[Nottingham] Response on awareness day

[Graeme Fowler]

On Fri 04 Nov 2005 12:05:47 GMT , Martin <martin at ml1.co.uk> wrote:
> Aside: The offlist mail has been more supportive than not. And those 
> commenting over on the LUGradio forum last showed their faces here at 
> a meeting/social when?...

OK, great, so some people have supported you privately and others have 
publically berated you for berating others. This is a democracy after 
all, we all have our opinions and some sit one side, some the other, 
some in the middle.

But will you (and everyone else) just shut up about physically 
attending meetings? The last one I attended was in 2001, I seem to 
recall (although I have offered support, help and equipment for events 
held since on more than one occasion either directly or indirectly), 
but that doesn't make my postings to the list any more or less valuable 
than anybody else's. That goes for everybody.

I've tried very, very hard to be as non-judgemental as possible over 
the course of this whole ridiculous flame fest, to provide a balanced 
viewpoint and to try as much as I can to act as the voice of reason. 
What's now frustrating is that - no matter how many times you or others 
say to leave it all alone - you're dragging up the same old arguments 
again and again.

Everyone - stop it. It's boring, the viewpoints are entrenched and 
opposed, and it's all a complete waste of time and bandwidth. And none 
of it looks any good to any potential subscribers to the list who might 
chance on the archives before deciding to subscribe, or to those 
lurkers looking for help in future. Imagine how some of the less 
experienced members of the list will feel now before posting a question 
- "Am I allowed to? Will I get flamed? Is this too trivial?".

In my opinion (as many have pointed out, I am entitled to it after all) 
this whole argument has reflected very badly on the Nottingham LUG *as 
a whole*. Whether you're a regular poster or a hardened meeting 
organiser, we collectively look like arseholes to the rest of the world 
now (for we are all "NLUG" or "NottsLUG" regardless of personal 
commitment, posting statistics, signal/noise ratio or meeting 
attendance record), and this fact is available online for the entire 
world to see. Congratulations.

Can I ask, politely, that we just all stop it?

Graeme