Rob, I Think You Can Go Back to MFI
 

They now have new management of those boards and moderators who actually seem interested in moderating. I just witnessed something I never thought I'd see: they just clamped a certain someone's (whose winding, invective-filled posts we've come to know and love) butt down hard.

I'm not saying it's time to close Hints down or anything (God forbid!), but it looks like civility has been foisted on the barbarians. I rememebr when you left. Looks like you can go home again. :)

Do you have the link? This, I would like to see for myself. As someone who spent many a frustrating hour attempting to combat the worst of thalo's excesses (I presume that's who were talking about) I'd like to see what happened.

--- don't worry, I found it.

erm, gentlemen, could you please ... you know, for the uninitiated out here, drop us a little more than that tiny crumb of wisdom.
;)

It's a way long story about that, but right now I think Griffman has a lot more on his mind than worrying about what's going on over there. ;)

Don't worry about Hints going away; the focus of the two sites was never the same under any circumstance, and there's plenty of material going around for lots of sites on the 'ol info superhighway.

Well I was a little worried about posting too much stuff about another forum here, but we have a had a discussion or two about "those guys" in this very forum.

Here's the Link .

thanks
 

that link was illuminati...ng. I can't really say i feel enriched, but then again, i asked for it, so serves me right for putting my nose in other peoples' affairs.


----------------------------------------------------------
"Oh, 'tis love, 'tis love, that makes the world go round!"
"Somebody said," whispered Alice, " that it's done by
everybody minding their own business!"

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
----------------------------------------------------------

I'm hoping the attention to moderation lasts. I enjoy interacting with some of those regulars, but there are a few trolls who generally spoil things for everyone.

You don't want to know. Thalo's like one of those 1930 stuck records in grandma's crank-up record player: There's only one sound when it's stuck and it goes on forever. But he's dedicated and does write well; and he's not as nasty as some at MacFixIt. But he's much, much more boring. Like a long winded lefty, forever harping on the same evils of capitalism and the modern world, all the while thinking he has arguments that would move a reasonable person. Move such a person--yes; but only to sleep.

Well, for better or worse, my time is pretty much fully allocated now between the two sites, the book, and my job ;-). But it is nice to see an attempt to bring civility back to the conversations!

-rob.

So I wonder if "he" has taken the advice and started up his own website yet? :D

Tee hee.....

;)

G.--

Don't know. Don't care.

You must be luxuriating in the peace and quiet, G.--. ;)

Do you think there's any likelihood that that would have happened and we wouldn't have heard about it? ;)

Well, to be honest, the pessimist in me still doesn't believe that this is the end of it. Sure, it's been quiet for a week or two....

Of course, I still have my "stomp button" at the ready, and I'm not afraid of continuing to use it. :) Some people may not agree with the way I've handled things lately, but Kurt gave me the green light, so I'm going to do what I think is best and not look back.

:D

G.--

ahhhhh, jack-booted invective-stompers.

I stopped dropping in at MFI around six months ago, mostly because I got fed up of reading the same post over and over again and arguing the same tedious arguments to absolutely no effect. When this thread started I went and had a look at what had been going on and wasn't at all surprised to read the same posts again. Where he gets his energy to regurgitate the some tired old points over and over again (and at massive length) is entirely beyond me.

In other words I think you've been more than reasonable in your application of the "stomp button" ... it was about time something changed.

Thanks for the kind words, Dave.

I should stop for a minute though. I come here to get away from there. :) My intention has never been to come here to talk about MFI. (Not that I mind "there," of course).

Perhaps I should have kept my mouth shut and stayed out of this post altogether. I don't know.

Craig and Phil are very good friends and I've appreciated their support and encouragement throughout all of "this."

At some point I'll catch up on learning my *nix and perhaps have something worthwhile to offer "over here." :D

G.--

Nah, I think it's a reasonable thing to discuss here. After all, while we might get upset about the various problems we experience with our various boxes, the experience of dealing with you know who month in month out is just as much a problem with OS X as anything else; i.e. if you're serious about discussing OS X over at MFI then dealing with thalo wasn't something you could choose to avoid.

