I'd like to start by talking a bit about what I think this site means to people, and why it's so successful.
I've been reading this bunch of people since early when the site was at the Yahoo! groups, and at that point I went back and read all the posts, which took me a few days. We've moved then to ClassicAppliances.com and later the name got changed to AutomaticWasher.org.
I could tell you many many stories about what we went thru. I am willing to bet that y'all could also tell me many more that I've missed during the periods when I had no time at all to read this site. I always come back though, it's basically the very first site I read when I have time, then if I have more time I read the others, which is rare these days.
Anyway, we went through many things together. People lying and trying to scam nice people here, outrageous claims flying, you think about something, it probably happened to some of us here too.
That, to me, is the entire difference between this website and the others: we bonded. We come here and have friends, not just people across the intartubes which you can flame and tease and be nasty to.
You want a story? "When I was a little kid, in Saint Olaf, MN..." (or, if you don't like that, "Picture, Sicily, 1934...") Anyway, a couple of years ago, a regular poster here posted a link to a TED Talk with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor (who suffered a massive stroke, survived it and recovered to a degree that many would say "complete"). I credit AW.org, the poster and Dr. Taylor with the fact that my SO is alive and well today -- a few months (maybe less than a couple of months, in fact) after that post, my SO suffered a stroke and because of AW.org and Dr. Taylor, I was able to not only recognize what was going on at the very first few minutes, but also to know that I had to call 911. It also gave us strength and courage to go through a hard recovery. Today, he's recovered completely and no one can even tell he ever had any trouble and even friends who know him for years sometimes say it seems like it was just a bad dream. That post was definitely not "on topic" and I would have never seen it otherwise, it's that simple.
That to me, in a very small nutshell, is AW.org. We're not just talking about on-topic stuff, we make friends, we talk about a variety of things. Incredibly, that is also what helps people who collect the incredibly rare appliances -- you can bet your hard earned money that if it wasn't for this sense of camaraderie and community here, you wouldn't see anyone taking any of their valuable time to help each other and even send incredibly rare parts or entire machines as gifts to each other.
I feel that one can only have that sense of community when people behave like people, instead of being forced into a sanitized state. It doesn't take long to find out who are the people who spin the most incredible stories and lie through their teeth the way the site operates now.
Let me try and address some of the things that seem to be worrying people, please bear with me.
The other day I was reading a user guide for a dishwasher from another country. It had lots of verbiage about how dangerous automatic dishwashing detergents are for kids and how you need to lock the controls and the door so kids will not "accidentally" ingest it. Let me just say that I think the word "accidentally" is very ill chosen -- it's not that you suddenly turned your back for half a second and your kid ended up in the Emergency Room. It's that you're not paying enough attention to your kids and you're not teaching them what they need to learn to succeed in life.
I have a dog -- the first three times I was loading the dishwasher when she was a puppy, she got near the machine and tried to sniff/lick stuff, I gently blocked her and told her "no". Previously, when we lived in large homes with lots of students, one of our housemates had a cat, we trained him the same way, no problem ever. You don't need to spank your kids or pets so they'll learn, you can be gentle. They'll learn what you consider acceptable very quickly if you treat them as intelligent beings. I can't believe that people need to lock the dishwasher to avoid landing their way more intelligent human kids in the ER. I have never had any troubles with pets and/or children jumping into the washer or dryer, and I don't personally know anyone with that problem with babies/children either. They teach their kids and then it's no problem if a washer or dryer is open.
So, I think that if anyone has a problem with their kids reading this website, it's their problem to deal with, they need to teach their kids and pay attention to what they are doing. They can also buy and use software to limit what their kids are looking at on the internet. Maybe all we need to do is mark the Super Forum as Adult oriented and let their software block it if they care.
Also, please think very seriously when was the first time you were introduced to swear words and subjects such as sex. I am willing to bet that for the majority here, you heard and repeated your first swear words when you were under 7 and sex must have registered on your radar screen before you were 10.
I don't feel like we are supposed to be baby sitting kids on the internet on the off-chance someone has not heard a swear word or about sex until they are 21 or so. That's their parents' job.
Do I come here to listen to the sex talk or talk about it? No. But I don't flinch and ran away either. Do I need to see posts peppered with sex and swear words? Hell, no. But again, I'm a grown up, I can deal with it and be polite about it if it's too much. I don't need a flame war about this, and they seem to be fairly regular in websites that have "strict rules" about subjects and language.
As a matter of fact, websites with "strict rules" seem to spend way more time flaming about people who supposedly broke the rules than on-topic subjects.
Remember also, that this is the internet. No one owes you anything. Don't expect to come here and find everything the way you like it so you can relax and get away from the world. Go do something that guarantees you that if you must, but don't come here talking about "think of the children" any time something gets out of whack. If you are too easily shocked, you should get out more, or at least stay away from the internet, where people from all over the world, with every race, religion and political view can participate.
Also, don't come to us pleading the case of etiquette: if you have actually bothered to read Ms. Manners for even 5 minutes, I find it terribly hard to believe that she has not gotten thru to you that "Etiquette is not about never being offended or offending anyone -- quite the contrary, etiquette is all about deeply offending someone in front of everyone but in a polite way which may include plausible deniability."
You don't want to talk about sex, then don't. Be the change you want to see in the world, like Ghandi said. Behave like an adult, if the thread has a subject that you know you don't like, don't read it. Say you don't like toploaders or frontloaders -- avoid the thread, there's absolutely no real good reason to come to the thread to bitch about and repeat for the billionth time that you think they're are worthless and the tool and work of the devil. Really. Trust me on that one, we've heard it before, probably from you. We're not dumb, we understood you the very first freaking time.
