?? What`s Fight Club..?

[shartley]

[Army]

Big Red One; you have it right, the club will deal with in depth answers to in depth questions. The Main forum, while having some intelligent threads, becomes over-burdened with silly responses to serious inquires. (Yes, I am guilty of some of those silly answers too )

No-one will abandon the other forums just because they are in the club, that's silly. We are too diverse in our thoughts and personal style to be so shallow.

Lighten up Rooster, give it a chance before you call it a failure

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"It's the unconquerable soul of man, and not the nature of the weapon he uses, that insures victory." BG Patton 1936

[Webmaster]

Rooster...aw come on why are you calling our pudding a cow pie :O( You havent even read the menu to see what we are serving. If I give in and say that - Fine - its an elitist forum - will it appease you?

Shartley - wow - stealth attack under the radar?! Are our moderators doing such a bad job? I feel that we do know how to run a board. Some people opt to let thier members have a certain amount of freedom - as long as they act reasonable. When they fail to do so, is when we step in. There are other boards more militant about it - and thats fine.

You post puzzles me because that really ISNT the issure. Fight Club is NOT a cure for OT, trolls, and flames of the general forum. Its more of a round table discussion between Tom and selected members.

So when you attack my mods I get a bit defensive - especially since thier job performance has NOTHING to do with the existance of fight club.



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Webmaster - AutoMags.Org
[email protected]
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"Good...bad...I'm the guy with the gun." - Ash, Army of Darkness

[Miscue]

If the moderators are doing a bad job, then why would they leave a post like that hanging? Bad moderators would remove it immediately. Good moderators allow even ideas that are personally disagreeable to them to stay, so long as they are within the rules. Remember what it was like before AGD? The AO mods would delete whatever displeased them, and would attack the poster on top of it. Is this what you miss?

-Miscue

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"Sophists play with 65 squares." - Miscue

Miscue's Profile

[cphilip]

No, your right. I am the least capable one for sure of all those named. However it is my intent to also be the ordinary person to relay your comments. That's how I am approaching it. Outside of Chemicals and a few other safety areas my other contributory skills are weak. However my resources and investigative skills are as good as anyone out there. What I don't know I can find out about real quick. And a lot of my posts are observational and philosophical. If that adds something to the Fight Club great. If not then I will not post much and be off of there real quick.

No offense taken at all. I fully agree with you. I have never claimed to be knowledgeable on all areas.

[This message has been edited by cphilip (edited 07-18-2001).]

[MagDog68]

Thordic definitely has a point about the people selected to join this forum. If you want great paintball minds to collaborate/debate in a forum, I think you should have gone for the experts: Tom, Rob, JJ, John Sosta, manike, Bill Mills, etc. Choosing people who just happen to have 900 posts doesn't necessarily mean you will get the quality you expect. Since when did quantity ever equal quality?

~Fred

[cphilip]

Good point Fred. It doesn't. But neither is the assumption that someone with 900 post was selected for those 900 posts either. Or that none of those 900 posts was worth anything. Most of them are not. But no one should be penalized for having fun here. Or not. I think Tom was clear that post count was not a selection criteria nor was knowledge of manufacturing PB equipment. I believe he is trying to create a stimulating group of people from a varied cross section of disiplines to spar around with. Not just PB guys. And in my case I have to think they wanted someone to make them all look a bit smarter and to ask them questions we all want to know but haven't been thouroghly discussed before.

[Rooster]

I thought that that was the whole point of this forum. To let the unwashed masses ask the questions about things we don't understand. Why do we need you to be our go-between? I repect your opinions, but this all seems to be about seperating us from the people that we have been so excited to communicate with. All conversations about new products and tech tips and all of those things have been well recived, and have very few Joe "New Guy" Doe replies that say stupid things like "Mags suck anyways so why waste the time?" All of the replies made to our more esteamed members have always been for the most part insightful, and for the least part inquisitive.

I'm not a power poster, or a tech, or even a guy with alot to contribute, and I'm sick of seeing posts go down the drain becuase of "How Old are you?" posts. This can't be the best solution.

[This message has been edited by Rooster (edited 07-18-2001).]

[RobAGD]

Ok

to Rooster and shartley -

The only people that really seem to be having fits about this is you 2. There are people that have mentioned they didn't think it was the best idea and they left it at that.

Rooster - you seem to have a particular burr up your bum about this. Let's put it this way, the people that show an insight into the working of paintball guns, air system or in general have good posts on a regular basis they get the chance to show what they know in a forum with peopel that do this for a living. If they in turn abuse this they will lose it.

