I still get pm's from people who believe that four, five or six year old April Fool's posts were meant to be true. And outraged that they weren't.

If posting an "April Fools" subject means having to put those two words in the title, then I'm all for it if it means keeping that tradition alive on RYPN.

One key thing that all posters have failed to do is end their post with "APRIL FOOL!"
That is always what happens when someone does it in person.

If this were done it would solve the problem and avoid kickback.

One other "rule" would be for NO posts that are true to be made on April 1st. Nothing is that urgent. It can wait until April 2nd.

How is that for a compromise?

That is so obviously not true..
lets look at the commenters who dont like the April 1st posts, in this thread, and in the other recent thread:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=37867

member since 2004 - 1006 posts
member since 2004 - 282 posts
member since 2004 - 459 posts
member since 2004 - 1519 posts
member since 2004 - 576 posts
member since 2004 - 1041 posts
member since 2004 - 1480 posts
member since 2005 - 68 posts
member since 2005 - 4084 posts
member since 2007 - 2087 posts
member since 2009 - 361 posts
member since 2010 - 172 posts
member since 2014 - 12 posts

maybe two people in that list fit your accusation..
the rest, not even close..so yeah, that would be a fail. ;)

Scot

R.L.K. -

This is what I now do; wait until 4/2 to post and refraining from posting on April 1st.
I still think that those folks who post one of these missives (quite often clever) would just add the "APRIL FOOLS" to their posting on April 2nd it would solve 99.99% of the problem.

Les

Apparently none of you read the URLs I add.

And as for those "pm's from people who believe that four, five or six year old April Fool's posts were meant to be true . . And outraged that they weren't", I have a simple proposition: Forward them to me to deal with.

I agree that a "April Fool" label added to the subject line would likely take care of the issue.

Couldn't have said it better, myself!

They remind me of two kids I saw at the gas station that morning, when one pointed behind other and yelled, "There's a T-Rex right behind you!" The second kid was very little but clearly not stupid and he never turned around. The first kid, completely convinced he'd somehow pulled a good one on the second, yelled, "April Fool!" and turned away with a very smug look on his face, as if he'd really fooled the other kid at all. The second kid, who looked about as old as the first, just rolled his eyes and moved on.
These threads are just like that. That first kid will probably grow up to be a train fan, where his talents will apparently be well-serviced every April 1st with such realistic "gotcha" posts like I read that day on other forums that mentioned UP 4014's restoration was done and would be steaming the following week, or the chowderhead who thought people would believe that BNSF had decided to buy the old MLW grade over Snoqualmie Pass and would be running trains again there by next summer...

You could try this:
Create a topic, like the railfanning topic, for off topic (non rail) discussion and "chatter."

Make it clear the topic is devoted to humor and nothing posted there is to be taken seriously.

Set up your robots file to tell Google etc not to index that topic. Sweep it out every few months if you so choose.

However, it appears that far too many folks here have no sense of humor and absolutely no joking around or humor is to be tolerated. That's fine, but my question is that if you're not having fun, why bother?

And the other problem is that for every one that writes, you have 100 more who don't say anything and either get annoyed or simply believe that such and such really is going to happen.

Consider how much amazing stuff is posted here. 4014 will (theoretically) steam again. How many years was that laughed off by everyone. I was told it would never happen by a lot of folks, including the fellow who would have been in charge of making it happen at the time. He said, quite simply, "It will never happen." and left absolutely no room for doubt.

So if somebody posts that a certain K4 will be removed from the swamp, the T1 Trust group is going to use it to scan and make parts for two and then double head them, can you understand how a young railfan might go "Wow, won't that be neat!?!" instead of just laughing?

The problem here is the audience. April Fools jokes are popular in Academia. There are two reasons for that. 1) It's called "Sophomoric Humor" for a reason, Sophomores think they know everything and are geniuses. Of course, often they're neither. 2) There is the implication of a certain level of sophistication among the audience, allowing them to realize and understand it's a joke.

You can't assume the same level of sophistication for an audience created of an essentially random group of people.

So, should the tradition of "Amateur Creative Humor Writing Day" continue, it should be clearly identified and also protected from being indexed. However, the mod's intentions of banning it seem quite clear, so that's one way to solve the issue.

“Fun” is perhaps not the word I would use in how I see RyPN. I enjoy the somewhat professional atmosphere that we see within RyPN (in most cases anyway) which is why I come to RyPN and not the many other rail related sites. I certainly don’t consider myself a railfan, preferring to focus on the mechanical side of things. I prefer to say I hate trains actually, I just enjoy working on old stuff which most of the time happens to be railroad oriented.

