A question for Guitar Attack!

[Deleted]

I was looking at a lot of post on Guitar Attack. Seems there are a lot of them no longer active or the person that posted them is no longer on here.

My question is, why do you not delete these posts? There are no pictures and some of the comments are no longer on them.

I am curious, is all. Looks like there needs to be some clean up. If you all don't have the time to do that, I could do it for you! LOL!

[GuitarAttack Forum]

That is an easy one. I discussed this with Admin a while back. There are over 30k posts on this board. We do not want to put the time into going through and trying to decide what to keep.

Therefore, we are going to keep it all. Admin has been successful keeping the spam and questionable posts to a minimum. We don't want to have to curate this board and decide what is or isn't worthy.

I am sure there is still enough on here to keep people interested for a little while.

John

[antares]

Jan 4, 2024 14:43:50 GMT -6 GuitarAttack Forum said:

That is an easy one. I discussed this with Admin a while back. There are over 30k posts on this board. We do not want to put the time into going through and trying to decide what to keep.

Therefore, we are going to keep it all. Admin has been successful keeping the spam and questionable posts to a minimum. We don't want to have to curate this board and decide what is or isn't worthy.

I am sure there is still enough on here to keep people interested for a little while.

John

This is an awkward one John. I admin another guitar based forum basically because both the admins passed within a year of one another prior to covid. The owner of the forum gave notification that he was going to close it down after some bad experience and when I asked him to reconsider he just awarded me admin status. It has extremely low traffic. There is one other guy left and we use it as a mutual conversation conduit these days. I wanted to award him admin rights too because otherwise I'm the last man standing, but he wasn't too enthusiastic for which I don't blame him.

I restrict sign ups to "approval" and for the few we still get (and never hear from again!) that seems to block spam. It means I don't have to monitor for spam, I just deal with the applications when they show up.

I also restrict sign up to approval because we had an unfortunate experience with one member claiming to be female from The UK. She wanted to rejuvenate The Forum and introduce FacePage and Twitter links. I canvassed the other members and there was no enthusiasm for the dreaded social media experience. I gently declined, and incorrectly thinking I am American, she launched into the most vile anti-American and colour prejudiced tirade you could imagine against me. I tracked her I.P. address down and should have reported her, but I didn't. She goaded me to ban her but I didn't. She discovered one of my other eMail addresses and started to stalk me with vile eMails which I ignored. She deleted her membership so I banned her I.P. address. Along with spam, that's why I restrict sign up.

I try not to swing the ban hamster, but that's the kind of thing you may have to put up with. Too many of these forum admins think they're god's gift in my view.

[GuitarAttack Forum]

Steve --

Thanks for the feedback. I've had some bad experiences with some folks on here, but there have been many more good ones. And when I say many, I mean many. There is always that one person who gets under your skin and they seem to derive pleasure from the process. I found out early in my online life that the anonymity and geographical separation afforded by a forum (and social media) makes many people very bold and loud in a way that wouldn't be seen had our interaction occurred in person. I also think the online discourse has coarsened since COVID and it may just be a function of people spending so much time on the socials that they don't talk to real people anymore.

But, I get more "thank you" emails than hate mail, and that is what keeps us going. I think about the music stores I used to hang out in when I was younger, and a lot of the knowledge I was exposed to was never captured or saved for posterity. There is a lot of knowledge on this board, and while our contributors come and go, there is a lot to look at and learn from.

We have been pretty successful on warning posters and deleting offensive posts, but it is a daily process. While it is not perfect, and it may not be optimal, I still like it, and we will keep this forum going for as long as humanly possible.

We'll deal with the haters....I want you all to focus on guitars!

Thank you all,
John