Some ‘personal’ thoughts from me as a Forum Member

A week or two back I made an Administrative post (“A reminder”) where I tried to set new guidelines for Forum posting as I wanted to try to return the Forum to its former position of being primarily Fish-Oriented.

Points were made agreeing and, sadly, disagreeing and I personally received emails and PMs for the concept and one against it.

One of the things I was accused of was constantly posting answers to questions, isn’t that what the Forum exists for? Would you rather a question go unanswered? Another was that I was forever logged in – why shouldn’t I be? – I no longer work away from home so can access the Computer at all times. There are others here who are in the fortunate situation of being able to do that whilst at work – fair play to you!

Personally I have no objections to some light-hearted banter, indeed it has been my ‘style’ on both this and another Forum I used to contribute to before it closed down, what annoys most of the ‘established’ regulars is the inane gobbledegook – not to mention personal attacks on members in open Forum – coming from other members.

An example…the senior Show Judge posted some words of advice regarding how best to present your Fish to be at their best for the Show last month, the replies which followed descended the topic into discussions of how their partner dressed up when going out!
He withdrew his advice and has only posted once or twice since! We need people of his calibre here!
Please remember, this isn’t some Fishkeepers chat room - as Stretnik says, PMs exist for that sort of personal rubbish, use them.
A perfect example was the hmmmm where's the mods thread, that should have been confined to a series of PMs - in my opinion. This sort of nonsense only drives more dedicated and serious Aquarists away, which is unacceptable! Sadly one of the contributors to it was someone I hold in high esteem as a ‘serious’ Fishkeeper and his actions have been remarked to me as being ‘surprising’, confirming my own thoughts.

Galling to some, too, is the constant use of abbreviations – I can see the need to do this for economy in texts, but posting here costs nothing and you can use a spell-checker if needs be – since time immemorial man has striven to learn to read and write properly and in the space of less than a decade people are now writing in what I call ‘text-abbreviation’. Lord only knows where this is leading – I really fear for the future but I’m rather grateful I’ll not be around to witness it!

Someone cannot join any democratic community (Forum in our case) without abiding by the rules of that community – they must not set themselves at odds with existing community members.
To anyone who wants a Fish Forum run in that sort of way the alternative is there for you to start up your own one! If you want to remain members of this Forum please heed the rules and protocol of it.

The issue of the youtube videos was as a result of a complaint from another Forum member and could have been handled better, I agree. But the principle behind that decree was sound.



(Those were just some personal observations of my own, nothing other than that).

John