Yeppers, Love my Muttly.

Hey would you do me a favor and close this thread, that is if you are done with this subject... wanna talk about a piece of work, check this explanation of what we do:: Our RCAdmin wrote this in the Jets thread, of course he did way better then I could have...

Gordon who is new at the moderating gig has appropriately shut this one down. Many good points have been made and I listen to all of them and take heed. Without having a pulse on the users experience which IMHO is what it's all about then one cannot improve in areas which might need it.

I will say that first this thread is not jet related so really shouldn't been in this forum and to show that the mods give some leeway as I prefer less censorship and heavyhandedness over more that it has run this far to allow many to voice their concerns although not appropriate here.

We are dealing with people who have different personalities and interpretations of things. One mod might close something faster than another mod might. One user might feel something should be closed sooner than it was while another user might feel it should have been left open longer! It's hard to always win and we mostly strive to be as consistent as possible.

So everyone knows it's rare that on any questionable calls a mod acts on his own accord. As Gordon points out the moderators have a private forum to ask for opinions on how to handle many issues here. We have around 50 moderators who work the site and if any have questions where they are unsure or feel their opinion might be off they poll the entire moderator group as a sanity check. Sometimes mods will strongly disagree over things. I've even lost 2 or 3 mods since RCU started over issues with certain rules that were decided upon.

All that said just remember a few things. This is a hobby and for many of us a passion. We all do it because we enjoy it. The moderators help out because they enjoy helping others or for other reasons but at this time none are monetary related. It's been my experience since I was a little kid 26 years ago and ever since that the group in this hobby are some of the most generous people when it comes to giving up their time to help others.

On another comment and with all that said above, yes the site is "for profit" at this stage of the game. It does cost significant and growing dollars to run it and we are urging more companies to come on and advertise here to support the site and promote their own products to an audience that wants to see these products.

Last...one thing a mod loses when he comes on as moderator is how he has to read a thread. Most read it at face value and enjoy the site. A moderator has to pass judgement on every sentence and word here as they read a thread. It's much more difficult on the moderator to fully enjoy all RCU has to offer when reading the site through these "tinted glasses". After a couple months this usually burns out moderators and I urge them to take a good break as over time they almost all become more inconsistent in certain ways from reading threads this way.

And last...those ebay links...I'd say let's keep them off here in general. I had setup an auction forum where one could post and view these things and it had almost no traffic but I fear the forums would get cluttered with ebay promo posts if we allow this. I really don't have a problem with what John posted or if anyone posted something similar but fear others might see that and give an inch and they take a mile and then the usefullness of RCU would deteriorate a bit for each user.