tekkie,
I don't want this to develop into another slanging match nor will I respond to any replies on the subject.
My argument is this; I can go on to any number of boards both here & overseas and discuss Jap cars, yank tanks, wank tanks, amphibians, sports cars, V8s, hot rods in fact almost any type of car ever made. If however I was to mention that I am a Citroen, Renault or Peugeot owner, I would get slagged off the board as most would know. If you have any doubts, put the brand of a French car into a message board seach engine or similar and read the messages; you are treated as a leper. Now, along comes aussiefrogs which I and several other multi French car owners have chosen to support & we can have (or in the past have been able to have) a sensible discussion on French cars regardless of make or model; we haven't always agreed, but one interesting point has been the diversity of avenues we have all enjoyed. Some have chosen to go down the road of performance enhancement, others restoration. Some prefer the older models, some the more quirky ones whilst others have followed the new car route. With all that in mind, we have all had one common interest, French cars.
General Chit Chat has been for basically anything. There were no rules laid down, we just used our common sense as regards what was & what wasn't acceptable. This could range from a computer problem to someone suggesting a social gathering to discussing window stickers, basically anything that the users & readers of the board found of interest to themselves or thought may be of interest to others.
All of a sudden we get this inundation of strings on cars other than French ones. Now this is fair enough if someone was genuinely thinking of buying a car and asked for peoples opinions of a couple of cars to compare with something French which was also in contention. This was not happening; instead we got a few posts which just went on & on about cars that very few members had an interest in. Each time one of these threads looked like dying, someone would fire it up again. We had gone from being an exclusive French car forum to what was effectively just another car forum. One of our members from the UK, Jon Wood, is all too aware of the massive problems that have been caused overseas with forums that have been "infiltrated" by boofheads. These types see a board which has been operating smoothly & efficiently for ages which all of a sudden shows signs of getting the staggers through disharmony and they start "needling" from the sidelines & destroy the board. An attempt to do this on this board happened a couple of weeks ago & I spotted the posting almost immediately, contacted the moderator who zapped the message & I presume banned the offending party off.
General Chit Chat had reached the stage of around 90% of all postings related to vehicles other than French ones which had several members, me included asking what we were doing here.
If debating the pros & cons of these breeds was all so interesting to these listers then by all means go to a board where they can discuss in detail with people who actually own & drive the things, not hypothsize with ones whose second cousin once went for a test drive in one.
There are times when for reasons other than being a French car owner, I go to other motoring sites and get involved in discussions. That is where I go because that is the place to go. I am sure that if I were to ask for a suggestion for boost pressure on a 7.2 litre V-12 twin turbo XJS Jaguar on this board, it would be a brave technician who dialled it in for whatever was suggested. If these threads were either informative or educational or even to any degree entertaining there may be some justification, but they're not.
I do believe also that it is an insult to "gibgib" who owns this board and who pays to maintain it out of his own pocket as a service to French Car enthusiasts without any form of payment from those who feel free to use it, that these people can show so little loyalty that they feel they have a god given tight to turn it into a general run of the mill type of car forum.
As far as posting things other than about French cars goes, well I think I have answered that one. There are no rules, just common sense and know when to put the subject to bed.
Strings running to 2 & 3 pages and full of nothing but mindless banter coming from people obviously speaking from what they're sitting on does nothing to improve the standard of any debate, wastes a lot of time and is frankly an insult to anyone's intelligence as far as I'm concerned.
I may have come across as being somewhat abrupt if not rude on a couple of occasions duing this debacle but the truth of the matter was that hints were getting nowhere; as my late father used to often say of some of the guys he had working with him "First you tell them what to do; then you show them what to do; then you do it foer them!!"
With this, I know just how he felt.
Trust that explains the position from the point of view of more than just me.
Now we can get the same mindless responses as in the past - Should be able to discuss all brands, if you don't like the title don't read it and so on & so forth.
A case of lookin' at tha pitchas 'n not reedin' tha werds. sleepy clown
Alan S
