It’s not a reality show like Survivor. COG is first and foremost a owners group club. A club with at this point a commendable long history, that pre-dates the forum. There are many volunteers working in the background to make sure the club is successful and prosperous. We remain prosperous (for now) and a fun group to associate with by having a common interest, and that is motocycles for the most part, and at this point in time not necessarily even a Concours. The issues we are discussing are therefore not your typical Internet forum. The forum serves as a public facing entity for the club, and for many people including me six years ago, serves as the first contact point for COG.
Cap’n Bob knows my story. I thought I “knew him” from the forum, but really met him when he was the first person to greet me at my first COG event with a bottle of water as I was getting off my C-14 after a long ride. To me that is COG. If I were asking questions and receiving rude responses from primarily one individual on the forum, that would set a tone, and why would I travel and spend money to meet new folks that behave like that? This is my primary concern about what most would agree is a history of abhorrent behavior. A wrong first or lasting impression of COG the club.
Now that I’m more involved in COG and trying along with many others to make this club successful, it bothers me when some individuals can’t behave better on the public facing side. So, yes, I think the forum (in addition to its other purposes) is the public facing communication tool for the organization. We are an owners group, and a club, and I think we should be able to police individuals that are known to work in detrimental ways to good of the club. Think blackballing, like many clubs enforce. Sure in this case the offender offers advice, and assistance and some of it is great. However, working directly against the standing Tech Editor who is an impressive contributor in his own right, has an obvious negative effect. But further more, ongoing comments from many about stalking, belittling and degrading other members will take away from those otherwise great traits that the offender may have.
So I think COG needs to decide if we want more contributing members like Fred and others that have left for the same reason, or whether we want this to be an anonymous forum and anything goes. If you don’t like it, leave, I think is the wrong direction. So given a chance, we should vote or have the Directors decide to keep the better ones if there is an obvious conflict.