I am sorry but I do have a problem on this. Thread closures in my humble opinion should be few and far between. As others have said most threads will disappear down the pages if nobody reads or wants to contribute to them. However the recent "spoof" thread was closed when it was apparent that a non Hornet had started a joke thread which did not find favour with the majority of people who post here. I happen to agree with that - but would not if it had been a post by one of us - it was the fact that it was an outsider and was not welcomed that made closure sensible. From what I can tell most people agree with that. However what irritates me is the closure of the Poll about it. That was started by one of us and sought to find out what we hornets think. I would have voted but found I could not because BHD unilaterally decided to close it. I can see no discussion about it - and I strongly object to such censorship - it is not the Mod's job to close an innocuous thread without at least consultation. But what is more is BHD's closing post - it smacks of my old school days when some highhanded master would allow no other discussion - I will post the quote to save anyone needing to look it up - it reads: HTML: "This will be the last word on the matter! The thread was created by one of the Norwich Mods using an alter-ego, much like Leo did under HornetArt. He has had success on the Norwich, Sunderland and Bristol Rovers boards. It was simply a tongue in cheek thread where he offers funny answers to mock questions. However a few sourpusses did not like it so H closed it. A long time ago Leo said that there should be no need to close a thread unless it is offensive! This was not offensive so if you dont like it you ignore it. I am not going to start closing threads just because there are 5/6 people who have had a "sense of humour bypass". If one person on the board likes the thread then they should have the right to read and post on it. If not it will drop away and nobody has to read it. FYI, i dont enjoy the change a letter or song games, but i leave them and only skim mod them. I have not been harmed by them. The matter is closed and so is this thread. P.s, the news thread is not the place for this discussion!!" 1 - why should BHD's be the last word on this matter 2 - it did not seem to me like a few sourpusses but almost every poster barring the Mods themselves who were "in the know" 3 - I did not use an alter ego in the manner of this Norwich poster. In fact I will explain why I did. My wife was diagnosed with cancer in 2010 and had a huge operation which seemed to have cleared it. However in the summer tests showed it had recurred. A number of people here knew some details about it and I wanted as Leo to disappear - to stop posting with all the previous baggage I felt I then carried. I resigned as Mod for that reason and opened up a new identity under which I hoped to post as anyone else does. However Dan and Norway for their own reasons "exposed" Art as Leo thereby denying me the right to leave behind Leo - and I had no choice but to come back as Leo. All very complicated I know and I am not even sure now quite why I thought it was a good idea but it was a right I felt I had but was denied me. For others of you - and I know on here there are more than a few - who are surrounded by severe illness - you may understand that sometimes things just seem to overwhelm you. I feel that even now - and wish I could post here under a different pseudonym where nobody is aware of those issues. I stopped posting altogether in November to January but have returned as I like the community of people here and miss being able to share a view or two. 4 - as BHD has quoted Leo let me now state that in addition to offensive threads I WOULD close a thread by a non Hornet if it proved almost universally unpopular as this one did. I too do not like the plethora of games and music threads here but they are "ours" so I just ignore them and would not delete - it is the non Hornet aspect that for me makes the difference. Hopefully you will all have been too bored by this monologue to read this far so this thread will not need Dan's attention and can wither rather than be executed.
Leo, i'd just like to say that what Dan said yesterday was slightly misleading. We were not 'in the know', i stumbled upon that post the same way you did..just a few hours later when the poo had splattered all over the fan and the post had been closed and reopened. Only after that did i discover who had written it, and even then, the mod in question is not someone i 'know', purely another mod, trying to have some lighthearted banter across the boards. i also don't agree with closing threads, and only closed that one because a. the fuss was huge over something so insignificant, and b. because the poster suggested it, since it had been taken completely the wrong way and wasn't worth keeping live. I didn't know Loydinio's thread was closed, but agree, it shouldn't be...but then..unless a post is offensive, i don't see the point in closing any of them for the reasons you state... Are we saying that only Watford fans can post here? Because if we are, that seems very excluding to anyone else who has an interest in visiting other boards and intermingling, and will certainly not help in cross board communication. Alienating our board seems a shame, we've come so far....and our first mod had a big hand in that..
