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Chockstone Forum - General Discussion

General Climbing Discussion

Topic Date User

Taipan 23-May-2006 At 9:17:45 AM Ronny

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Pebbles, you'll find that Bored (one of the forum's (in)famous annonamous posters) regularly disparages the forum as irrelevant as a bunch of crap in cyberspace is worthless. Now as a means of communication no one could say that a conference call is useless, and a form is hardly different, so that doesn't make a lot of sense. But a conference call with 100 unidentified people yelling their own opinions would be a waste of time. What gives the forum any sort of legitimacy for any sort serious discussion (fun and bullshit aside) is that it provides a mechanism of communication with other real people.
I could create 100 fake online personas, start a poll, and conclude that 90% of people want all bolts pulled out. But that would be useless. What separates a normal forum discussion from that is knowing that the people on the forum are real, and that the discussion is to some extent representative (of bored office workers if you insist Board).

The problem that you have is really that people are too quick to respond with personal attacks on people who's opinions they don't like. Hence the need to guard against that by removing personal details. Maybe we all just need a bit of Voltaire around here (defending to the death people's right to say it etc).

Until that happens however, I'm quite happy to accept that you are a real person and do have these opinions.

For what its worth, I agree with you for the most part. The key point is that trad crags can be turned into sport crags but not vice versa - its just a matter of how to strike an appropriate balance at any particular crag.

J