Hi GM, lots of OS X Talk/T.I. refugees here, and it's not a no-talk issue.

Now if only the mods would do something about the anti-American trolls in the Lounge there! I'm not talking about criticizing U.S. policies, which is fine; it's much, much worse than that.

thalo's website
 

I hear tell that thalo has now set up his website but I don't have the url - does anyone know it?

Dave; it's www.thalo.net

I think you'll see that little has changed.

OM(brothers)FG!

Yep, thalo rides again.

Now, ... shall I subscribe to his forum - and join the '16 registered users' - or will I hack off my leg with a rusty chainsaw ... tricky ;)

So much ego, and so much time, it would appear.

Jeez. I keep forgetting how nice these fora are :)

Anyone who uses the "sometimes I say nasty things, but those things are important to wake people up" is usually just excusing their lack of empathy.

True "saviours" push from behind. They don't haul from the front.

I've never seen a discussion that's been helped by a devil's advocate. Those people are usually the ones without the wit to be more than "no" men.

Clever discussion comes from being able to find where you and your opponent agree, then working from there.

Poor old thalo. Maybe one day he'll regret his uselessly "important" ego crusade.

I guess we all need a purpose?

Wow. What a wind-bag. Every one of his points could be summed up in a couple of phrases, not a dissertation.

And it reinforces that most people who belabor the "I'm a pro-user" are not worth listening to. I use OS X every day for professional duties, and I never even think about going back.

Thanks to the admins here for keeping this place in shape. (No offence to Griffyman intended, admin isn't easy - especially when a blow-hard claims squatters' rights. Kuddos for having the spinal fortitude to layeth down the smack. I've lurked there from time to time and think the guy is an idiot.)

What strikes me about the rhetoric on his site and in his forums is that it sounds like it comes from a group of juvenile Klingons.

Thalo's title in the Forums is "Master Baiter". Also, things like "It takes balls to say that." show up every page or so.

Perusing thalo.net is 10 minutes of my life that I'll never have back.. thanks a lot MacMath for resurrecting this thread for me to read! *giggle*

He seems to have confused the cliché "To make a long story short".

Never much of a thalo fan, here, but I have to hand it to him for hanging out his shingle and inviting debate. He's very clear on what one can expect and so there should be no surprises. The regulars there enjoyed each others' company at MFI, just as they seem to do now. More power to them, I say. There needs to be some kind of "support group" for those who've felt disconnected from Apple because of OS X, I guess; there may be more of those folks than maybe we're willing to acknowledge and a lot of them are veteran Mac users who spent a lot of years pushing Apple products. It really does seem that Apple/Jobs could have been a little more accommodating in some areas, but, c'est la vie. :rolleyes:

Having just made a brief foray into thalo.net territory I have to report that it was not a pleasant experience. For those of you still interested in this topic you can read of my trials and tribulations here.

Oh my, your usually sound prudence deserted you in that return to QuibblesVille.

He likes tilting against the big windmill (OS X) provided there's a big crowd to watch.(So he's got his website to try to get the crowd.) He wants to be the admired Saviour of the company he *says* he loves.

We'd have to be a computer-oriented Wittgenstein to make this wildly-inflated motor mouth miss a beat. But computer-oriented Wittgenstein wouldn't have thought it worth his while.

You just wanted to go back to reassure yourself how awful it used to be--and still is. So now that you've found out, why not give him what he--and they--can't stand: Inattention. They are the astrologers of Macdom. Treat them as astrologers: Only novices or the demented communicate with them.

Actually, it was worse than I remembered. Which I didn't think was possible ;)

LMAO!

Dave, I can send you a rusty chainsaw, you don't have to go out of your way looking for one. :D

Hmmm, it was a momentary lapse of good sense, I wont do it again. I guess what always irked me about thalo over at MFI was his utter failure to ever see further than the end of his nose. It seems that he's become even more myopic since then ;)

That's not surprising because his wooden nose has grown longer.

A couple of posters at MFI have said that they've been to thalo.net and were surprised to find that without the heavy hand of corporate moderation, the posts at thalo's site were actually milder (and in thalo's case, actually shorter!) than they had been at MFI.

