One thing that you may not immediately realize when posting here is that the discussions on this site are routinely crawled by Google and other search engines.

Now couple this with the fact that this site is consistently one of the top 10 "Equipped for Survival" sites on the internet, you end up with an important role as a moderator - and that is to protect the mission and vision of Equipped To Survive, and importantly, to avoid association by inference with "survivalist" web sites.

Computers are not every smart, and as a result, it takes humans to recognize, lock and as needed purge topics that are out of the scope of this forum.

When a topic is "locked" it remains visible to search engines, and if, after a topic has been locked, I review the messaging and it's gone in a direction that leads me to think (and I have over 15 years experience in planning and managing the development of large-scale interactive communications projects) that it's going to attract the wrong kind of traffic to this site, I kill the whole thread.

I have been online too long, and participated in too many flame wars, and I'm not going to ease up on the toughlove we implement here as moderators.

And I thank you!

-Blast

Hello,

FWIW. I've enjoyed ETS since I first came across it. It was only after lurking for many months and reading virtually everything on the site that I made the decision to participate in the forums. And yes, I reviewed many other forums before and since which I decline to even associate with.

The decision to join was in a large part predicated upon the courtesy, sanity and validity of much of the information and the 99&44/100% of the other folks on the forums that can, do and will continue to follow the very basic guidelines that have been set forth by the owners and moderators.

Thank you to Doug, his wife and the owners of the forum & site for keeping things online.

Thank you to all the moderators who are to my understanding (as well as none of my business anyway) unpaid volunteers who go out and take care of full time jobs and gainful enployment, families then take some of the remaining time left for sleep or other essentials to moderate and "ride herd" on the rest of us.

Thanks to all the others who make it possible, including those behind the scenes making the hardware and software that runs this great site, play nicely together in the sandbox for the rest of us to enjoy and not least of all, the many supporters of ETS.


It has been my pleasure to meet several of the ETS members in person, and others more vicariously via the forum, PM's, E-Mail and phone conversations.

This forum is one that I view on a regular basis and enjoy being a member of.


Hmmm...guess I'll get off my soapbox now and try to find my dinner to eat while I finish perusing the rest of the recent forum postings etc.

Regards,
Comanche7

Bravo! Bravo! Moderator! Moderator!
(vigorous applause, with cheering)
:-)

Keep it up Martin, The reason most of us are still around is the fact that this board is civil. and you don't have to have asbestos underware to set in on the verious threds.

we can get silly and make snide and other impolite remarks but in the end we usually kiss and make up, sometimes it takes daddy Doug, or unca Martin or Chris reminding us, but we get there.

Thanks for the explanation. At least now I know I'm not going crazy and just imagining reading these things.

I don't have any problem with the rules, however, I do see a problem with this approach. If these post are just deleted without any warning or explanation, how are people supposed to know which topics are out of the scope of this forum? For example, I just posted another topic to find out what happened, and it already seemed to go back to the topic of gold/silver/bartering. I doubt if anybody suspected the topic itself is reason for it being deleted. At least if a thread were locked with a reason given, then there would be less confusion (i.e. is discussing silver/gold coins forbidden? barter? or using silver/gold for bartering?) It's not like I have a strong interest in the subject, it just happened to be the one of a few topics that I can remember that has gone missing

Also, FYI, even though the topic has been deleted, it still shows up in the search engines and I can still pull up a cached version of it.

I think it's safe to say that topics relative to TEOTWAWKI are good candidates to being terminated. I like this place because that stuff doesn't take up BW and clutter the board. Lots of other forums if that's your favorite topic.

Gold/silver/bartering to replace the current monetary system is approaching TEOTWAWKI as a topic. It's not equipping yourself for survival, it's equipping yourself for trade, big difference. $.02, I'm not D.R.

And that cached version has far LOWER search engine ranking than a live version of the topic. One cached thread leading to a defunct link has minimal impact on the overall site search results, and whatever effects it does have fades with each crawl & cache trip as the killed thread is no longer indexed.

If you want to talk search engines and more importantly Google, I'd be happy to share with you, offline, what I've done in 2007 for AT&T, HBO, Discover Card, Sesame Street, Nickelodeon and a few other companies you might not be familiar with in regard to interative communications strategies, including, but not limited to, Search Engine Marketing and Optimization.

There are plenty of explanations of what this site is and isn't about, they are found n the sticky posts at the top of each forum. Read them.

Finally, yes, I am a volunteer here, we all are, and I've been quite well charged with a mission to keep this forum on the straight and narrow, and, for ETS at least, any topic that drifts into "the total collapse of society" - as in beyond an ice storm or earthquake or major fire - has an exceedingly short lifespan. There are three perennial topics that will instantly get my attention because they drift quickly.

1. Gun topics. I'm a life NRA member, don't tell me I'm an anti-gunner, but I delete posts that look like they are going to end up somewhere along the lines of Black Helicopters and Ruby Ridge.
Here's Marty's quick guide to gun topics on this board:

a) Will you eat what you shoot? If Yes - carry on,
b) Is what you shoot going to try to eat you? If yes, carry on.
c) Are you trying to learn more about what types of guns are best to use to defend your fortified compound from a starving urban mob that wants to sleep on your couch and drink all your beer? BZZT! Sorry, please try again.

2. Gold & Silver. I like gold, I wish I had lots of it. However, when you start talking about Gold as a means to buy the guns to shoot down the black helicopters and buy food when all the banks have gone under.....BZZT! Thanks for playing, please try again.

3. The Middle East. The 5,000 year old war in the Mideast, its participants, causes and effects are better discussed somewhere - anywhere - but this forum.

Stop, think and post. That is all we ask.

I'm sorry I'm confused. No offense, but what exactly in that topic was this?

I realize the topic was about barter goods, but I don't see how that automatically equates to black helicopters, anymore than talking about defending your home using a shotgun equates to fortifying your compound.

I can see that these topics can drift in that direction, but I thought that

"This section is for the CIVIL, APOLITICAL discussion of tactics, techniques and tips related to being prepared for a long-term (5 days +) emergency situation" -Doug Ritter

From this, I thought as long as the topics fulfilled these three things, then it was a go. I didn't see anything about "no discussions of barter goods" because they attract the wrong sort.

I know there are people who disagree with such topics (I happen to think stocking gold for such purposes is pointless), but I know there are others who want to prepare for bartering conditions, and want others opinions on it. I don't think talking about bartering automatically equates to survivalist.

If any discussion of bartering is off limits, then maybe you should add it to the forum rules.