I must say that I am very impressed at the response to this new traditional shaving forum, obviously there is a need for a well run online community. 60 members already, many of them well known, well respected people from the traditional shaving world. Greg from iKon, Leisueguy the book author, Mantic59 of the famous videos, Fido of New Forest Shaving Brushes, Matt from Razor Emporium, beejay the artisan brush maker etc, a huge amount of expertise on hand to have their say. But everyone is welcome to join in, no matter what their level of knowledge.
And lots of good discussion, 83 topics and 274 posts of good quality. Also two people have kindly volunteers to be moderators.
The idea is to have an online community which is friendly and supportive with mutual respect where people are treated as they would like to be treated themselves. A tall order but it can be done.
The problem, as I wrote in my previous article about forums, is anonymous sociopaths who think that it is OK to trash other people’s lives with complete and utter disregard for the norms of civilised behaviour. And it is the anonymity that allows them to do it. These people mostly have families, homes and good jobs. Their real world friends and family would be horrified to discover how they behave.
Predictably two of these internet hooligans descended on the forum to try and trash it, presumably they thought that they were being clever. If they jumped over the wall of my home and started vandalising the garden I would call the police and their pictures, names and addresses would soon be in the local paper. But somehow they think that the internet is different.
So I banned them, banned their IP addresses and posted their IPs complete with Lookup details, just to let them know that they aren’t really anonymous. And they got off lightly, there are spammer databases used by blogs, forums and elsewhere on the internet, I could have referred them to these which would have curtailed their internet rights significantly.
This does not mean I am ever going to publish the IP addresses of other members, no matter how much I disagree with them and no matter how heated the discussion, because I won’t. What it does mean is that I am protecting the normal, civilised majority from the barbarians. We either have a civilised community or we don’t and I will do what it takes to make sure that we get the former outcome.
So come along and join in. There is some really interesting discussion going on.
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Well said Bruce.
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And thus it goes, Bruce. Come the revolution, there will be a brave new world, free of the old faults – at least, until the new rulers inevitably discover that the old rulers had reasons for their ‘faults’. This is a bitter cup, and if you are wise you will drink deeply until you understand. Otherwise, having banned two members within three days of starting up, you might feel a little depressed. Getting used to this sort of thing is called ‘growing up’. Welcome.
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It’s nice to see that there is a forum for the exiled shaving folks. Many forums’ moderators/frequent posters are generally mean, condescending, and greedy. I’ve watched them be horrifically mean to newbies, and practically put honest vendors out of business. The normal, friendly people should unite! 🙂
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@Average Shaver
What you are missing out on is that I have already set up and run for several years a forum in a different area, Artforums.co.uk, that is friendly and supportive with mutual respect. And artists have very strong subjective opinions! So there is no “growing up” involved.
I was amazed just how bad the traditional shaving forums are, at some of their practices and at how badly they served the community of traditional shavers out there.
Banning total idiots who come to the forum to do harm never depresses me. It is just a job that needs to be done to look after the decent majority.
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Bruce, still don’t understand what happened between DFS and you? I like that forum. Anyway, good luck with your new forum. You are a good writer and experienced Internet personality and I am sure that the forum will be successful.
About the rest of traditional shaving forums. I may not agree with the administrators and moderators policy of some of them, but agree that they have the right to ban people. They own the forums, they set the rules. But unlike other forums, badger & blade is involved in a behaviour that may be considered as criminal. In my case the have stolen over $100 from me. People, beware and avoid feeding this people. Many naive wet shavers could be burned financially by owners of badger and blade.
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@dock: What happened?
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I had an argument with one of their moderators about the censorship. At that time I had already contributed $20 dollars, but during the argument I decided to contribute another $100, because our dispute was not about money(I am not a vendor), but about principals. They blocked my membership 3 minutes after I made the $100 contribution/donation/subscription and didn’t want to return the money. Paypal was unable to help me. Anyway, they still have my user name over there, but they don’t show that I have contributed the $100.
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Report them to the local better business bureau for fraud ,
http://www.manta.com/c/mttslbt/badger-blade-inc
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I used to spend a lot of time on B&B but got tired of all the noise. Where people were more apt to post a new thread instead of doing a search or even read the first page. ie three threads on the main razor blade page about numbers on the blade and 4 threads arguing whether or not bigelow and proraso are the same. The problem with a lot of forums is the Dreaded “post count”. Everyone wants to get a high post count and they see it as a status symbol so they’re apt to post a lot of noise to get 1000 plus posts. I belong to two (non shaving related) forums that did away with post counts specifically for this reason. It worked and the noise died down. this along with some “do a forum search before you post” rules helped reduce noise and move the forum forward in a more valuable direction. I enjoy spending time on those forums and they have a very high value to low noise ratio. I think I’ll check out your forum Bruce
Also I’ve read some posts about B&B charging you automatically year after year so, for those of you that have trouble with the B&B subscriptions you need to read the fine print carefully and notice there are two options for subscriptions. one for auto-renew denoted with a * and one for a one time charge. Always read what you are paying for.