Banned from TGP

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sprint said:
I'm curious: whats the attraction to be a mod on any forum? It's volunteer is it not? I can't see a reason to do it given the significant effort required, headaches, and inevitable interpersonal conflict - even if your passionate about the specific forum and want to give back to it. What am missing?
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I once volunteered to be on the BOD for a regional off-road Jeep club, to help with planning events etc. Part of that position included being a mod on the club's forum.

One of the things the forum software would do is send an alert to mods if multiple users signed in through the same IP address. Within a week of taking that BOD position, I got an alert that a member had signed in on his ex-girlfriend's IP. Which actually meant that she had kept his password and was signing in under his name to spy on his messages. She also happened to be the fiance of a different, quite prominent, member who was a known enemy of the first member (they'd gotten in a fight at an event before).

Long story short, a shitload of drama ensued, the girl got banned, her fiance quit the club, the first guy found out the ex had kept multiple passwords and was spying on many other things, and my first week of being on the BOD of this little Jeep club was a nightmare because of a stupid IP address alert.

So yeah, props to those who volunteer for this task. I'm a bit turned off from it.
 
Dave Merrill said:
Mods are part owners?
How does that work?
Buy into ownership and get a mod-ship as a perk?
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If you own, or part-own, a company you can get paid through "distributions". This is technically not getting a salary. So you can say you "work for free" but you actually do get paid.

If I owned, or part-owned, a forum that did $6M (!!!) a year in revenue I would gladly take on some moderation duties in exchange for distributions, especially considering the profit margin is probably well over 50%. I can't imagine that they have much in the way of expenses. Server costs, some minor administrative costs. Rest is gravy. I wouldn't be surprised if profit margin was 90%.
 
FractalAudio said:
B.S. TGP does $6M/yr. No way mods are working for free.

They may be "working for free" but taking profit distributions as part owners.
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I have no real idea other than what that mod said while banning the lot of us over the 24 hr period.

And, I’m not 100% so on their revenue number other than I’m fairly certain I saw it reported somewhere recently. I have no idea what these kind of sites actually bring in.


They don’t seem very principal based over there …

:smoking:
 
vetteboy79 said:
I once volunteered to be on the BOD for a regional off-road Jeep club, to help with planning events etc. Part of that position included being a mod on the club's forum.

One of the things the forum software would do is send an alert to mods if multiple users signed in through the same IP address. Within a week of taking that BOD position, I got an alert that a member had signed in on his ex-girlfriend's IP. Which actually meant that she had kept his password and was signing in under his name to spy on his messages. She also happened to be the fiance of a different, quite prominent, member who was a known enemy of the first member (they'd gotten in a fight at an event before).

Long story short, a shitload of drama ensued, the girl got banned, her fiance quit the club, the first guy found out the ex had kept multiple passwords and was spying on many other things, and my first week of being on the BOD of this little Jeep club was a nightmare because of a stupid IP address alert.

So yeah, props to those who volunteer for this task. I'm a bit turned off from it.
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People are mostly stupid a-holes out there in the wild world.

Glad this place offers a bit of respite....
 
USMC_Trev said:
TGP has been a known quantity for at least the decade since I’ve been here and playing Fractal stuff. Just from this forum I know to never go there and I haven’t. So my questions are 1 - Why is anyone still going there and B - Why TF are we still talking about it like it matters?
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There are halfway-reasonable discussions in certain parts of that forum.

And, I've only ever gotten a week long ban. I'm not willing to totally write it off. But, I don't go to their modelling area or the pub. Or many other places.

sprint said:
I understood they sold memberships (can't understand why someone would buy one, but that's another "what am i missing" thing).
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I've been a paid member of a forum a few times. It's always that they provide value that I feel is worth a few bucks a month.

For one of them, at the time, it was partially for access to their "VIP" (just paid, not actually special) sub-forum and mostly because some of the members there REALLY helped me out when I was starting a new hobby. There were 3-5 people who were absolutely invaluable and probably took years off my learning curve. I wanted the forum to keep existing, because I wanted other people to have experiences like that. Plus, they got me a press pass to a huge music festival that I was going to go to anyway....that was also a really cool experience....no lines, free water, taking pictures up close, meeting some of my idols...etc..