They idea is to have very deep discussions in a forum that wont get cluttered with fluff post.

I WANTED an few extra forums to help clean up the main forum but some of what I had suggested was shot down. Tom wated to try this to see how it works if it causes too much of a problem with the users of AO then we will change it.

We are looking at a few new forums, one for doing some archiving of good threads, FAQ's, and general knowledge stuff.

A Tom ProtoType forum again I think this will be more of a Archive because the main post for that will be in main and then moved to the Archive.

We try to let people have a basically free run of things. Hence we dont move a ton of post, dont typically have to edit many or delete many. I think I have killed less than 10 threads, and edited less than 20 post. I have moved a few.

Now that post counts are up we need to start poking poeple to post to the correct forums. But as it looks now there is a TON of cross posting and we need to clean that up a bit.

But we do what we are told, we talk and email back a forth and we over all try to make this a fun place.

There always seems to be some people that can't see past thier nose for the betterment of thing for the group, because it dosent fit into thier precived roll of things.

You have had you say, and we have noted it, move on to something else and stop harping on this. Use your energy for something other than this.

-Robert

[cphilip]

<font face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Rooster:
Why do we need you to be our go-between? </font>

You don't and if you chose to not take advange of my offer I won't. maybe I phrased it wrong. Sorry I got in now as a matter of fact. I never lobbied for the idea nor the position. Others put me up without my urging. But since I did I am trying to make Tom's idea work. For him. Go back on the original post for the idea and read my input. I don't expect you to to respect me and my experience that I can give to it. I expect to have to earn that. In the mean time I offered and you chose not to accept it. Enough said about it from me.


[This message has been edited by cphilip (edited 07-18-2001).]

[manike]

<font face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by Rooster:
manike, unless im mistaken, and i often am, you are the guy who writes for warpig about European events. If writing regularly for the biggest paintball information site on the internet isn't being in the industry, i don't know what is.</font>

Hi Rooster, You are not mistaken that is me.

I do write articles and send them into warpig exactly the same as I write huge posts on lots of different boards. They are all submitted voluntarily and it's upto the webmasters of such boards if they allow my articles/posts to be read by all.

The articles I write for warpig are done voluntarily in my free time. I do not get paid for them. I do not even get expenses for them. It actually costs me quite a lot sometimes to be able to write them. I write them to be part of paintball and to try and help improve paintball for all. Exactly the same reasons I post on boards like this. If we all here are posting our views and showing pictures we have taken does that make us all part of the industry? I use warpig like I use this board, as a means to share pictures and information with people.

If you wrote an article and submitted it to a magazine voluntarily does that make you part of the industry? If you write a letter to APG and they print it?

Maybe it does? I am looking to be part of the industry but so far paintball has not paid me a penny (well apart from marshalling a local site... )

manike

p.s. One great point to this thread Rooster is that yourself and others who feel your way, are debating and seriously thinking about their posts. That's all good and is food for thought. It's not in FC but who cares, FC is causing good debate even in the main forum. (It's doesn't even matter what the debate is about in my mind).

[MagMan5446]

I thought that we weren't supposed to talk about fight club. Didn't Tyler make the first two rules very clear?

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You need coolin', baby, I'm not foolin',
I'm gonna say it, yeh! Go back to schoolin',
Way down inside honey, you need it,
I'm gonna give you my love,
I'm gonna give you my love.

Wanna whole lotta love.
Wanna whole lotta love.
Whole lotta love.

-Led Zeppelin

[blembiggity]

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[shartley]

[Rooster]

For my closing argument (its going to take some serious willpower not to reply to any rebuttals, becuase I like to get the last word, but I will give it my best effort.)

I'm not willing to just take it on faith that this is all good. There are as many people that have posted against fight club as there are members in it. Could the challenge make people post better stuff? Maybe. On the other hand, why should it take a dollar on a string to get people to do something? Could it bring our best minds together in a place where they can influance the future of paintball? Possibly. On the other hand, it could segregate our community into the upperclass and the pleabs. Could lay-people gleen infomation from the round table discussion? Sure, and I probably will. On the other hand some people that wanted in are already resentful of the club and will learn nothing.

I see all the pros being tossed around and no one is considering the cons (or at least not letting us know that they are seriously considering the possible cons). I am sure that AGD understands the value of testing something before using it. Unfortunately, putting *Beta Test* on it and saying give it two weeks to grow on you doesn't really make it a test. Its here now so really the options are learn to like it or leave. I don't really like being put in that possition, and thats why this bothers me so much.

