Since Al was doing such an amazing job here on the McFaulds Lake hub I kept a low profile. After reading today of his decision to move on (hopefully not permanently) I thought I would share a piece I have just put on another other Hub. It concerns problems we are having there, here and in other Hubs. Unfortunately I do not see a resolution to the ongoing problem of managing a forum effectively. However, in the interim, be rest assured I will be here as well as any other Hub leader to try and keep the peace.

A partial cut & paste from another Hub I manage here on Agoracom:

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Anyway, I'm not going to waste any more time on you or any of the others that are clearly here only to disrupt these boards.

This post is directed at the Agoracom Admin's. Sorry folks. This is not working. I told Baires tonight via a PM that the sillyness and immaturity levels that most forums eventually become (Agoracom included) makes most of them doomed...even with the best of intentions. You can not have free speech without someone trying to disrupt constantly. You can not have extremely controlled forums without causing paranoia, having heavy censorship, and upsetting a lot of people. As some of you may know, I have been a forum Administrator for over 8 years on various forums out there in Internetland. I have seen all of the games being played and believe me there are a lot of them...and many very well orchestrated. I played the games also to figure out the rules and the players.

As Agoracom knows, one of the more popular leaders left the McFaulds hub today because of the frustrations that many people experience on forums (listed above). I am sure his new home will not be any different eventually...its just the nature of the beast. I know you ban IP addresses but as has been evidenced here in the last little while, its fairly easy for others to quickly come out of the woodwork...whether its the same individual using a proxy server or whatever.

Deleting posts, banning users and explaining yourself to others is a thankless job for Hub leaders and forum members. I truly hope something good comes out of putting out these little fires all of the time but going through the "fluff posts" is tiring I am sure for many readers.

Here is a copy of a post from an individual on the McFaulds Lake forum in a farewell post to AlCollard. Some may say that this could be applicable to other boards here. I will let you all be the judge:

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I've been reading the boards on Agoracom for quite some time now. When I began reading there were only a few posts a day, usually all worth reading. As more people began following the Noront story the the posts began to accumulate at a faster pace and now the few posts has turned into a few pages. Unfortunately the few pages now produce even fewer posts worth reading, instead of reading 5-10 good posts a day, it's down to 1 or 2.

The trend in recent weeks has been the blind leading the blind, and I came to this realization when the most important topic on the board was that people weren't getting all the points that they "deserved," or posters complaining that negative posts, also known as realism and proper DD, make them feel bad. I've watched quality posters, one by one, leave the forums because they can't post any objective information on the boards without the blind subjectively labelling them as bashers. Any posts that cast Noront in a positive light is not questioned and heavily thumbed without the poster providing any supported evidence at all, any posts that cast doubt on Noront's prospects are shunned, told that they carry no weight because they aren't backed up with evidence. The logic just doesn't seem to carry through on that one.

Then you get the posters that say "it's different this time" commodity prices and my investments can never go down right? and if it does go down people like Al are making it go down with there negative, realistic, comments, or we're being manipulated. Sure, we may be being manipulated from time to time, but for people to say that it causes every dip and dive shows their level of investment knowledge. If an investor reads something on a stock forum that causes them to sell, that should tell you that they haven't done the proper DD and shouldn't have been in the stock to begin with.

There were many people back during the tech bubble that touted that "it's different this time," "it's not a bubble," "if you're not tripling your money you're not an intelligent investor," Warren Buffett was called a dinosaur because he wasn't investing in tech, I think everyone witnessed how that turned out.

I'd say good luck Al, but you don't need it,

Best of luck to the people this post targets,