Interesting question. Every forum has bad apples. Moderation style of some forums is to put trolls and bashers on a 24 hour ban. My criticism of moderation at the other forum is that it's laissez fair and at the same time biased. Hands off means hands off, not fair to some and childish to others. Pick one. One example was someone banned from posting in classifieds posting all these ads in the general forum and it being ignored by the mods because of some sort of dispute. It's also a large forum but long time members who've asked to be mods have been ignored. I don't know why so it's not possible to draw a conclusion. I'm not accepting mods but it's because traffic is light.
Typed words are also tone deaf and many people are thin skinned, right you numbskull?
Adding a smiley could fix so many conflicts.
I don't bash the direct competitor forum for a few reasons. Other than being a positive and constructive person,
We're car clubs, not rival motorcycle gangs. I think there's room for more than 1 TDI specific forum. For those who only know of tdiclub, there are lots of car forums out there so please don't think it's the best website or forum in the universe. Many people still think the earth is flat and that witches cause seizures too.
I'm not offended at all if users post on both forums but I am certainly very annoyed when people ask questions about my material on another forum instead of asking the author on his site. I started this site as a simple FAQ mirror site for reference on what information answered my problem but decided to add original material and a forum. As more effort went into it, it's nice for the work to be appreciated by forum posts here instead of starting a new post on a competitor forum about my material. I often spend over 5 hours/day revising old writeups, keeping the info current, researching and doing site and forum upgrades. That's all I'll say about that.
If it's a reply to a question it's good since it helps to answer their question. But completely skipping my forum and staring a new post question elsewhere about my FAQ doesn't even make sense - wouldn't it be best for the author to see it? Every FAQ article even has a direct link to register on the forum.
Any forum is nothing without users but a good forum and website requires constant work. I'm constantly doing upgrades and small improvements. And there is more to a website than just a forum. I have not seen a detailed and standardized FAQ and pictoral "how to" articles like the ones on this site on any car forum anywhere. I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes but still, 100x less misinformation than you'll find in a forum, where anyone can give bad advice which is then archived or not corrected by others. Their management can do or not do whatever they want because it's their site. That's why I started my own site. In the end, they also have many good users which keep their community going, and I hope that a quality site like mine will gradually shift the large lurker-poster ratio around. From the website stats I can see website traffic:forum traffic is more unbalanced than usual because of the obstacle to forum growth mentioned earlier.
So thanks for the post!