Also, I find the argument that such and such magazine/newspaper/whatever can't publish about our website because we're too racy/foulmouth etc to be disingenuous at best. One can find such things all over the internets without even trying, kids can find more stuff on Youtube than here, no one seems to be too worried about Youtube. Sometime ago, for example, someone said something racy and a few people who I will charitably think were well intentioned but naive instead of sophisticated, pointed out that such subjects were for websites A, B and C. Well, no one has ever accused me of being a prude or misinformed about sex, but wouldn't you know it, the people who were so worried about the kids taught me about 3 websites I had never heard of before and that were too racy for this vanilla guy. Talk about making it easy for kids to find info which was worse than what was posted here. The fact that some publication has to pretend to be shy or naive and not publish about us may explain why they are loosing readership when it's now so easy to find out what one wants on the intartubes by oneself -- previously, I fear that the reason they wouldn't publish such things is that one side of their publishing house could pretend to be so virtuous when the other branches of their business were busy publishing books and magazines like Cosmo, teaching you all about how to be thin and beautiful and how to learn these 2 dozen new sex positions and what the other people like in bed. Riiiiiight. Very virtuous, as if I couldn't read the name of the publishers on the covers.
It also bothers me how everything needs to be so clean and disinfected, so very Pleasantville, with Main St and Lovers Lane, where everyone is white, middle class, straight with 2.5 kids, a dog and a cat. No one has a bathroom and, if they do, their's no toilet in it. Two single beds on the couple's bedroom, yeah, right.
It's like telling us that we need to be nice so the straight people will show up and stay. Well, if straight people show up and are so ill adjusted that they can't deal with some gayness, do we really want them here? It's like telling us that they accept that we're black but they'll only interact with us if we use enough makeup to appear to be white. We have plenty of nice straight people here that seem to have no problems with the site. The ones that would have a problem with some gayness, well, we're here, we're queer, get used to it. They can't be serious collectors or seriously interested in appliances if they let something like gender, sexual orientation, nationality, rare, religion or politics get in their way.
What would I like to see less of in the site? Ebay/Craigslist crap -- I seriously can't believe anyone who is searching for something has not been looking there already. If you know who specifically has been looking for something, email them, but the constant "heads up!" is silly beyond words. I like it when people post stuff to snark about how someone is posting about a GE dishwasher and it's actually a Whirlpool self-cleaning oven, it's not that I don't have a sense of humor. But really, do you honestly think that you'll be the only one that saw that special dryer near Anytown, USA?
I would like to see less stupidity -- I lost count of the times here that someone that is saying something that makes sense and I agree wholehearted with says it in such a way that even I get repulsed by the tone and words. People, get a clue, if you sound like an idiot, you are actually advertising for the opposition instead of your camp. In fact, I sometimes think some of the folks here *do* work for the opposition and want us to feel so bad about gay rights and/or political platforms that we'll switch sides.
As for the kids -- I don't mind them being here, it's fun to see them grow up and contribute. But their parents are supposed to supervise them, not me. They are welcome here, but parents, take note, one of the few things that Americans and America gets wrong, or fails to get at all, is that parents should not be raising kids, parents should be raising adults -- if you are not educating your kids, supervising them, guiding them to become reasonably well adjusted in society and contributing members to society, you are failing at your job. It's your job to make sure that your kids are learning about safe sex either from you, in the safety of your home, or from some reputable instructors in some good school. Not from misinformed "friends" on the street.
To the folks that are so bent out of shape about paying for the site. I don't care where you live, if you have a credit card, you don't even need to sign up to PayPal, you can have PayPal transfer your 12 bucks per year to this site. If you can't afford a buck a month, please let us know -- I would be more than glad to drop a chunk of change here to be offered as some form of scholarship to the folks who are struggling with this. No, I'm not rich, but my folks give me a chunk of money every year for my birthday and I'd more than gladly give the money to Robert and consider this community my birthday gift.
Robert, if you want the least programing load on your back, just list either the super forum or the entire site as "Possible Adult Subjects" and let the parents decide. I'm willing to bet that any parent that is cool with the kids' interest will already be cool enough to not care about the label. All the other parents are probably already forbidding time by the computer anyway, not worth worrying about it.
And finally, thank you Robert and all here for everything. This place makes my day better even when heavy stuff goes on here, it feels to me that I'm among friends/family.
Peace all,
-- Paulo.
PS: just occurred to me that I forgot to touch another important point. History shows that on the Internet (at least since Usenet newsgroups, and certainly the websites), every time someone says "this subject is not on-topic for this forum, we should create another one for it", it will be lather/rinse/repeat. Say you have a forum for classic appliances and people start discussing the newest thing some company released last week. Eventually enough people decide it's annoying and we create a forum for modern stuff. Then enough people start asking about detergents etc or what they found out last week and we have a forum for chit-chat. Then the subjects turn to the last cancer treatment, or someone's pet or lover is sick or dead, then people start talking about religion, politics and sex and we create another forum for hot topics. Sooner or later, the hot topics forum will start complaining about the BDSM vs. vanilla sex or swear words etc. That's why we have 3 forums now. We'll need 6 soon and it won't stop there. Maybe we should tell everyone to get a free newsreader (if I remember correctly Outlook Express has a built-in one and there are plenty of better newsreaders out there for free) and let this be Robert's website and use alt.automaticwasher.vintage, alt.automaticwasher.modern, alt.automaticwasher.chitchat, alt.automaticwasher.hottopics etc and let people use the built-in kill-files and threading to deal with it on their own, instead of forcing Robert to accommodate everyone. I warn all that have never been to a Usenet newsgroup though, we'll be seeing a lot of spam and people driving by to let us know we're perverts for liking appliances, which is one of the reasons this site was created, I think. ;-)
