There seems to be a lot of gnashing of teeth the last few days here on RYPN. That has included considerable bitterness, condescension, and attempts to sow discord among the membership.

Yesterday, I made the rounds of some of the facebook equipment forums.
Several that should have been useful forums, included new posts showing porn videos. This was hard core stuff -- nothing at all left to the imagination. At least in the opening scenes clearly shown upon opening the sites.
Several others had those never-ending death notices for celebrities who are, in fact, not departed.
Several that had worthwhile content also had that content ruined by the usual internet idiots who disagree for the sake of disagreement. "...one mistake can undo many things done well." Ecclesiastes 9-18.

My point would be, RYPN seems to be a very well run web forum.
Hearing from other forum managers, it can be an hourly battle fending off unwanted and malicious interlopers. Obviously, someone is working hard behind the scenes at RYPN, because that nasty crap does not seem to be happening here. Be thankful for that.

So? What next?
A couple of days back, Kelly Anderson started a thread on boiler stay bolt issues and discussion. That should be a good learning exercise, pulling together information from people with hands-on knowledge.

Perhaps that can be a blueprint for future threads.
The sky is the limit . One can imagine any number of threads, created to highlight specialized areas of interest. There is an amazing wealth of knowledge available on this site.

To be blunt, no one gives a damn about my politics, your politics, his politics, her politics.

Be cool. Be fair. Be courteous. Be helpful. Be humble.
There are no stupid questions.
Often, there may be one correct answer, but there can also be nuances.
We all make mistakes. We can learn by them.

In life, in general, we sometimes come up against problems, or have taken the wrong turn in the road. It might have been C.S. Lewis who said, to paraphrase, that once you realize you have taken the wrong turn, true progress is going back and trying the other fork.

I am just a simple farm boy. My way of putting it would be -- let's push the reset button and try this again!
Best wishes to everyone. Happy railroadin'!

Which ones have the porn?

Well said Great Western.

I might add that viewing this forum over the past few years, I’ve noticed a tendency for some people to attempt to elevate themselves by stepping on others. Every time this happens there is someone that reads the post and decides not to contribute, either by offering an answer or by asking another question.

As you stated, “There are no stupid questions “.

I can't say in the dozens of related groups I participate in on Facebook that this has EVER been a problem. And if it is for you- report the offending post and it will be taken down by either group admins or Facebook moderators.

Sounds like a mite exaggeration to me.

Not an exaggeration at all. Several sites had overt, hard porn. When you scrolled down to the site, you had full male on female views with all the essential body parts in full view.
Our company fb site has had porn also, not as in your face as was yesterdays, but certainly not something one wants customers seeing.
In our case, we can't be moderating it every minute of the day, but our fb site manager took it down as soon as any of us noticed.

Just a question, Boilermaker? Why do you think I would make up such a thing?

Comparing a facebook forum to a Internet bulletin board is like comparing one of those zoo trains with a diesel buried inside the boiler and painted up in neon colors to a mainline steam engine.

Anyone can start a Facebook forum, and often Facebook will allow very official sounding names by any random person. It can be an uphill battle to remove or claim one of these forums. Many of them are abandoned, but they never vanish. At least a forum like RYPN will vanish off the internet after the owners quit paying the bills, and hackers break in and trash the place.

I've seen spam adverts of porn, but the popular one right now is spam of bootleg merchandise related to your cause, but that you will never see money for. FB usually catches and kills any porn posted directly to FB. If you're clicking enough to see all the fun bits and crazy activates, your hard drive probably needs to be pulled and dipped in acid.

Do any of the FB forums you speak of have ANY on-topic info regularly posted?

Well? I really don't care how facebook works.
The point of this thread is that forums like RYPN can be solid places to exchange information and to learn from folks with expertise.
Viewers/readers can help build up RYPN, or they can help break it down.

RYPN is a resource of information and not a political platform. We only seem to go off-kilter when somebody tries to infer "who is to blame".
Sometimes RYPN is a rumor mill. Sometimes an individual tries to show how much smarter he/she is over everyone else.
But mostly, I find it works as an information source, as in the stay bolt matter, the preservation or or loss of certain equipment, where a particular project stands in the moment, resources for information, and a forum to say, "Wow that group has done a great job".
Most of us were raised to be respectful and acknowledge others; a few of us were not.

All the real juicy stuff comes to me via the RyPN back channel...

Well-stated, Mr. GW. Thank you!

Howard P.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.......

We'll remember that when you (or others) complain about how it works and doesn't.

Criticism is always more valuable coming from those with training and/or hands-on experience in the specific category. I've done "everything" in journalism from photography to deadline cover stories to lugging mailbags into the post office to layout to selling advertising to interviewing reluctant politicians, so if I complain about a newspaper or periodical or TV news, I have far more background than someone who only reads the comics and does the crossword puzzle every day. And I've worked with brilliant coders and scientists I couldn't trust to proofread a manual, and columnists who were brilliant at sports but could misspell the same word three different ways in one column (but all the people in that sport locally regarded him as a "walking encyclopedia").

Insofar as the desired survival of RyPN or other forums like it, it is not necessary to have a detailed knowledge of "how Facebook works." What IS critically necessary is to understand how such platforms have COMPLETELY changed how people interact, share information, and learn on the Internet. MANY internet resources were rendered dead even long before Facebook by other advances in online media. I actually knew of people who abandoned online discourse with others (or at least claimed to) when AOL chatrooms/forums disappeared in favor of non-proprietary e-mail lists/groups, which are now the ones that look like old fuddy-duddies compared to Reddit, Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, etc. The "young guns" of today have learned, to their advantage, how to maximize their online presence and publicity, and how to monetize it as well.

(True story: I have an associate who asked me if I could shoot a set of videos of one railroad I have the opportunity to work with. A couple chases, some "behind the scenes" shots, scenery, human interest stuff, etc. He sent me one of his "surplus" digital video cameras as a "deposit." After I uploaded all the stuff to a Google Drive folder for him, he edited a functional railfan documentary of it.
A year later, he asks me, "Where can I deposit your share of the YouTube royalties for that film?" I thought he was kidding, but he wasn't, so I set up a PauPal account and told him to send it. To my shock, it was $557.00--more than I've ever made for even cover stories in the rail magazines.)

I run 3 groups for local Ren Faires. We've had two problems. 1) "Official merch" that most definitely wasn't. Those were pretty easy to catch though.

Far worse is the matter of ticket sales. Until this year, the Faires had never sold out before, and we let people sell tickets on the fan page. "I can't make it his weekend, offering my tickets at a discount". Worked fine for a few years.

Then we sold out. Announced it at 4:00 PM. By the time I got back to the hotel at 8:00 PM, we had dozens of posts offering tickets for sale. Most were so fake it was pathetic. I had "member approval on" and I had 150 potential new members wanting to join. 150 of them in 4 hours! (The page only has like 4K members total) almost all of who wanted to sell their tickets. Most wanted scalpers prices. Some were offering tickets for weekend 3. One small problem? We only did 2 weekends this year... I ended up deleting them all, banning ticket sales on the group and warning folks about not buying 3rd party tickets. We still had people get ripped off. It was bad. FB is so scammy these days.

If this happens to your group, chances are people will be angry with you, even though you had nothing to do with it.

Please focus.
To repeat:

The point of this thread is that forums like RYPN can be solid places to exchange information and to learn from folks with expertise.
Viewers/readers can help build up RYPN, or they can help break it down.

RYPN is a great place to exchange solid information. It is not a place to debate. I hope the gnashing of teeth is done for a while. I ask that people give everyone a little grace.

Tom Gears
Moderator