yourreef ( now closed 2 days a week )
- Thread starter New_Tank_Guy
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Nu2SW
New member
umm Im sorry but they do have a choice, its called public transportation, Walking, Biking. So there for they do not have to pay as much to fill up there 40 gallon monster SUV at $4 dollars a gallon, As we do have choices for other forums and websites and such.
In life we Always have a choice to do something else.
OK thats all i had to say... On with the show...
PS Love the forum, I dont have any complaints.
Yet...:mixed:
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7254031#post7254031 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by wombat2
Okay. Agree to disagree.
Nope, sorry. Have to ban you for disagreeing.
On a serious note, it's disheartening to see you "disagree" when Brian is telling you that the mods and staff here all function with the best intentions for the mission of the board. That mission isn't to make money, it's to provide a commercial-free, family-friendly environment where we can all exchange hobby-related information.
We work hard to keep the environment as commerce-free and unbiased as we can. We don't protect sponsors, nor allow them to advertise in the forums any more than we allow anyone else to advertise. We've lost sponsors when they felt we weren't "protecting" their interests enough, and we've dropped (and banned) sponsors when they couldn't follow the rules.
FWIW,
Kevin
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7254083#post7254083 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Anemone
Nope, sorry. Have to ban you for disagreeing.
On a serious note, it's disheartening to see you "disagree" when Brian is telling you that the mods and staff here all function with the best intentions for the mission of the board. That mission isn't to make money, it's to provide a commercial-free, family-friendly environment where we can all exchange hobby-related information.
We work hard to keep the environment as commerce-free and unbiased as we can. We don't protect sponsors, nor allow them to advertise in the forums any more than we allow anyone else to advertise. We've lost sponsors when they felt we weren't "protecting" their interests enough, and we've dropped (and banned) sponsors when they couldn't follow the rules.
FWIW,
Kevin
If the mission isn't to make money, why don't you guys let the owner of the site know that? He's been charging people, what, $25 to search for information? Are we supposed to believe all those $25 payments are paying for the bandwidth? Vendors pay, what, $500 a MONTH for their forums? Do you guys even ask him where this money goes, or ask to see an accounting for it all? What happened to the money that was going to the now departed gurus? (Yes, I know it was a pittance for their work.) Why is there so much secrecy involved in so many of the dealings here? Why are posts and threads deleted (I know, not technically deleted, but disappeared nonetheless) without any explanation where they went? Why are members banned without any explanation at all?
I'd be more inclined to believe you if there was a bit more honesty.
Wow! My understanding of the history between you guys is pretty much limited to this thread but you guys "the moderators" have been extremely unprofessional in dealing with whatever the disagreement stems from. If you are "right", and I'm not taking sides on the issue I'm just disturbed by the behavior, you should be able to state your position and move on. Continually insulting someone that you disagree with only brings you down below their level and causes the people who read your posts to lose respect for you. I've seen this behavior from both Brian and Kevin a few times and I just don't get it. You should be here to prevent people from attacking others not doing the attacking.
Brent
Uhm... Tell that to my wallet..
I live 25 miles from my job, there is NO public transportation near me (not even a bus passes through town, there is a train station, if I want to work in NYC (2 hr commute), but it doesn't go near my job), so public transportation is out, walking is certainly out (have you ever walked 50 miles in a day?) and the same goes for biking. I even need my "modest" SUV (Ford Sport Trac) to lug things around / tow things (the wife has a more economical Forrester). I even carpool a few days a week, but can't do that every day due to the fact that I DO need transportation that my car-pool buddy cannot provide on some days.
As far as the financials of the board, well, as a staffer, I never questioned John. Ya know why? Its NONE of MY business. Just as it is none of anybody's business but John's. Why do we volunteer "blindly"? Well, maybe, just maybe, its because the staff / mods / TRC'ers here have a real passion for the hobby. I'm not here to profit, and never was, I'm here to help further the hobby, as all the other staff is. You have no idea how irritating it is to constantly be harrassed about the financials.. Would you let me see the complete financial breakdown of your business or personal accounts? I mean every check, every withdrawal, every deposit, everything? I think not. Would you go to your LFS and demand to see theirs? Again, I think not. Why is the financials of this board so damn important to everybody to know? If RC was a 501C non-profit corporation, you would all have a right to see that, but since it isn't, why push the issue?