A good reasoned answer Leo. Being somewhat long in the tooth, I usually tread carefully about my thoughts on certain subjects because I realise that I come from a different generation to some of our regular posters. I quite often just let things pass me by, especially when they start to get rather like facebook or other similar chat rooms. Yes, you can find me on facebook, but I would have to be one of the most infrequent posters ever. Not606 is really a football forum, although I believe that due to the type of people who contribute to the Watford pages it has become far more than that. There have been some really well thought out views on many topics, with people prepared to give their opinions on things that could be potentially explosive. Of course there are also the silly almost outrageous moments, but then I think that I can discern when things are tongue in cheek. By and large however I do believe that we as a group have been fair minded and tolerant of our fellow fans. It can of course be quite funny when we do get into a bit of banter with fans from other clubs, especially when they do not understand that comments made here are banter, nothing else, yet they take them as serious remarks about their team. For that reason I am happy when we have contributions from the 'away' end, but for someone to produce something that he thinks good, then he spreads it around many forums, strikes me as delusional. The thing that made me want to see the end of it was the manner of his reply to a comment from one of us. He might not have intended it, but the way i read it set me against the thread.
As always H - you put points across so well. I almost 100% agree with you. Do you know - as a Mod I may well have refused to close the thread and just suggested people should ignore it if they don't like it. However another part of me is concerned. I for one am not as keen on not606 as I was on 606 as 606 was more football and incorporated far more cross club banter - which I liked. I don't like the extent to which not606 reminds me of twitter and facebook - two things which I do not subscribe to. Fortunately in recent weeks it seems a lot of the "lol" ing etc has died down a bit - that is good for me but I recognise others like that. You ask if only Watford fans can post here and from the above you will gather that I do not think that at all. However my concern is that on joke threads we could be inundated across the whole of not606 if people from one club want to post to all others - our "Friday afternoon" is ours - we dont go to Norwich with it. If Bob's Your Uncle had put up a thread that was genuinely interesting and funny then maybe it would have been accepted - but frankly it smacked of someone "advertising" and was at best puerile. It got a firm thumbs down from almost everyone here. Am I sorry it was closed - no - would I have closed it - probably not in hindsight. I certainly would not have closed Lloydinho's
As one who got a wee bit over the top in my anti the thread I can see why today. My initial reaction was "what a load of rubbish but I'll put one post in just to show opinion". It was then the closing and reopening because a mod thought the person was ok that I objected to more as it would quite easily fallen of my radar and I'm sure many others if it had remained just the purile humour from the OP (I ignore all the game threads out of choice but dont find them offensive or annoying). There must have been something in the tone of the original post that caused the negative reaction. I'm not sure what it was but its usefulness as a reminder as to modding policy is a positive.
