The Local Hobby Scene - perpetual thread

[berryberry]

Originally Posted by jmichael

No need to.
But after spending hours reading the whole thread I Have to give my, who gives a shit, except me, opinion.
Bam got banned, and deservedly. So what, does anyone think it matters? all he has to do is open a new account if he finds a need to post
As for DG, first the way she argues, she reminds me of a certain politician who never did anything wrong, It was everyone else fault, that there is a conspiracy out to get him/her, DG are you a republican ( yes I put this in there to piss you off, not directed at DG
As for me, DG or anyone else, for that matter, if you don't respond "We would run out of stuff to say, even Bam.
I got one Question for the admin and the rest of you to think about... Why do you only disable an account, and not delete it?
Why keep all our information? For an organization that claim it's protecting privacy why keep the information?
I sure hope I don't get BANNED for this

Well opening a second account, especially to avoid a ban, is against the rules. That said, we do know of one person here (Dogface78 aka theOperator aka HoochiCoochiman) who somehow has gotten away with multiple handles and is still posting. Not sure how he gets away with it but Bam I am sure will just take his punishment and return in a month or two or three or however long his vacation from the site is for.

[Charley3]

Originally Posted by berryberry

You pretty much nailed it !!!
And Silvermine was a higher level of paid membership. Those members all were ripped off too

When you say “ripped off”, what exactly do you mean?
I paid for a lifetime premium on this site. A while back ECCIE shut down and most thought probably permanently. I didn’t look at that as being ripped off. Just the risk of buying a “lifetime membership” is always there. Nothing is “lifetime”.
Or was there something more then that?
Also, there has been little hints of blackmail that supposedly DG played a part in. If that’s the case, why doesn’t it get spelled out instead of hints here and there?

[Dreamgurrl]

Originally Posted by Charley3

When you say “ripped off”, what exactly do you mean?
I paid for a lifetime premium on this site. A while back ECCIE shut down and most thought probably permanently. I didn’t look at that as being ripped off. Just the risk of buying a “lifetime membership” is always there. Nothing is “lifetime”.
Or was there something more then that?
Also, there has been little hints of blackmail that supposedly DG played a part in. If that’s the case, why doesn’t it get spelled out instead of hints here and there?

Great questions Charley!

[pensfan123456]

Originally Posted by Charley3

When you say “ripped off”, what exactly do you mean?
I paid for a lifetime premium on this site. A while back ECCIE shut down and most thought probably permanently. I didn’t look at that as being ripped off. Just the risk of buying a “lifetime membership” is always there. Nothing is “lifetime”.
Or was there something more then that?
Also, there has been little hints of blackmail that supposedly DG played a part in. If that’s the case, why doesn’t it get spelled out instead of hints here and there?

As far as the blackmail, if I read it correctly, a certain provider requires IRL info for screening. Then charges a cancellation fee for appointments. I believe the insinuation was that a hobbyist was forced to cancel an appointment with said provider and was threatened with being outed if he didn’t pay the cancellation fee. I am not saying that is what happened, I am saying that is what was insinuated to have happened. Which would legally qualify as blackmail.

[berryberry]

Originally Posted by Charley3

When you say “ripped off”, what exactly do you mean?
I paid for a lifetime premium on this site. A while back ECCIE shut down and most thought probably permanently. I didn’t look at that as being ripped off. Just the risk of buying a “lifetime membership” is always there. Nothing is “lifetime”.
Or was there something more then that?
Also, there has been little hints of blackmail that supposedly DG played a part in. If that’s the case, why doesn’t it get spelled out instead of hints here and there?

To answer your questions since you asked:

When you are actively out soliciting and taking money a week / a month / etc before you know you are pulling the plug on your website, that to me is cheating someone out of their money.

As to your question about blackmail, if you search thru this thread, you will see there are THREE different individuals who reported instances of blackmail by a certain provider who posts here. You could always ask those 3 individuals for more details. When you have 3 individuals reporting the same thing, well draw your own conclusions

[Dreamgurrl]

Maybe you should repost them again for a third or fourth time just to make sure that a person who just said they pay for lifetime premium access didn’t read them. Please do.

[Chase7]

Does Bam's comments matter.

[Dreamgurrl]

Originally Posted by Chase7

Does Bam's comments matter.

Is this a question or a statement?

