I sat down at my computer a few minutes ago, clipped and lit a wonderful La Aurora that was recently gifted to me by a friend I met on this board ... in starting my post, I saw where there has been work done already today ... one of our number has got the jump on things and has successfully identified and clearly illustrated, the very problem I'm posting this to address ...
A recent posting on the Cbid board noted the number of guys who were “Missing in Action” lately and named several folks from whom we’ve seen very little in recent months … far more than those named have been missing and I’ve got a pretty good idea why that’s true … in verifying my thoughts, I wrote personal e-mails to many of them and their responses confirmed my thinking …
The problem, simply stated, is the unpleasantness that we’ve seen all too much of on the boards in recent months … since the closure of that bulletin board on another site that we won’t name, but everyone knows the two initial name of, there’s been an overwhelming influx of new faces on Cbid … while nothing is wrong with new people coming on board, many of the refugees from the closed board brought with them concepts of what was normal on cigar BBs that did not exist on Cbid … and the nature of their posts reflect those (to us) alien concepts.
Other newbies and a few of our old regulars have all too willingly joined on those threads and have lowered the tone here .. we see an overwhelming amount of acrimony and personal invective that were seldom if ever seen here before … some of what has been posted has an almost juvenile “writing on the restroom walls nature about it, some a silly and inane quality and some a very parsimonious nature …
Many of our regulars, daunted by the BS, have taken the course of least resistance and have either joined other boards or simply stopped participating altogether … not many of us have the time and energy to become deputy lords of discipline and “slim-slap” the offenders.
Cbid has always been a family … not necessarily one in which all members got along all the time or saw eye-to-eye on every issue … far from it … but with a rare exception or two, it has never sunk to a personal level in which attacks on one another were seen. Sure, there has been a bit of sometimes frustrating and annoying thread-jacking, but that too has increased exponentially in recent times.
The good folks at CI/CB are naturally reluctant to come down too hard on offenders … (A) because they ARE good folks and (B) because they are in business and the offenders are their customers … with a few exceptions in which offenders have gone far over the limits, few are banished from the site … not many threads are deleted from the board, although there are quite a significant number that by the rules could be.
There’ve been more threads censored and deleted in the past 60 days than I can remember happening in the two years that preceded them … and some of those whose threads have been deleted or censored are actually taking pride in that having happened as though it were a merit badge of some sort …
ENOUGH of that … !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There are a great number of us that want that to stop and stop for good … we’re sick and tired of all the dis-harmony and 7th grade bathroom silliness … we want a forum in which cigars and other topics can be discussed or even debated in a REASONABLE and CIVIL manner … we want a forum in which the “conversation” is kept within the bounds it would be kept if we were all in a large room and talking face to face …
I can’t count the number of times I’ve said it before, but the best example of what I’m talking about can be found in the relationship that I and Rickamaven enjoy … no two people could have more divergent political opinions, but no two people could have a warmer, friendlier and more cordial relationship than the two of us enjoy. We each have high respect for the other and despite deep differences in opinion, have kept all of our exchanges on a high-toned plane … there is no acrimony whatever.
We want to see all the old faces return … we want to see all the new faces remain and join those of us who’ve been around in the months and years before the closure of that other board. We want to see those whose concept of a BB is to slam one another and engage in juvenile behavior to go elsewhere … there are plenty of other boards where that sort of thing is prevalent and well-tolerated …
To that end, we will not engage in this sort of behavior … we will NOT respond to these sorts of rantings … we will isolate them and ignore them and leave them all alone … we will let them be seen for what they are… they will NOT be “Slim-slapped”, either by Slim or by a deputy … there will be NO response whatsoever to posts of this sort ... let me repeat that last ... there will be NO response to provocation whatsoever on these boards ... the provocateurs will be completely isolated and ignored as if they did not exist.
We will reclaim our board and will be only too happy to see the return of those members who’ve been Missing in Action and let those who don’t yet know them see firsthand, what an extreme pleasure a really good cigar BB CAN be …