We are all volunteers here because of our passion for the hobby, nothing more. We do what we view is in the best interest of the hobby, and we do what we can to provide a family friendly / educational / flame free board. I can also say that Wombat2 bringing the disagreement with Race Foster here from RDO, especially after it was SHUT DOWN on RDO, was in poor form. If it was shut down on RDO, why would you think RC would be the place to continue it, moreso considering we are a bit more strict in our moderating here? That's a no-brainer to me..
In as far as respect for the mods / staff, you've all heard the old adage: "Upset someone, they will tell 100 people, but please someone and they only tell 10 people." I think the majority of members here respect the staff of the board, and actually appreciate what we do. It's a thankless job for sure, but we actually DO get thanks from people at times. Unfortunately those who are happy are less likely to comment on it, and anyone who is even slightly unhappy is all too willing to complain like crazy.
Nu2SW
New member
you still are making the choice to live that far from your job to where you can not use public transportation.
commuter trains, commuter buses.
You mean to tell me that NYC does not have something along that type of transportation. If the Central valley of california has a commuter train that goes from the valley to the silicone valley or San francisco, or to some where where you can take public *****. I find that hard to believe....
**EDIT*** I live 20 miles from my job and live in sacramento,ca and we have buses out here. Thats just hard to believe. But you do have a train, so you pay up the wazoo for gas so you can get to work faster and not get up earlier... That is called connivence and we pay for it dearly.... thats why they are gouging up at the pumps.
there is ALWAYS a choice. You just Have to look.
AND having to pay 25$ to search is ludicrous, and when you try to search and it tells you " oh due to high volume its disabled" thats insane.
But I have my google search and I find the posts anyways....
And brent I totally agree with you.
No, you'd be more inclined to believe me if we told you all the info you want to know. It's not your business.
I didn't run this site out of my personal pocket for several years, so I don't feel I have any right to ask the owner what the finances are - that's not my business.
As far as why are "so many" posts and threads deleted, well, "so many" aren't. Commercial posts are (remember, keepig a commercial-free atmosphere is one of our primary goals) - mainly beacue just locking them and leaving them leaves no incentive at all not to make them (ie, the ad is still there). Otherwise, we try very hard to just remove posts that violate the User Agreement and leave informational threads intact. Occasionally, we will be threatened with legal action over the substance of some thread and will sometimes remove it (depending upon advice of counsel) - me, I'd like to tell the ones who write those kind of threats to stuff it, but it's not my behind that would be on the line, so again, it's not my ultimate decision.
As far as "bannings' go, the ONLY members who are banned without "any explanation" are those who are removed for very obvious reasons (spammers and porn posters mostly). All the rest either get told explicitly why they have lost posting privileges, or have received multiple warnings leading up to the event (which would tend to make the actual loss of privileges self-explanatory).
We also tend to work hard at "rehabilitating" members who have lost their posting privileges. We use the "ban stick" very much as a timeout, and most bans don't need to be permanent.
Of course, all of these things are done behind the scenes, with only the mods/staff and concerned member involved. Just like the rest of it, it's not anyone else's business.
I'm sorry you want to know all the inner workings here, but quite frankly, you're not going to be told. If that's going to be a problem, so be it.
Finally, "charging people to search for information." Sigh. This is a very old argument. This version of the software archives data in tables very poorly, and it takes an inordinant amount of resources to search. Works fine for smaller databases, but once you get into the size range of the RC database, it becomes very, very resource intensive.
Restricting the search engine when the system resources reach certain levels keeps the entire site from becoming unavailable. Perhaps you'd like to not be able to surf, read, and post because the search ability is not throttled back, but most people don't agree. The folks who pay for premium memberships do have higher search priority - in other words, their search ability doesn't get throttled back until the system's resource hit a hgher usage level. That's not the same as not allowing anyone to search unless they've paid (what you said).
Finally, we were well on out way to hopefully correcting this by upgrading to a later version of the software that handles searches a bit differently. Unfortunately, due to the number of "customizations" that have been done on the software over the years to make RC look and feel the way it does, we can't just upgrade out of the box. Our recent change in admins resulted in the loss of almost a year's worth of work on the upgrade. Starting from scratch isn't fun, and it isn't what we wanted to do, but people with conspiracy theories about us "forcing people to pay to search" as a marketing tool to drive premium memberships are waaaaay over the line insulting.
People CAN still search (and people are having successful searches all the time), but when you have 2000+ members on all the time, you'll hear about the people who can't use our search engine much more often then those that can. And, there are other search options (google, for example), that we refer people to. We're not trying to keep people from accessing the info on RC, but we are vilified for rewarding those who CHOOSE to support RC. MAkes no sense at all to me.
