Go down the street to the run down wooden shack and ask for a man named “Whirlin’ Joe.” He demands hefty payment for his ideas however, bring lube.
All of the subjects that could be talked about from the book seem to be ones that would fit perfectly welll in with other forums. SkipMagic’s already said the same rules apply there as they do elsewhere. A wish to create discussions about the subjects doesn’t require the making of an entirely new forum solely for it. The reason is either advertising or ego, and I suspect the former.
I suspect further that the forum will last a day or so. Enough for people to have seen it and seen arguments about it. And then it will go, allowing for excellent advertising as well as give the opportunity to appear gracious and as one listening to posters. No, i’m not cynical at all.
I could suggest another title that also ends in “House”.
Good lord you people need to get over yourselves.
If it wasn’t for Ed Zotti this site wouldn’t even exist at all.
Show a little respect.
It is hardly showing disrespect. It is questioning the need for a separate forum.
It occurs to me that we have good evidence that Ed Zotti is Cecil Adams’s sock puppet. Or vice versa. (Literally: there are two separate accounts and user names for someone we all strongly suspect to be one individual.) So I suppose the “dual” set of standards has always been there. 
Now watch the admins leap down my throat, maybe give me a warning. 
I’ve noticed that on some topics, they are singularly humorless.
This would have been at least a little bit easier to swallow if he was honest and just said that he knew he’d get more traffic here than he would at some backwater blog, but instead he made up that absurd “pompous” line.
Good deeds do not a blank check write. And since he apparently shows us considerably poor respect by pretending the reason for the new forum is simply to discuss the subjects touched on by the book and expecting us to believe this despite the complete lack of need for it, I believe it is hardly us who need to learn the lesson of respecting others.
And when you apparently consider your magnificient defense of him so worthy as to be essentially reposted verbatim;
…perhaps it might also be beholden to you to not show disrespect by assuming the people in this thread have not even looked at the forum itself, and indeed the disrespect of a rebuttal that does not rebut any charges but merely demands of us our unwavering and unquestioning loyalty.
Show a little respect.
blah blah blah, Tuba.
I don’t see the difference.
If you want to talk about your book, that should go in Cafe Society rather than add the overhead of another forum.
:shrugs:
I guess I can avoid this ad by not going to the forum.
Regards,
Shodan
PS - Welcome back, iampunha!
Can we report this whole new forum to the mods? I think it’s a bit of a joke.
Meh. I’m rarely on the fora page anyway. And obviously not ever for very long.
There’s a high silly factor in The Barn House getting it’s own forum, to be sure, and the timing could have been better but this little give from Ed
(bolding mine) is enough for me.
Meh.
Really.
It is his forum though! If you had a nationwide column “Ask Shodan” sold many books and inspired a website and a forum dedicated to fighting incontinence since 1939. If I was your employer I think I would allow you the added lines of code to create a new forum area for your new book. Hell I would allow you to create a new one a week if you so desired because you are the face of the brand.
We are guests in a forum dedicated to Ed’s alter ego.
Paying guests.
I wholeheartedly endorse the OP. This has got to be a joke. We need a Barn House forum like we need a McDonalds forum.
As a vBulletin owner, I’ll say that a new subforum really shouldn’t make the hamsters work harder. Its appearance on the main page won’t increase database queries.
That being said, about a year or so ago I wrote that the various spinoff boards members started really didn’t do much to entice Dopers away from the SDMB, even though those boards were stable and offered more features to the user, because they were essentially vanity sites. The SDMB feels like a public town commons, while the other boards make me feel like I’m in the owner’s living room. The SDMB really didn’t feel like “Ed’s Place” in the same way that the boards run by Opalcat, Skip and Una feel like vanity sites, and that was much of this site’s appeal. Other popular message boards aren’t run as vanity projects; for example, there’s Something Awful, not Lowtax’s Place.
The more the SDMB begins to feel like “Ed’s Place”, the more it begins to feel like a spinoff board. I do hope, though, if there is a subforum devoted to Ed’s book, that he’ll at least be active there, instead of just making the rare appearance.
I’m still waiting for the punchline.
Count me in the camp which doesn’t see a problem with a whole forum dedicated to a book written by an administrator with a long history with the Straight Dope.
New forums require differing amounts of resources depending on what is posted in them. The Game Room gets lots of traffic, the Barn House will get limited traffic (unless the book becomes a runaway best seller, and even then, I wouldn’t hold my breath).
So it’s arguably as self-centered and pompous a choice as a blog–especially given that a blog doesn’t have to be pompous. So be it.
Best wishes with the book (and the forum), Ed.