I've finally completed another project for my website which has been several days in the making. I've created a web forum for my website specifically for '67-'72 F-series pickups. The forum is located at
Keith
whoops...made the 'ultimate' mistake...I posted a notice of my new forum on the FTE forum. And now I've been censored, deleted and banned from the site altogether! Wow! ;)
Take a look at this page:
On Mon, 01 Dec 2003 23:01:32 -0600, Keith wrote in alt.trucks.ford:
Interesting read.
On one hand, it's his dime and his time to keep the site up and running, maybe even his livelihood. He has every right to control the content, especially if he depends on the income to live on or to offset his costs.
On the other hand, there is (was) a very popular forum dedicated to a particular (Euro) brand of dirt bike. It was operated by a dealership. 'Twas a great place for info, technical issues, riding information blah, blah blah. Then a few things like this happened, even to me for something even less threatening than your issue. It started to piss a few folks off, one person took it upon himself to crank up a competing forum, without commercial support, all his own time/money.
Long story short: the first forum has all but shriveled down to nothing, a few new posts daily, very few views and replies.
When this transition first began, someone posted to the old forum asking. "Where did everybody go?" The answer from Admin and the Mods was something like: "...all our regulars are real riders, they are out riding and don't have time to sit in front of the computer all day..." (this was at the beginning of riding season)
Talk about "head in sand", all those "real" riders must have either gone for a very, very long ride or got lost in the woods in the process. The place is dead while the "new" forum has blossomed, with well over 10,000 registered members and too many daily posts to keep up with.
Just recently the new forum has taken on advertising and has a online parts purchase alliance with a dealer. At first I took this to mean the new forum was headed down the same path as the old one. I'm happy to report I've seen no censorship, post deletion or anything of the like. We are free to talk about anything we wish, recommend competing dealers/sources etc.
Heavy handedness will drive folks away, "word" travels fast. There's plenty of other places to exchange information and it's about as easy as pie to set up a forum.
David
What's so great about a website forum?
Alvin in AZ
Nothing.
Well, if it is a good one, they can be much better organized and offer storage for pictures and technical data.
Of course the downside is if they crash or the owner loses interest, all the info can be lost.....
Matt
99 V-10 Super Duty, Super Cab 4x4On Tue, 02 Dec 2003 16:59:12 -0800, Matt Mead rearranged some electrons to form:
Plus it provides an outlet for the Usenet-challenged.
True...I'm constantly amazed at the number of people who aren't even aware Usenet exists at all!
Keith
David M wrote:
Another downside of web forums is that there are too many of them. I decided a long time ago nto to have one on my site. Every forum has to have two or three people that know a lot of stuff to make them worthwhile (and let's lump newsgroups in there too). The result is a lot of good information is just fragmented. In other words, if I want to figure out how to do something I might need to ask in 6 forums to find somebody who really knows about it. If it's my lucky day I might also have to wade thorugh 50 wrong answers and somehow figure out not to be fooled. Enormous amounts of information, right and wrong, may be piling up in the archives where it's hard to search. If I'm an expert on something I'm not going to bother answering it in six forums every time it gets asked, so I have to pick one and actively contribute to only one. So I think what I'm saying is they're inefficient and it takes a LOT of wasted time, gratis, to make one any good at all. If you start one you are asking for more free contributions from the web public, same as this FTE guy, whoever he is.
I don't frequent any Ford truck sites, so it's none of my business, but from your site I think your differences are merely the result of points of view. If he was smarter, he could have started by politely asking you not to mention your forum AT ALL on his forum. But he's not wrong in what he's accused you of - It's pretty obvious that he's correct. You are using his forum to lure people into your forum. I don't read either forum, so I don't know why I'm typing this. What I meant was, he's not a nut, he's just communicating his point of view.
I'm constantly thankful of the number of people who aren't even aware Usenet exists at all...as bad as some discussion groups are, imagine how bad it would be if everyone started posting.
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