Posted By:
Brian McQueen
Peter,
I’m going to answer your question as objectively as I can. Please note that I’m not trying to be malicious, sarcastic or mean when I say this, but I do feel that the board’s focus is still something that eludes you.
The board’s focus is quite simple. Pre-WWII baseball cards. That’s pretty much it. Jason’s question above is, in my opinion, very “on-topic” because it asks a question about said pre-WWII baseball cards. Even more than that, it asks for opinions on a certain way to collect these cards which is a nice question and appeals to many collectors – including myself since I actually have collected “by color” many times before. I therefore, responded to Jason’s post because I felt I have something to add to the conversation (more than just a random, flippant comment mind you) and even provided a link to my own website so that Jason and everyone could see an example of what he was talking about that I had already put together. I stayed on topic the entire time I was posting, didn’t hijack his thread to talk about something else and (hopefully) gave Jason a quality answer that is worth reading.
The main reason people became irritated with you is because many of your posts have nothing to do with cards, which is again, the board’s focus. I will certainly give you credit for having come up with a couple quality posts in the past. A lot of your others however have been grossly off-topic. Those off-topic posts have now become so frequent in number that people have begun to protest and you’ve earned yourself a bad rep, as James mentioned above.
Another objection people have is the quality of posts you’ve provided us. I believe that posts about the players that are on the cards we collect is on-topic and have seen many good ones. Many threads people start of this nature are informative, relay some sort of a story or information about the player and leave us with a feeling that perhaps, just maybe we learned something by reading it. Your posts however don’t seem to have any sort of a “tie-in” to cards at all and are seemingly just random thoughts that pop into your head. Examples of this include the “Who are the drunk players from this era? Scans appreciated!” type of threads that I’ve seen you start. Threads like this don’t really have much to offer in terms of depth. If you had perhaps educated us all on a story you had heard once about a player or tied the whole thing into collecting somehow, it would have been much more “on-topic” and I don’t think anyone would have hassled you for it. If I could provide any advice here it would be to really put some thought into your posts. Please remember that this is not a blog or a chatroom where simply blurting out the first thing that comes to mind is appropriate. If you take the time to think about what your posting, perhaps even researching the subject matter ahead of time and then coming up with a good, clean thread about that area of interest, I think people will respect you a lot more for it.
Regards,
Brian McQueen