There were enough negative posts when this idea first came out that the plan should have gotten at least a little re-tooling. Since alot of people are upset that I only complain and never offer solutions, this is what I would have done.

1. Have an idea to get industry type people together to go over issues they think are important (and since they are in the industry, if they think the issues are important, they likely are.)

2. Main forum is getting crowded. If they post there, posts will get lost, ignored, etc. Two options exist, clean up the main forum, or make a new one. [now here, clearly the easier thing to do is to create a new forum, no extra modding needed, no need to try to force everyone to change the way they post. Is it the best thing? Thats kind of moot, the forum is here now, and I'm fairly sure it will stay.]

3. Who to gets to post there? Now heres where I fervently disagree with what has transpired in the last 24-36 hours. First of all, industry type people are great. Bill Mills, (im going to get some nicks wrong, bear with me) manike, RobAGD, JJBrookshire, JohnSousta, and Mahog (as a mag customizer). I even understand why you would want to toss the mods in there, Webby, Army, Miscue, and BlackVCG. That is a completely objective way of putting the club together. Either work for AGD or the site, or be a major paintball industry member (i know thats a tiny bit subjective, but im sure it could be worded so it wasn't).

To open up the floor to nominations is to open this club up to what all the nay-sayers feel it will become, a good-old-boys club. Thats where the problem lies, sooner or later, like it or not, someday it will become us and them. Has anyone considered what will happen when the majority of the people try so hard to get in, that you can't really justify keeping them out? Is it going to work to have flight club be where the majority of the membership is? And if you want to trim he membership, who do you trim? What if people try so hard to get in they show themselves to be better members than the mods, or the techs, or the industry personnel? Do you boot the old people, do you not let the new people in? Look at all the possibilities for bad feelings.

4. Ok, the board is up, people are posting, but there is some dissention in the ranks. People are expressing concerns, people are upset, people arn't sharing the vision. There are a couple options here. A, make people see the vision. B, the vision maybe isn't quite what we tought it was. If its B, you go to your pull-the-plug contingency. If its A, the most absolute wrong method of getting people to share your vision is to tell them that they are blind becuase they don't see it. You need to systematically rid them of their fears, and prove your vision to them. Its not good enough to say the RT can shoot an unheard of 26 bps per second without shootdown without getting the robot trigger puller out and proving it. So far the method of trying to settle everyone down has been to say "look, its good, even if you can't see it yet." Sure people are posting intellegent stuff right now, the forum is new, they want to prove why they were selected. Is it only working becuase the forum is new? Who can say with 100% certainty? You have to present it as something that is completely unselfish, and completely for the good of all members, even the occasional poster who mostly just reads to try to stay somewhat informed about his sport. Is that a very high bar? Sure it is. Families are very close knit organizations, and i think calling AO a family is appropriate. But, as most of us know, it takes just a few small waves to drive a family to dysfunction.

I personally think the flight club thing could have been handled better. Good idea, poor exocution. The family has changed, and dropping a forum won't change it back. Has it changed for the better? Maybe. I'm a pesimist by nature. I plan for the worst and I'm surprised by the best. Unfortunately when someone is planning something, they don't want to hear from the nay-sayers, it ruins their momentum.

Will I let this go and give it a try? Let me answer that with a question. Do I really have a choice? Its either like it or leave I guess. And in the grand sceme of things, compared to all the help I've recieved, this is a rather small thing to deal with. So yes I will be here and maybe someday I will become so used to the idea that I will accept it, and maybe a long time after that I will come to like it. Its human nature to adapt to something, and grow anxious when its changed.

And becuase of my fervent opposition I might be viewed as some type of piriah for the rest of my time here becuase i had the audacity to challenge the ideas of the powers that be. And then again I might just fade into the background again. Another face amoung the faceless crowd. But at least I wouldn't allow my self to be steam-rolled into something i didn't beleive in, and for a short time and even though it might have been in a negative light, I had an opinion and I wouldn't let it go even though others thought i was wrong. I can live with being wrong, but I can't live with not being heard.

I want to thank all of you for debating this intellegently, and without resorting to name calling or flames. I encourage those that still feel paasionatly about this issue to continue to debate it. The only way you will be heard is to speak up. I still have the upmost respect for the AO patriarchs, and I hope this works for them, becuase we are a family, and their failure is our failure. But their success is our success, and hope to continue to see many more in the future.

Good luck AGD, in everything.

::fade to black::


[This message has been edited by Rooster (edited 07-19-2001).]