FWIW,
Kevin
NYC has tons of public transportation.. Busses, cabs, subways, trains.. I live in NW New Jersey, and if you know a thing or two about the Garden State, well, its not cheap. I work in the central part of Northern NJ, and I could not afford a house there (2x the price of my house for a house half the size). Now where I live, there is no industry, unless I want to pump gas or work in fast food, and that wouldn't even begin to cover a mortgage. So, no, I really don't have a choice if I wanted to own a house. I'm between a rock and a hard place. I would work in NYC, but lets just say 2 hours in the morning, 2 hours in the evening for a commute, and a $12 train ticket for the day is not appealing. Thats $60 a week for train tickets, and as it is I have a 45 minute commute with a parking lot for the highway, and a $75 / week gas bill. I think the extra $15 to relieve me of 2 1/2 hours extra commuting time a day (12 1/2 hours a week) is worth it..
So, really, I don't have a choice. And believe me, I have been job hunting for the past 18 months as well, and jobs are scarce around here, so that is even less choice I have.
Exactly!!!!!! I completely agree. This site is a business. Brian was just trying to convince me and everyone else otherwise a few posts back. It is really none of our business how your financial matters work. And just like a business, just like the LFS you compared RC to, any information we get filtered through it needs to be considered as such, in my opinion. I would think since you guys are volunteering you would at least ask though. If I was volunteering for a profitable business I'd be concerned. I love the hobby too, but I'm not going to volunteer at my LFS.
If you could bring that thread up from the depths I would love to see it again, and I'd love others to see it. I doubt Race would like others to see it. (See my point?) Race was accusing RDO of things that were simply not true (that we pick sides in B&M vs etailer debates), and I wanted to address those accusations. Race and I never even addressed each other on RDO on any thread. The result of my post was a thread deletion and a ban threat.
I respect the hell out of you guys, partly because I do the same thing on a lesser scale. You volunteer with loads of crap for zero pay, all because you love the hobby. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to question your motivations. I think you guys should be questioning the owners of this site's operations a bit more too.
That's where we are different. I worked for 3 1/2 years at a LFS, getting meager pay. Sure, perks like first pick, and wholesale meant alot, but I also liked sharing the information. Trust me, the pay was not worth the hassle, but some of us enjoy educating others, and also, protecting the hobby from bad purchases that could, someday, end up with restrictions on what we can keep / import. I'd rather be pro-active, and educate, than one day lose the ability to keep my tanks because the government imposed laws on it. Call it "Paying it forward", because I know I made a difference in many peoples education on SW tanks. THAT is the real motivation for me.
To be brutally honest, and at the expense of being called an idiot, a few years back I did some graphics work for John, some banners for potential sponsors, to give them some incentive to come on board. Ya know what I said? "No thanks John, put the money towards a server upgrade / new software".. I learned so much from RC, and saved so much money on my own systems, that I give my time freely here because I want this board to continue. If it educates others just 1/10 of how it educated me, well, I think its worth it to give back once in a while. Not everything is about money. Sometimes people do things for good causes.
Not my position to do that, it was removed for a reason. And if you wanted to address those accusations, perhaps an email to Race would have been better? Perhaps if the thread on RDO was left open, and an email sent to Race? There was absolutely NO reason to bring your issues to RC. If you want to dispute things about RDO with Race, do it ON RDO. RC is not the place for those discussions.
As I said above, money is not always the driving force. I think RC has one of the best volunteer forces running any BBS on the web these days, and I think that is because we are in it for the hobby, NOT the money. Sure, my wife (and I am sure many other staffers wives) would love to see us make money from RC, but ya know what? ITS NOT ABOUT MONEY to us. To us, its about having the information, the knowledge, the experience, and sharing that information to help make others better reefkeepers, and possibly do something that one day may save all of our collective butts from having to keep a FO, or worse, just a FW tank because the government imposed restrictions due to low numbers in the wild as a result of thousands of inexperienced hobbyists needlessly killing animals..
If John paid out of his own pocket for years to keep RC going (and I know he did, RC was in deficit for a very long time), I don't fault him for wanting to recover some of that investment. In fact, I encourage him to, because if he didn't do that, I wouldn't have this treasure-trove of information at my fingertips. For that I commend him. His selfless contribution to keep RC going has resulted in A LOT of people getting an education..