I completely agree, i hate having to close a thread as it seems to be censoring people which is not what this forum is about. I left the thread alone and if people had not kept posting the same things about wanting it closed it would have drifted into obscurity as i planned. But people kept posting and therefore it was moving up all the time. There aint nothing i can do about that. The issue i have, is that it would seem that for a select group of 5/6 people that they are the majority. I may be wrong, but only 10 different people posted (not including the OP, myself and Hornette) which actually represents a huge minority of the board. If however that was the consensus, and people did not like it it would have disappeared into obscurity. The reason i closed the poll is two-fold. 1) the poll was obsolete as the offending thread had been closed, so there was no need for it. The aforementioned 10 posters all disapproved of the original thread and did not want it cluttering up the board. So i decided there was no need to keep having the discussion about what was wrong with a thread which was closed hours before. If you read NNW's comments you will find reason number two. It was winding people up, people did not want the original thread and NNW was clearly not happy about the vote thread being 'bumped'. So i closed it and gave my final thoughts and explanation of the thread. It obviously wont be, but i thought it was only going to end up in a fight, so i thought give an explanation and then let it go. It was a total of 10 posters which is a vast minority. Unfortunately no-body read my post about it dropping away if its not liked. They just saw fit to post insults and abuse which bumped the whole thread. If people insist on posting it wont drop away and they are at fault. I dont want to go into depth about this again, but I did not expose you, it was Norway who posted a short sentence about you being HA but then promptly removed it. We had both decided to let you carry on, but then you obviously saw the comment and decided you would come clean. No-one had a problem with it, i even told you so myself. I simply looked into who it was because they appeared to like causing heated discussions which could easily get out of control (look at the Suarez threads). I too disliked the vast number of games threads about at one point. This is why i posted an announcement that the Mods would look into the situation in the new year, simply because 6/7 threads would be on the go at once and would take up most of a screen, and many people did not participate in them so would have to scroll down each time to find threads of interest.
I did originally close it because i was suspicious of the OP and did not want to have an unsavoury character about. However, i then did some digging and found that he is a Mod for Norwich and the thread was not advertising, it was simply a bit of fun. So i then re-opened it which i thought was only fair. If people didnt like it it would drop away and no harm would be done. But it would be unfair to close a legitimate thread by a decent poster. Im sure we all agree about that.
A decent poster would not need to use two accounts simultaneously (and by simultaneously, I'm explictly not casting aspersions on those who decide to make a clean start under a new alias). I've posted some good, bad and downright ugly things in my time on not606, and for better or worse all of them form part of my history on the site. I have the fortitude to stand by my contributions here, and retract or apologise for the few that I regret. I don't have one account for the good cop and another for the bad and ugly. I would also point out that if one of us mere mortals were to deceptively use multiple accounts, we would probably face being banned.
Maestro is a perfectly decent guy.He created Bob Shurunkle because it sounds like Bob's Your Uncle which is a fitting name for an agony uncle. He did not want it to seem like he was trolling the boards as a WUM. There is nothing stopping any of you posting under other names, and in fact i believe that one of you does. I wont name names, but i have my suspicions. The one thing that would happen is that person might get a ban if he or she broke the site rules and was racist but i would not block the original user. I would not ask Mick/Syd to block a Wum as i find them quite funny at times (Garry on 606.).
Well, he was. Whether his intention was malicious or not is besides the point. He created a new account solely to troll, and the powers that be (Mick and Syd) have not done a fecking thing about it.
He was not a troll. He was not posting to wind anyone up or to disrupt anyone. In fact he was quite happy to have the thread closed (as Hornette pointed out) when he realised the negative views of it. Mick and Syd would only look into it on the say so of another user. They cannot monitor every new member, there are over 15,000 members on here.
His post is on a number of boards, including Sunderland, and is a good laugh for those who enjoy a good laugh, including me. Sorry if that makes me a bad person but I subscribe to the old fashioned, if its not your thing ignore it system, or what I like to call, grown ups.
Really? By your own definition... ...he is. (bolded bits explain why, underlined or's are there to show that the bolding is not out of context). He is a troll because he explicitly decided to create an account for that primary purpose. As for Mick and Syd, they can't be expected to know the in's and out's of every new member. They can be expected to do something about a mod of a Premier League board who has freely admitted to action which, by your own definition of the term, is rampant trolling.
I won't put in my tuppence worth as the argument as a whole is a bit pathetic, I realise principles are at stake and a slight power clash here and there but what upsets me most is poor old PSH is on holiday and he would have loved this debate.
He is not. His intent was not to provoke anyone, and was not to disrupt anyone. The fact this arguement started was our own creation, not his!
He categorically is, as I have just proven. I'm willing to accept this. but not this. The argument would not have resurfaced today, and would not have taken on its current tone, had he not trolled this board.
