Personally, I think we should all be grateful that Ed didn’t write a book on one of the following:
Candid Shots of Kittens and Puppies
Trees I Have Known
How To Make Paper-Mache Centerpieces for Fun and Profit
The Complete Book of Bow Ties
Idiotic Discussions on The Straight Dope (Vol I)
The bow tie one? Fuckin A!
Had to tie one of those mothers on my wedding day.
Idiotic discussions on the Dope?
That shit’s free. All day, every day. The questions that get asked here just absolutley fucking amaze me.
Some poster So, I’m picking a bugger. Right? How far can my finger actually go up my nose? Some poster
Yes, but imagine all those idiotic discussions collected in one place so you don’t have to wade through the intelligent discussions to get to them. Or all the political threads.
Oops, when he said picking a booger, I thought he was working out whether to vote Obama or McCain.
Nevermind
I find Ed’s special forum for special folks to be lame, tacky, and unnecessary. However, I hardly see the point in getting all upset about it. So what, it’s just another subforum for me to ignore and never go into, kind of like MPSIMS.
The long time SDMB policy of being more conservative than Bill Kristol on quaaludes is another matter, though. All this does is reinforce what most of us knew (that adding new forums is a simple and painless process), and make it even more baffling why tptb are so afraid to do it. whoever made the comparison to something awful earlier was right on, they handle the adding of new subfora far better over there.
Oh, and Tuba, good work maintaining your rep as the most predictable and :rolleyes:-inducing mod in the history of message boards.
Well I guess that answers that.
in case it was unclear, I meant conservative with regards to adding new features, not politically.
I raised my concern about The Barn House over in that forum, but I’ll re-iterate one or two of my major concerns here.
Firstly, there are a number of writers and authors on the board, and they don’t get their own forums to flog their books or writing projects.
Secondly, it sets a bad precedent. I don’t recall seeing many, if any threads, on Home Improvement/DIY stuff up until now.
If “Special Interest” forums are now getting the green light, how about a “The Gun Safe” forum for the hunters/shooters to talk about guns? What about a “The Back Page” Sports forum for the sports fans? A “The Cattery & Kennel” forum for people to talk about Kitties & Puppies? Or even an “SDM/b/” forum for Random Shit That Doesnt Make Any Sense But Is Sometimes Extremely Funny?
And on a related note, where the everloving fuck is the “Politics” forum this board so badly needs? Most of GD and The Pit seem to be given over to threads about American Politics, and it’s getting WAY out of hand.
I don’t want to see the boards become full of obscure special-interest sub-forums with only a handful of threads in them, but If Ed can have his own forum to discuss his recent literary project and house-renovation hobbies, then we’re so far past overdue for a “Politics” thread that it’s time to start getting the Search & Rescue teams out, IMHO.
Lets just declare that Ed’s new forum has Pit Free-for-all rules. That sounds fun.
You really don’t want to go down this road. Blow off all the steam you like here, but if people keep dumping on that forum it’s going to be a problem.
So, then, why is the forum there?
I mean, I’m not wiping the spittle from my rage-quivering lips as I hunch, awash in the ghostly CRT glow of the SDMB while glowering at the recent addition. But, I mean…why? Pretty obvious nobody likes it, pretty obvious it’s a combination of commercial- and self-wankery that you’ll probably use free posting to justify.
Well, it’s a good thing I don’t have the power to declare rules anywhere on the site then, huh? I haven’t posted in that forum and never will, so don’t worry about it, captain literal.
Now that’s an interesting comment. Do you care to elaborate on what kind of troubles might occur, other than mods overthere moving inappripriate threads to other forums?
You can add my satirical thread “The barnfire of the vanities” in the new (and yet strongly controversial) Barn House forum to the list of Barn House forum threads that were immediately closed down. More of a shoehorning of an improvised rant into a pun of a thread title, but I like puns.
It’s an honor roll of gimlet-eyed skeptics, really. Do you suppose it’d be worth a shot for all of us starters of ex-threads to restart them in the Pit, or would they be just as dead here?
I propose a new SD slang term: “barnhouse” for the half-baked, self-aggrandizing, inflated, power-mad or generally eye-roll-inducing; with a secondary “barnhouse” definition referring to a personality type associated with one or more of the following characteristics: lacking a sense of perspective, humor or irony; being highly defensive WRT criticism or mockery; exemplifying a toadying, fulsome sucking-up to authority, or referring to such an authority itself.
The irony is I’ve long felt a separate forum for all things house & garden might be a good idea. I just don’t think it should be served up in the form of Ed Zotti’s damned vanity forum.
And what if his book is basically crappy, at least in the Sturgeon’s 90% sense? Wouldn’t that be the final ignominy?
Then there’s no problem.
Threads that are just in the wrong place will be moved like they always are. A few people have started threads there just to crap on the idea because they don’t like that it’s there. If that keeps happening people will start getting warned for it.
It’s a stupid, pointless indulgent wank of a forum and it deserves to be pointed and laughed at until someone wises up and pulls it: doesn’t the fact that people are lining up to hang shit on its very existence tell you something about it? And if you start banning or suspending people for poking fun at it just because it’s Ed’s pet forum, you’re going to make the moderation of this board - which, incidentally, I am generally a big fan of - a laughingstock.
The don’t be a jerk rule comes to mind, they have requested to keep complaints in the pit and ATMB. No different than insulting posters in GD, it is the rule.
We could speculate on titles for possible sequels:
The Barn Ultimatum
Barn Free
Barn This Book!
How is that one forum different than the rest of Ed Zotti’s vanity message board?
You appear to be in the vast minority of posters in this thread.