Eventually, that forum kind of fell apart. It got filled with uninformed, inexperienced new users who got into this weird habit of parroting bad advice they'd heard from all over and disparaging all of the old guys who actually knew what they were talking about. More and more of the old guard (myself included, though I never really considered myself an expert....good, sure, but not an expert) retreated into the VIP sub-forum and never looked at the public rooms/topics. A handful of people moved on in life or got frustrated enough that they just quit...VIP became a ghost town, the rest of the forum basically turned into noobs yelling at each other mixed with shills and advertising, and everyone left. It still exists, but even the founders don't actually use it anymore.

Another came from a different huge hobby forum. There was a small side of that hobby that was relegated to one single thread where we were kind of allowed to run rampant. But...there were like 15-20 different conversations going on inside it because posting about those topics anywhere else would get posts deleted. After one of the prolific guys (who I think started that one safe thread) got a week long ban for basically no reason, he started his own and invited about 15-20 people via PM. That forum stayed invite-only and paid (a few dollars a month) for several years.

Eventually, the founder died in a traffic accident, his surviving wife couldn't stand to be a part of it, and everyone drifted apart. The hosting bill went unpaid for a while, and eventually it just disappeared. I probably should have volunteered to take it over, but I was broke and getting my 2nd degree at the time and had neither the time nor the money....so I just watched it die. I still miss that place.

Actually, it happened a third time...basically the same story as the second except without the death but with one admin going on a power trip and banning people. He got "fired", bans got rescinded...but the damage was done. The whole thing fell apart.
 
When I was first starting out with Helix, my first full-on modeler, I learned a lot from some folks there. I paid to get rid of the ads, and ignored the jerks, mostly. (Though it's not clear which side of that line some actual experts in, say, acoustics, fell on...)

These days, I just don't go there except on rare occasions. I'd so much rather be here.
 
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la szum said:
One thing people can do is to NOT be a paying/supporting member of TGP.
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Yeah, just use uBlock Origin, voila: no ads. It’d be one thing if ad companies could 100% guarantee they’re not selling adware to malicious parties. But they can’t.
James Freeman said:
Hey y'all Fractal dudes.

I too was banned forever from TGP after a decade of contribution.... for a stupid general poop joke.
Yes, the moderators there are very swift with the hammer, all it takes is some cuckoo to use the Report button and whine how "offended" they are by your post, and you're gone.
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I wondered where you went!
JiveTurkey said:
If a "new member" comes along; they will have an air of posting familiarity about them. Even if they don't say the same things they did before; you can tell by how comfortable they make themselves from the jump. New people usually lurk for sometime before posting. Alts jump right in and pretend they are someone new that happens to immediately know the landscape.
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You totally can’t tell someone by their posting style. Absolutely not. No chance. :D
 
IAmThePepperoniKing said:
I wondered where you went!
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I was one of the first casualties of NDSP's purge plan on TGP. :D

NDSP think they can fix years of lying by enforcing damage control with even more dirty actions like forum moles, they are in for a big and long lasting surprise.

Regarding the 'Report' button; if a single mole can manipulate the mod team to ban a dozen people in one day, there is something fundamentally broken in how the mods handle reports.
 
sprint said:
I'm curious: whats the attraction to be a mod on any forum? It's volunteer is it not? I can't see a reason to do it given the significant effort required, headaches, and inevitable interpersonal conflict - even if your passionate about the specific forum and want to give back to it. What am missing?
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In the world of guitar, a lot of people cannot really play guitar. They cannot write music. They cannot mix or engineer music. The next best thing is to be a moderator on a website where you can pretend you're some bigshot, when really all you actually do is play terrible covers in a not-quite-as-good-as-a-shit-wedding band, band.

Forums might have made me bitter. Not sure.
 
James Freeman said:
I was one of the first casualties of NDSP's purge plan on TGP. :D

NDSP think they can fix years of lying by enforcing damage control with even more dirty actions like forum moles, they are in for a big and long lasting surprise.

Regarding the 'Report' button; if a single mole can manipulate the mod team to ban a dozen people in one day, there is something fundamentally broken in how the mods handle reports.
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The mods are buffoons, all of them. None are capable of critical thinking, none are willing to have a discussion. It’s BAN BAN BAN.
 
USMC_Trev said:
So you accept the abuse? That's Stockholm Syndrome, kid. "He beats me because he loves me"?
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Actually, no. Not really.

I did quit looking at The Pub because there's no point. But, I actually censor myself less following the suspension and am expecting a ban any time soon. I swear whenever I feel like it, and I stopped using weasel words like "in my opinion" for a lot of things.

If they don't want me, they can ban me. If I decide to push the issue, it'd take an hour or two.
 
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