I like to clarify and have all of the facts before automatically passing judgement.

[Dreamgurrl]

Originally Posted by pensfan123456

As far as the blackmail, if I read it correctly, a certain provider requires IRL info for screening. Then charges a cancellation fee for appointments. I believe the insinuation was that a hobbyist was forced to cancel an appointment with said provider and was threatened with being outed if he didn’t pay the cancellation fee. I am not saying that is what happened, I am saying that is what was insinuated to have happened. Which would legally qualify as blackmail.

That certain provider should get a deposit first, then cancellation fees aren’t an issue.

I mean... that’s what I do

[pittlicker]

Deposits suck. As been stated and proved over and over. NO MONEY UPFRONT !
No pussy is worth that.

[Dreamgurrl]

Originally Posted by pittlicker

Deposits suck. As been stated and proved over and over. NO MONEY UPFRONT !
No pussy is worth that.

Thanks for your input.

[berryberry]

Originally Posted by Dreamgurrl

Maybe you should repost them again for a third or fourth time just to make sure that a person who just said they pay for lifetime premium access didn’t read them. Please do.

Obviously he missed reading them or he would not have asked his question.

[berryberry]

Originally Posted by pittlicker

Deposits suck. As been stated and proved over and over. NO MONEY UPFRONT !
No pussy is worth that.

Agreed - only bad things come from paying in advance. There are examples on this site every week of guys being ripped off paying funds in advance to different providers

Smart hobbyists know - NO MONEY UPFRONT

[blkstocking]

And even smart hobbyists get tempted.

[laserface]

Originally Posted by Brandofan

So if I understand this correctly it seems that Indys aka TOS started after ASPD shut down and picked up steam in 2006.

Indys started before ASPD shut down. It existed for at least a year or two before that, I think it started even before diamondjohn (one of the senior admins on ASPD and general overseer of the Pittsburgh forums) passed away. It actually started as purely an ad posting site (similar to current sites such as Tryst).

When PI (then known by a different handle) relaunched the site to include reviews and discussion forums, he started using ASPD's facilities to try to siphon off ASPD's Pittsburgh user base and encourage them to migrate over to his site, via forum posts promoting his site and direct PMs to ASPD members. The admins at ASPD told him to cut it out, but he wouldn't. So ASPD decided to prohibit all mentions of the Indys site and/or links to it on ASPD, both in public posts and PMs (vBulletin has a "censor" function that can automatically replace all mentions of certain words by "*****", even in PMs) - this is why people started referring to Indys as "TOS" (short for "The Other Site"), to try to get around this prohibition. In retaliation, Indys banned almost all of the ASPD admins involved in that decision from Indys, and in retaliation for the retaliation, ASPD banned the principals of Indys from ASPD. At some point there was a negotiation, after which PI agreed to not use ASPD to promote his own site or siphon off users, in return for which ASPD agreed to reinstate PI and friends, and to lift the prohibition on members even just talking about about Indys among themselves - but the damage was already done, and during the inter-site dispute much of the Pittsburgh hobby community migrated over to Indys and never really came back. For whatever reason, even after the agreement was reached, the name "TOS" stuck, even though there was no longer any need for it.

At some point during this process, diamondjohn died. Then not all that much longer after that, Amber (Bustygirl - the owner, primary architect, and chief programmer of ASPD) also died. The admin crew, with the support of Amber's mother and sister, tried to keep it running. And then something bad happened (the exact nature of which I never fully understood), and the site crashed. A lot of the content, and a lot of the site code, was lost. There was no real backup, at least not that anyone could find - I know Amber made backups from time to time, but she was very concerned about letting anyone have access to the raw site data, so she kept a lot of things like this to herself. The admins with technical know-how, in conjunction with a contracted vBulletin programmer, spent a few months hunting around for whatever bits and pieces they could find, and put the site back together as well as they could. But it never really worked correctly after that and so much was lost. So Amber's family members decided to shut down the site, rather than have it limp along in that state, especially given how much money it cost every month to keep it on the air. From a local perspective, the multi-month outage drove almost all of the remaining Pittsburgh users over to Indys, because there really weren't any other reasonable choices.

I remember the night ASPD was shut down, I spent the whole night at my computer, hitting "refresh" on the new post listing every minute or two and trying to read all the new posts, until the site just stopped responding... :-(