Zixar

To whichever moderator finally deleted that post, thanks.

NukeAnything is a good extension, too. If there's an annoying image, popup, scrollover, animation, whatever, just right-click on it and Nuke it. Poof--gone!

Garth: That was uncalled for.

Psalmie: I appreciate what you said, but it looks like few want to listen. You know, so many people have asked, "Why didn't the 'good' leaders in TWI step in and confront VPW?" That's easy to ask after the fact. Most folks were so blissfully ignorant about what was going on that they didn't even want to hear that things might not be all WOWburgers and fries. I'm afraid that unless people actually start to examine what's been going on, and take steps to correct it, they'll have simply traded one blind trust for another. Cripes, after Victor Paul Wierwille, you'd think we'd know better than to create an unquestionable Victor Paw Tucket in his image. I know he doesn't want that, and we shouldn't want it either. Paw does have to lead the way through better moderation. Yet he can only delegate so much of that. The rest of us have to follow the example he sets and exercise self-restraint so that the Mods won't have to police this place 24/7. No, we don't have to all hold the exact same views, ideas, or beliefs, but we should hold the same manners.

Just don't blame me for how this one turns out.

Unfortunately, it looks like dmiller's Objective poll is showing WORSE results than my supposedly "loaded" one.

excathedra: Perhaps I should. It would certainly be less aggravation.

parsley: The question was honest. I think the results were, too.

Well, at least you were polite enough to admit you didn't read it carefully. Thanks.

MC: What's the minimum number of people that have to be offended by something before it's not polite to say it in public, then? And PLEASE answer "one".

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Mary Cate: So let me get this straight--you do know what the phrase means, you just didn't bother to notice the phrase wasn't there anymore before you started making snide comments about me with regards to it?

Chuck: I'm not trying to convert anyone. It's a question of inappropriate behavior in inappropriate forums. It's one thing for a person to be an atheist and post his reasons why in the Doctrinal Forum. It's quite another to start religiously offensive threads in the Open Forum. Or, can you not see why your calling the Bible "a load of bull...." is as grossly offensive as using racial or ethnic slurs? Freedom of speech is one thing, as is freedom to disagree. I don't care whether you belive the Bible or not, but when you deliberately denigrate it with obscenity, you've crossed way over the line. Forget this "Christian" site dodge, too. No one is saying this has to be a stated "Christian" site. But it doesn't have to be a stated "African-American" site in order for "n*gger" to be offensive, either.

I could be wrong, but I thought nobody could be that dense unless they have some sort of severe brain disorder. Yet... If I had said "GreaseSpot has gone round the bend", I'm sure some idiot would say something along the lines of "Duh, GreaseSpot ain't got no wheels, so it couldn't have been on the road in the first place." If I had said "GreaseSpot is past its prime", some wiseass would say "GreaseSpot isn't a number, so you can't tell what divides it, so you can't tell if it's prime." Or some other idiot would say "Duh, GreaseSpot ain't no cut of meat, but if it wuz, it'd be choice, not prime. You're stoopid." If I had gone in earlier today and changed both the poll and the title of the thread itself to remove all references to shark-jumping so as not to tax the easily-bewildered, I'm sure someone would still find some way to broadcast their complete ignorance of the difference between speaking literally and speaking figuratively.

That will also work. I saw an empty IDE-USB2 enclosure at WalMart the other day for $50.

You can change it to read "It was the equivalent of a Holocaust denial on an Israeli movie discussion board" then. -->

Well, fine, Tom. Forget I said anything. Or just believe that somehow I managed to stuff a ballot box on this forum and I'm an evil, conniving son of a bitch. Makes no difference to me what you think.

Long Gone: If it were just me, then you'd be right. If I don't like what's going on, I can just leave, the same as anyone else. The problem is, it isn't just me, is it? The results were a long way away from 31-to-1. Typically in the past, whenever the site has been questioned, the fairweather friends leap out of the woodwork and outnumber the questioners by at least 4-to-1, usually a lot more. Until the numbers were brought up, I assume people voted honestly on the issue instead of along personality lines. I would think the prudent course would be to acknowledge that there's something going wrong and fix it, not cover it up in another rah-rah session for Pawtucket. It's purely my opinion of course, but that's what caused it to grow in the background in the first place. The site won't suffer a bit without me. It might disappoint a couple of people, but it certainly won't come crashing down because of the loss of one poster. We've lost good (and bad) people before and it carried on just fine. However, when a large number of unrelated people get disgruntled at the same time, it doesn't take a Ph.D. to figure out that there's a problem that needs to be addressed for the good of the remaining folks.

I neither used quote tags nor quotation marks. I drew the conclusion that you intend no change from the following: If that is the wrong conclusion to draw from that, then I apologize. How are you planning to change the site to address the issue, then?

Belle: That is a possibility. Yet, the thread has been viewed well over 800 times already, so apparently there's more than a little interest in it.

Paw: The number of answers is irrelevant. Consider if, say, Mr. P-Mosh, for example, posted a poll asking who will win the Presidential election and gave the following choices: a) Kerry, because Bush is an idiot b) Kerry, because Bush is a warmonger c) Kerry, because Bush is Halliburton's sock puppet d) Kerry, because my goldfish told me so e) Nader, because Kerry owes me money f) George W. Bush. The Kerry voters might be split as to a-d, but odds are choice f would be the single highest vote getter in the poll. A-E combined would still be the opposite of F, and still give an overall indication of whom the polled people preferred. In this poll, the largest response group were the ones who agreed that GS has changed for the worse(10 votes). If it were just a few disgruntled posters, you'd expect choice A to have the overwhelming majority, regardless of how many other answers there are. A and D were split almost 50-50, and that's before I brought the stats up here. Like I said earlier, I had expected it to run about 80% for GS, 20% against. So far, that hasn't been anywhere close to the results. Doesn't that tell you something?

Belle: If the "silent majority" believe otherwise, they can cast their votes without saying a word here. So far, looks like they haven't--or else thirty of them HAVE, and the results are as shown anyway. Shell: There was no gossip involved in the information I received. It wasn't "bi+ching and moaning and groaning", either. Three of my friends emailed me independently of each other expressing concern over what had happened with Dot and the JW trolls. The consensus was that it wasn't just a fluke, but a wake-up call to a disturbing pattern. The numbers so far, coupled with Pawtucket's response on this thread(EDIT: This was being written at the same time Paw posted his second response.), have underlined two things--a) There is growing unrest among the GreaseSpot posters, and b) Pawtucket currently has no intentions of changing anything to address that. Actually, I expected the numbers to run 4-to-1 in favor of "GS is just fine", which is the normal distribution of votes when questions come up about what's going on. When they come up near 2-to-1 against, something is wrong.

P-Mosh: Buy a new HD big enough to hold your data, then take it to a friend's computer and clone the lemon drive onto your new drive with the new drive's software. Maxtor has "MaxBlast", don't know what the others have, but I've done the same thing with MaxBlast many times. Best Buy frequently has 80GB drives on sale for $50 or so. Call Amex immediately and tell them what's going on. They have excellent Buyer Protection Customer Service for stuff like this. If you didn't get what you paid for, and the store won't make it 100% good (i.e. that stupid 15% fee), odds are excellent you won't get charged for it. Amex can tell you what you need to do.

As of this date, the numbers don't look good. 9 think it's just taken its next turn 2 think it hasn't quite yet jumped 8 think it may have 10 think it definitely has 3 think it lost it a long time ago. How you weigh the 8 "maybe" votes notwithstanding, that's troubling. Apparently it isn't just a few disgruntled posters, it's any where from forty percent to two-thirds of the posters. That's not good.