Not every site has to be “fun” to be enjoyable and if anything the April 1st topics take away from the professional atmosphere of the site and my enjoyment of it. I would suggest a complete ban on such topics, or keep them in the railfan side of the site, but keep them out of the Interchange.

In other words, I don’t come to RyPN for “fun” and laughter. I come to learn something, to see what others are doing and how they are doing it. And that I do enjoy. So, just ban the April 1st stuff. Please.

J.R. May

Let us begin with a simple assumption. Some work is required to moderate, administer and maintain RyPN. David does the system level stuff, and Randy and I, for the most part, take care of the rest.

Second assumption there are no monetary rewards and diminishingly few psychological rewards that confer upon those who maintain and operate this thing. Nor, truth be told, am I looking for those sorts of awards. I appreciate RyPN for what it is, pretty much.

Now anything that increases my (our) workload in administering this forum and does not balance that increase is some way with some kind of reward (perhaps as simple as satisfaction) is going to be viewed with some distaste by management.

I view the posts of our noble April Foolers in exactly the same way that I view "graffiti artists" who deface railroad property, right of way and rolling stock. The April Fools posts are no different from that grafitti, and only serve to besmirch the image of RyPN. So in my mind, singing the praises of the April Fools stuff is pretty much the same and supporting the grafitti artists. In the end the result is the same: I gotta scrub the crap off the digital walls of RyPN.

April Fools posts are, in my opinion a very distinct form of "inside looking out". The author gets to bask in his own superiority for deceiving the illumnati of rail preservation, not knowing that those illuminati are thinkng "Oh crudlets, the lackwit is at it again. Will this never end."

I intensely dislike the April Fools stuff (could you guess) and it gives me a rather enthusiastic desire to just walk away from this. It's amateurish, it generally isn't even slightly funny, and insofar as I can tell it serves no useful purpose other than to make the author feel good.

I would agree if that were the actual composition of RyPN. It's not.

It's mostly steamfap (people talking about what they'll never do)… and lightly cloaked foam only tangentially related to preservation, like old movie sets, gravel quarry urban legend, "surviving car" rosters, political rumormilling, and the like. Which is easy "content", by which I mean "easy to get distracted by and gosh, where has the time gone." In other words, foam-bait - like all the click-bait on Facebook but more railfan centric. RyPN is scarcely comprised of topics about active preservation of, by and for practitioners in the field, which would be the minimum standard to call it "professional".

I'm not saying any hand guided it to this condition, but it is in this condition nonetheless.

On November 24-25 2011 I posted 2 subjects as an experiment. One was a real question of direct interest to tourist railway professionals. The other was an intentionally useless, child's question about steam locomotives that had no relevance-to-practice or professional usefulness whatsoever. GUESS which one had 0 replies and which had FORTY-THREE.

Why? Because foam-bait is easy and depresses the signal-noise ratio, which demotivates professionals to stay.

Seriously? Topics like "Parents outraged at heritage railway porn shoot" are daily regulars and you're complaining about 1 out of 365 days. I can certainly understand your frustration, but April 1 is not the cancer.

And yes, "fun" should be part of it, an essential part of it since many of us are volunteers.

Back when I was in university, for an English literature seminar I had to pen and present an oral report outlining and explaining how the reader of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick was to understand that Jonathan Swift had not, in fact, slipped into senility or insanity and actually advocated the cannibalistic eating of the little blighters. The essay is, instead, a pointed attack not only on British policy towards the Irish population by keeping them in second-class status, but also a condemnation of societal apathy and ignorance towards the plight of the poor, homeless, and orphans.

The professor and I had a bit of a discussion before I penned it. How could anyone possibly take Swift's pronouncements at face value, I asked. If you're not enlightened enough to figure out that a known satirist is penning satire, how would you be intelligent enough to figure out the attacks on British policy and public apathy?

Apparently I grew up in a "bubble" of people who "got" humor and satire, and were prone to dry wit and execrable puns. And I had lots of help from everything from Looney Tunes cartoons (before they were "sanitized" for later audiences) to comic strips such as Doonesbury, Pogo, Shoe, and editorial cartoons. I apparently never got exposed, until much later, to people who just didn't get sarcasm and satire, a la Dr. Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory.

So, with Dr. Leonard Hofstadter's help, I shall rectify, as best as I can, the problems I have apparently caused for some:

Couldn't have said it better myself. Let's be adult about this April fools foolishness (for that is what it really is) and simply strive to keep RyPN as a professional forum to discuss topics related to preservation news and information that is helpful to our fellow preservationists.

Thanks!

Look long enough, and you'll find a long, satirical essay, full of "foolishness," that editor Mark Smith actually ASKED me to pen, in keeping with an issue's theme.

I wonder if anyone cancelled their subscriptions in a fit of rage after that.