Hardly deserving of the catty, smug comments I see here. Registration there has now passed 30, including, finally, me. A few of you seem to find it traumatic to leave your comfortable little cocoon, where everybody you know uses OS X and Apple's market share just grows and grows into a bright, but blurry, candy-colored future. Far be it from me to visit here and burst your bubble.

And what's with these commercial pop-up ads over here now? Jeez!!

Markle

Good for you. You should be enjoying yourselves immensely then.

And what's with these commercial pop-up ads over here now? Jeez!!

Beats me since there aren't any. Anybody else know what he's talking about?

<< Beats me since there aren't any. >>

Strange, then. When I came over here it popped up. I sent a screenshot of it, partly covering your forums homepage, in an e-mail to Phil. I can also send it to any other e-mail address you'd like, if you're interested.

Could someone be playing games with this site?

Markle

No, most likely it's a leftover from some other site you were just at. Many of them have scripts that pop up windows when you leave them.

You can send me the image if you want. You should already have my address.


Could someone be playing games with this site?

Yeah, I think someone might be trying. ;)


Edit: I just sent you an email. You can just respond to it with the picture attached.

I can assure you we have no pop-ups of any sort. Are you browsing on a Mac or a PC? Please don't take that personally, but on the PC, there are programs that take over and pop ads all over the place. The other possibility is that the site you just left has a pop-up whenever it gets an "on close" message, which makes it look like the next site you visited is responsible for it. I visit here quite often ;-), and have never seen a pop-up...

Regarding Thalo and his new site, I personally wish him all the luck in the world with it -- I really do. I never had anything against him personally, but it was clear that he preferred OS 9 and was happiest in OS 9. It's good that he's created a site for conversation about that topic, much as we created this forum site for discussions of all things OS X. But as for either site's principal participants being influenced by the other, the odds are very low -- OS choice is right up there with politics and religion in terms of things that won't be swayed by logic or persuasion or even brute force (ala Steve killing OS 9). As such, I expect both sites to continue to do what they do -- one will focus on the virtues of OS 9 and the problems with OS X, while the other will focus on helping people who have already chosen to use OS X. That's the beauty of a free and open Internet -- there's a place for everyone to feel comfortable and make contributions in their own way.

regards;
-rob.

A reminder of a world I had since left behind....

*shudder*

Crarko, you scared me... Thalo? With his own site?

There are possibly only two things more horrific in this world, one is the Spice Girls without their backing singers to mime to, and the second I won't even mention on this site because the odds are I would be shot and hung on the spot.

And it doesn't involve apple ;)

All the best,
Nova

Hi, Rob. Been a while.

<< I can assure you we have no pop-ups of any sort. Are you browsing on a Mac or a PC? >>

I'm on my famous beige G3, with 8.6. A long-standing question, you may recall, was what would I do if something happened to my Mac. Would I have to go to Windows, since I had decided that OS X was not an option? Well, I found out in November, when the motherboard in my Mac died. Turned out I could just have it repaired--although the shop wound up having to order TWO new motherboards from Apple, since the first one was defective! That also gave me the chance at the same time to upgrade the memory, HD (do CD or DVD backups, and do them often!), and a couple of other components in the box. This will keep me going a while longer and postpone that inevitable decision.

Anyway, weird thing about that pop-up. (I sent Craig the screenshot.) The site I had just come from never had pop-ups, pop-unders, or anything else like that. So for now let's just take it as a one-time anomaly and not spend any more time on it.

It's a very normal thing for people to join web forums for common interests or interesting discussions or debates. Your live-and-let-live attitude is a lot more refreshing than that of a certain few others around here.

Take care,

Markle :cool:

<< Yeah, I think someone might be trying. ;) >>

That did NOT get past me, Craig. I just chose to ignore it.

Oops....

Markle
:p

By the way, we just recently had our 12,000th forum member join, and have been pretty steady at about 10-15 new registrations/day since these forums opened in Jan. 2002. So I don't think the cocoon is all that little. Thanks again to all you folks.

Hiya, Nova! It's been a while, all right. Are you entirely in Wintel land, now?