at home - is a fine little forum. it's a place where some forumgardeners went to escape the oppressive state of the drama here at forumgarden, and who can blame them. what investment forumgardeners make here is of their own volition, and if the coffee starts tasting sour, well then you complain to management. when management says 'that's the coffee we always make, take it or leave it', well then you maybe go and make some of your own. or you skip the coffee and just stick around for the danish.
i seem to have lost my way again.
oh, one final thought - hopefully with some clarity - before i sum up this bit of rambling. we very definitely have in the past - and will continue to - smack down people who sign up for forumgarden, then post in a several threads about how they have this new nifty forum and why doesn't everybody come on over and try it out. we ban those folks, and delete their posts. forumgarden is built by forumgardeners, and people who come here only to say 'leave here' are not welcome. on the other hand, the 'madchatters' are not such 'dine and dash' folks. most, if not all, have invested heavily in forumgarden (of their own sweat equity i mean, of course, not financially). they're real forumgardeners. if one of them says 'we've started a little forum elsewhere, it has a different flavor from FG, if you'd like to check it out, here's where', then how could we object? likewise, if those same folks want to maintain some measure of privacy or exclusivity in their endeavor, then there's nothing wrong in PMing their fellow FGers and inviting them. i'd characterize that as being discreet, not sneaky.
now i'm tired of hearing my own typing.
the end.
