First off, I don't want to see Jon fail at his enterprise, landracing.com.
But I said it before, on line forums and message boards are fundamentally
incompatible with the objectives of most businesses.
The owner/manager simply doesn't want to irritate his customer base so
he/she thinks that the bad stuff that shows up on the bulletin board is OK
as long as it brings customers to the store. Wrong!! It doesn't work.
We're looking at a textbook case study here. Every store bulletin board
I've ever seen eventually gets torn down because the store owner doesn't
want to manage it the way that's needed in a world populated with a
component of self serving jerks. Doesn't really matter whether it's
internet or brick and mortar. The end result is always the same. Either
Jon treats his site as a hobby that doesn't need to make money or please
customers or he treats it as a business. In the former case he can be hard
nosed and just block the jerks. In the latter case the only way is to dump
the "bulletin board" thing. He'll never be able to prevent the damage these
egocentric parasites can do to his venture. Far as I know there is no
in-between formula.
Steve Hatch owner of the Ukiah, CA, based Railway Engineering Co. started an
HOn3 Yahoo model train group and quickly turned it over to some tough minded
moderators with no connection to his business to manage. It's been an
overwhelming sucess; and hasn't hurt his business one bit. Matter of fact
he often posts to the group and manages to stay quietly on the side when the
moderators have to come down hard on someone who pushes the rules. Net
result, the jerks get mad at the moderators and Steve just shrugs his
shoulders with quiet pride.
I think this is one example Jon Amo could follow.
Ed Weldon Los Gatos, CA
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Romero" <delsolid@gmail.com>
To: "LandSpeed List" <land-speed@autox.team.net>
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2008 1:56 PM
Subject: [Land-speed] Landracing.com forum
> I sincerely hope Jon gets it sorted out. I used to post there all the
> time and even sent some $. I don't bother anymore. It deteriorated
> into a place where complaining, second guessing, pissing and moaning
> dominated the conversations. The few intelligent posters were drown
> out by the noise of the peanut gallery. I have to admit that I'm not
> holding out much hope of it getting any better. The old terms of
> service were fine, they just were not enforced at all. Coming up with
> new terms of service wont fix the problem if they are not enforced
> either.
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