Friends,

The Interchange is still the best place on the internet to discuss railway preservation, many of the people doing the the best work in the shops and museums are here to share information. For the most part the place runs just fine. There are many great threads and factual information and opinions are abundant. Wow about thanking our friends who spend most of the time in the shop getting stuff done for taking a few moments to share what they are up to.

Tom Gears
Moderator

It makes sense that the ATSF Hudson proposal would generate controversy. I don't see why we need to wring our hands over the fact that it did. There were a number of reasonable topics that were raised in response that addressed issues that ranged from the technical to the philosophical.

It sometimes seems that disagreement itself is not acceptable to the participants in this forum. Differing opinions send some people into a tizzy and a lot of the responses do not reflect positively on their author's reading comprehension. I can point to a number of vituperative responses to things I've posted that have significantly misread what I've written. Such responses make it very difficult to have a reasonable conversation.

A very tiny number of comments on the ATSF 3463 thread could be seen as inappropriate, but the outrage really seemed to be generated by the fact that there was disagreement being expressed.

I am not in favor of splitting up the board. There is not an over abundance of postings, and dividing it up will take away from the energy and momentum needed to sustain interest. We should be thankful the board is alive at all. Getting exposed to things tangential to our immediate interests is a good thing, and is getting harder and harder to do as people more carefully control how they receive information, and various sources of information have tailored their content to narrower markets.

If I had to choose between swiping my credit card at a restaurant or putting my full identity on RyPN, I would choose putting my full identity on RyPN. If you are that scared of showing who you are, my feeling is, you need not be here. Our CITO has never once seen any of our information compromised on any railfan forum page. Your basis for not posting your full identity is as faceless as your inability to post who you are.



Mr. Rimmasch: (And the rest of the "Real Namers")


First, I am not "scared" of putting my name here. I simply deem it inadvisable in the general case and all of the insistent yammering about real names isn't going to change my evaluation of the risk/reward ratio, because this kind of stuff is my bread and butter. I'm going to say this as politely as I can, but I'm a better judge of inherent dangers involved in gratuitous self-disclosure (especially in my case) than you. I also owe my family more consideration than you, so "tough noogies".

Secondly, although its no longer quite as likely, there was a time when my professional activities might have realistically had me showing up at least one organization discussed here to do an audit-and it would be decidedly unhelpful to be associated with anything other than the most bland and innocuous opinions. Its still not impossible. The day I reach "critical mass", that will change. I'll give the "real namers" a well deserved opportunity to state their case in person, if for no other reason because I think would be fun to see how long they persist when in these challenges when they get to poke the bear in person. (bear, is that a hint?)

That having been said, I'm not completely anonymous. There's actually quite a few posters on here that know who I am. Those who know who I am, (its not that interesting, really) know because they've earned my respect and trust. Obviously, you aren't quite there yet, because you haven't received a PM. One of the former posters here was so classy and respectful, that when he wanted to share something on paper, he actually addressed it to "Superheater's Grandmother".

Even funnier, the other lead majorette (think lawsuits) in this band actually met me once but was more interested in offering gratuitous dismissals of a particular locomotive. He had a second chance to peel the onion when challenged to a public debate on a "secret plan" that still hasn't seen the light of day, but insisted on erecting a series of "smoke screen" objections rather than show up. I'm not a farmer, but I'm pretty sure my late great uncle would have a colorful description for that kind theatrics that essentially meant the product of a cloaca.

Now I must depart here, because there's a neighbor's dog that barks incessantly, but is compulsively attracted to my laser pointer, so I'm going to mess with him for a while now that it's dark.

When I first stumbled upon RyPN in 2004, I thought it was the greatest. It was the next best thing to replace the loss of Locomotive Railway & Preservation magazine. There was no other place like it at the time where a novice/observer like myself could participate with/learn from some of the giants in rail preservation.

To this day it I still visit the forums at least 15-20 times a day. And much of what I initially loved about RyPN is still there, but I too feel there has been a decrease in the quality of this board over the last few years.

Particularly there seems to be increasing levels of snarkiness and a lack of civility slowly creeping into this forum. It saddens me because RyPN has kind of been a refuge from all the real-world crap we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. At least it is for me. I don't know if any others out there share similar feelings.

I don't know what the answer is, but I've seen some pretty knowledge and prolific posters run off the reservation. I truly hope this board doesn't suffer a slow death through a "1000 nicks."

Notice the wealth of information to be had in a quarter of a second.


http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&outp ... asch&btnK=

Hope you have Lifelock.

No doubt about that at all!

I too have been coming to the forums for years and severalof you know exactly wo I am, and that has not dampened my enthusiam for this place. I like to think of it like a crew room where those of us who work on steam locomotives and other equipment can sit down and discuss things in a civil manner, and a place where those who are trying to learn what we know can sit in, listen, and ask questions. I have had the occasion to PM several steam heavyweights who frequent this board, and have always been treated with respect an as a peer. There is no other board which has access to so much information just for the asking of a question. That does not need to change. Some people just need to chill...

My view is:
1.If a thread or comment does not appeal to me, I will not comment or respond to it simply to make negative remarks. If I have nothing to add, I do not post.
2. The overall content and quality of the board is up to the user. The moderator's job is made easier by the user self editing their comments and not the tail wagging the dog by end runs such as format changes, name reinventions or splitting of topics.
3. Reinventing the wheel is not a necessary step if the dialog is kept on topic and civil.
I think complaining about what is essentially the aggregate sum of another comments or topics just fuels more off topic and pointless disgruntlement over subjects that are not the be all and end all of any of our interests.

The operative word here is "choose". There are consequences to your privacy choices - serious ones. You have NO IDEA what the risks are. Because even I can't keep up, and this is my profession. Here, dip your toe:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3078835/t/o ... -are-real/
http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_kovacs_tr ... ckers.html
http://www.snopes.com/computer/ineternet/spokeo.asp
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/0 ... ined-800k/
http://haesemeyer.wordpress.com/2012/03 ... er-privacy
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-1 ... finds.html

Until you understand all this stuff, you don't have the background knowledge required to even enter a debate about anonymity and privacy. This says nothing of all the other issues, such as the professonal ones raised by our valued pseudonymous contributors.

Thus, I stand shoulder to shoulder with the pseudonymous. Bottom line is, if I/we can't create a safe place to post content, YOU DON'T GET CONTENT.

Content is what we're here to do.

You solve content problems by
a) generating good content
b) rewarding good content
c) punishing bad content
The latter because posters are human beings are only human, and they err. This is where forums go wrong.

Performance is measured against a benchmark, and RyPN has a very well defined benchmark. There appears to be large consensus that the quality of RyPN postings is not what we'd like, hence we are not hitting the benchmark. The problem is, we need to do two things at once: First, pay the greatest respect to the efforts currently being made regardless of whether they perform; and second, have carte blanche to examine how to correct those efforts, with no "sacred cows" withheld.

Out of fear or inability to do both of those things at once, we do not have that carte blanche. We're not allowed to discuss any possible solution in the area of moderation. That topic is verboten for fear of offending moderators. In my opinion that leaves little else to talk about! Except, of course, scapegoating an entire class of contributors who are seen as expendable by some. There's nothing I can say to that but, "Who is John Galt?"

I've long noticed that dismissing something as "nonsense" technically doesn't state that the particular information being ballyhooed is actually incorrect or false. It just calls it names.

This topic is both degenerating and serves no useful purpose. There really is no management to persuade to your point of view, nor any way for you collectively or individually to effect a desired change. Locking the topic forthwith.