The reason I have admin privileges is as a now pseudo volunteer to activate registrations in a timely manner and also get rid of spam. I say pseudo as I find a gift card in my mail every now and then which I diligently use.
Rockler has a policy with regard to deletions on this forum that in the end would require a small nuclear event before an item would be deleted. While I have recommended some over the past year, they have chosen to just live with it in the hopes that it in the end it is harmless and temporal (my description here, not the words of the PM or Marketing team at Rockler). This is not the policy at the Vectric forum for example, but that is what Rockler is choosing to do.
Now it is possible John (Joraft) that one of your posts may have been deleted when I removed a set of my posts on a topic and you had a comment somewhere in the middle. I deleted my posts as a user, not as an admin. I'm not that familiar with exactly how this forum software is setup, and it may be that if the originator of the post removes all of their content, then the system just removes the post - idk. If that occurred, I apologize for not knowing the outcome when I delete my own posts in a situation like this.
Again, what I do know is that Rockler doesn't delete posts.
We did have a recent post on clip art that was realized by the originator and participants (myself included) to be breaking copyright/royalty issues - and the components of those threads were removed. As already pointed out and acknowledged, a post explaining this would have been nice - and a good lesson learned on administering the forum going forward in these cases.
Beyond that, there have been no removals of posts by Rockler, so there are no notices sprinkled around in the history of the forum.
For Doug - I can understand how you might sense some holes in the conversation. I think that with time on this or any other forum, you'll get a sense that it is mostly the nature of the beast. The most likely occurrence is that the originator of the question never responds back to say whether that worked, or was useful, or they are still stuck, or they figured it out and here's what they did. Again, in this forum's case, the author of any post can delete their post - they put it up, Rockler grants them the ability to take it down.
But for clarity for you and other new users - in this lengthy series of notes - http://cncsharktalk.com/viewtopic.php?f ... 7&start=10 - I had made several posts as a participant. In the end, I went back and deleted all of my posts as a user (one at a time with my user credentials) as it was clear to me that this discussion had no allowance for differing opinions, and those differing opinions were being labelled as attacks by me. Now this might be in stark contrast to the goals and pre-requisite conditions some seem to think Rockler is obligated to maintain, but that's how I saw it. And in fact Rockler far exceeds all of this in their current policy. What I didn't do as an admin, nor did Rockler as admin, remove any quotations used from these posts of mine from others' posts. So, that one can be confusing.
Again, for the most part, forum threads can seem a little bit hinky in sequence and resolution. In my experience and opinion, it is the nature of the beast (forums in general).
You can all choose to believe what I've stated above with regard to the actual result of Rockler's policy with regard to deletion or not. With regard to this last quote from John (Joraft) - I continue to fail to see why you would even say this on this forum. And frankly, it's not a comment that I am willing to sit idle and not express my opinion of and experience of 16 months of forum membership and participation. No individual member has the ability to manipulate anyone's posts (except me, and I don't do that because that is Rockler's policy).Joraft wrote:The primary purpose of any forum is the sharing of thoughts, ideas, and opinions. When those thoughts, ideas, and opinions are minipulated by a few members the over all value is reduced.
There is no evidence of this 'manipulation by a few members' - at least in my opinion and to my knowledge (which dates back to Sep 2010). If a member or guest has the time to read through the forum by date, you'll see all sorts of customer reported problems and issues with the Shark, NWA, Rockler - along with lots of good ideas from Rockler, NWA and fellow members on how to resolve them, and good ideas on how to get the most out of the tool, and examples of what and how things have been made with the Shark. It's all there, good bad and indifferent - agree or not.
So, if you are new to the forum, or a guest just checking this out, I have not experienced or observed any manipulation by a few members, I know that Rockler's policy is that they will not delete threads short of a nuclear event, for what that is worth to you.
Lastly, regardless of what I'd personally like to see this forum be or do, or what the goals or objectives should be in any of our minds, Rockler has stated what the purpose and objective for this forum are:
I've enjoyed participating, I've enjoyed being able to be a part of a community even from a distance, I've certainly received my share of information and advice about using the CNC Shark (good, bad and indifferent), and I've enjoyed helping a few folks be successful with this system. I'm also not going to foist my own standards on Rockler beyond their stated objective and goal - even though I've never been concerned with the value as obviously I'm still learning and participating - so it's good and working for me.CNC wrote: This forum is a resource for current and prospective CNC Shark Owners to share information and advice about using CNC Shark products in a respectful and encouraging manner.