Let's Clear the Air - Page 2

 What happened?? LOL..anyway, you all can read what he wrote! 

The problem is that it only takes a very few posters to start all these OT threads & to post repeatedly in them to keep them at the top while the dog-related threads get shoved down the page.  Look at who starts & who repeatedly posts in all the OT threads - it's not many people.  Meanwhile the board becomes less and less interesting as regards actual DOGS.  Now it's a circle, as people come check it out, see all the OTs, and go away w/o searching the chaff for the wheat.

I, too, believed Oli when he said GSD Forum for specific-to-GSD threads, and General Topic Forum for General DOG & DOG TRAINING/BREEDING topics.  Real shame that a very small (in more ways than one) group clutters up the forum.  There are so many political and other boards in existence to discuss these things.  As others have said, lots of us go there to discuss that stuff and looked to this board to discuss dogs & training.

Seems that many of the really knowledgeable are too busy actually training to start threads, whereas the smalls know so little about actual dogs, training, and breeding, that they can think of nothing to start discussing so it's OT, OT, OT for all their threads.  Just look at who's posting what.

This board is now on every breeds' page on the site.  There is also a breed specific section for each...such as with the gsd portion.

I substantially gave up on this place when Uglydog, DesertRangers and a few other jackasses hijacked what had been a forum devoted to the German Shepherd Dog with their political bullshit.

Go back a few years, and you'll see that this used to be a truly international forum.  There were posters from Pakistan, India, the Philippines, Japan and just about every country in Europe, North and South America.  There were quite a few German breeders who posted here.

But why on earth would anyone from Pakistan want to hang around when a bunch of bigots insult their religion on a regular basis with stereotype bullshit like "Islam is a religion of peace, that's why they chop people's heads off"?  

And did anyone stop to think what effect Uglydog's daily anti-Semitic rants might have on Germans, who tend to remain just a wee bit sensitive about historic events relating to Jews?  Or how he just had to repetitively post the same ridiculous tale of some 999 year old Palestinian man being eaten by an Israeli GSD police dog in every single thread honoring the work of police K9s?
 
I used to come to this place to read informative GSD-related posts by people like Hodie, SMBH, Bob-O, Hexe, etc. etc. etc., and to ask them questions, share observations and just generally talk about the dogs I love.  These days, half the posts are made by a bunch of clowns from Dumbfuckistan spewing the latest garbage they heard on Limbaugh, countered by post after post of liberals acting like know-it-all snobs.  Or White Trash follies like those from this past winter.  

So until Oli cleans this place up and gets rid of the personal garbage and the endless political discussions that go absolutely nowhere it's thanks for the memories for me.  And I suspect I'm not alone in feeling that way.  

My understanding was that GENERAL TOPICS was reflected on all the breed sites on the PDB, one forum for all breeds, where any dog related issue could be discussed. For instance, 'what kind of collars do you use?' or 'can you use fish antibiotics for dogs' or the personal agenda OT posts. GENERAL TOPICS is crawled by the various bots and posts to it are available to search engines, available to the world.

The GSD forum and the other breed specific forums are accessible only to registered PDB members and are not made available to the crawlers - at least, that's how I understood what Oli said.

Clonig GENERAL TOPICS across all boards within PDB broadens the readership and the contributions by including all dog people and has the potential of being a valuable asset to the dog communities. I'm not fond of the OT postings and so I don't read them. It's unfortunate that they do get bumped up with each contribution and have a tendency to crowd out the valid dog related posts.

On a forum that's laid out like PDB it's important, IMO, that the topic headers are clear and indicative of the message content. Vague headers like 'Need your help' or a splash of punctuation marks are easily ignored. Content is everything.

We should give this new layout a chance and try to work with it in the spirit in which Oli presented it to us, see where it goes. Ultimately, a forum or an e-mail list is only as good and as valuable as its members choose to make it.

 "now if we can only get the other 95 % of people to follow those simple little things we can all be one big happy family.

can we get a group hug in here."

It isn't the 95%, y'all.  It isn't the humorous O/T threads, the occasional O/T personal comments, the occasional O/T comments...  For those who have been here the past few months, it is lengthy and numerous O/T ABUSIVE posts, endless political tirades, X-RATED posts...

If you didn't see it, then you don't know what it was, and you don't know why a lot of contributors left.  Seriously, the number of abusive posts at one point was almost on the scale of a cyber-attack - there was someone with moderator status deleting the posts continually at one point, but they couldn't keep up with how fast they were coming in.

We aren't saying NO O/T posts.  Just come on, folks... this is not the place for political tirades!  You are either preaching to the choir, or falling on deaf ears, plus it may bring back the evil ones!

And the main point of this general forum is to share non-breed-specific wisdom across all the breed forums.  Not to fill it up with as many O/T threads as you can.  Not that there can't be any O/T threads... just that isn't the main purpose.

IMHO.  Based on direct quotes from Oli.

Look !!  Tess...lol,
Someone just brought this unlabeled Off topic thread back up to the top again and posted to it.
Seems like many have posted to it,  thats good people are participating.
I think whats needed is a forum labeled (Bitching Forum) so the complainers have their very own page to rant about whats not right with the database.
Some things never change.
STNC.

yup, I have no problem with the odd OT thread - when I first came here, I didn't know what "OT" stood for - there's so many abbreviations used in these forums.  I just think the political threads invite uncivil discourse and scare off new posters who might want to post something about their dod- especially of it's a non gsd owner.