Re: various vector...

On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Neil Bradley wrote:

> I've gotten lots of advice from fellow listmembers in addition to a WG
> monitor replacement for my Asteroids machine. because people posted about
> it on the list. As far as I'm concerned, that's part of the process in
> repairing some of our beloved games. To get to a point where I need new
> parts and can't ask for some for sale from a fellow vector head o the same
> list that was used to assist in debugging is just stupid!

        I somewhat agree. The problem with allowing selected for sale is
and has been the issue of where to draw the line. Ok, maybe we allow
parts, but do we allow whole games? What about the people that ARE here
just to sell stuff? What about eBay auction notices (even just for vector
games and/or parts?) Over the course of many months, I/we have been
repeatedly drawing/changing this line, and no matter where it's drawn
there are always still problems (Take this current price competition
between two sellers of Star Wars boards. How would YOU have handled
that?)

> In what fashion? We self police ourselves quite well I think. Only a
> handful of times have we gotten severely off topic.

        That depends upon how you define "severely off topic."
 
> So if it's decided that there's zero tolerance policy for sales of any
> sort, I'll start a list on Synthcom. Arguing about such petty shit is a
> waste of time, and severly off topic. The people on this list and their
> posts are quite valuable, including the for sale posts, so don't make
> those of us who do appreciate relevant forsale posts suffer because of
> an emotional inability to hit the delete key.

        I've been around long enough to see RGVAC go from a valuable
resource to the ruin of a newsgroup (it's not even really that great for
commerce ) it is today. It is my opinion that this happened because of
the proliferation of commerce posts (and the availability of technical
mailing lists, like this one, for all the "good" people to go to) I can't
stop you from starting a competing list, but I doubt that that will solve
anything long term. Everything will be peachy until the eBayers show up,
and then history will just repeat itself, and you'll be forced to post
list policy messages/take action just like we are now. I don't mean to
sound corny, but it's my opinion that we need to learn from history and
not repeat it by letting for sale posts permeate into a technical forum.

Joe
Received on Tue Jan 11 17:30:15 2000