THOUGHTS ON NEWS GROUPS | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Recently Kevin Pursglove, eBay spokesman was quoted in the press:
"The nice, warm personal community that eBay was in its early days
experienced some
growing pains as it became popular". What he meant
is that "bad apples" have invaded eBay with the attendent problems.
You can take these words and apply them to RC news groups. In earlier
days we could actually post some explanation or clarification without
being attacked by hecklers.
As conditions deteriorated we just
monitored the news groups , less frequently as time went on.
News groups could be valuable to customers and manufacturers. In the RC business the manufacturers are small, mostly modelers themselves, and the RC market is by other standards minuscule. Small manufacturers tend to have closer relationships with customers and news groups are a forum where mutual interests could be explored.
In our case news groups have become a hassle. There are groups of frustrated hackers, would be competitors and would be buyers who cannot afford Alpah4 who spend an inordinate amount of time sparing with actual owners and flaming us in huge threads. These activities usually concentrated around our order list opening. Lately a new ploy has been introduced to fuel this circus.
News group Alpha 4 clone "development efforts" have appeared. The "developers" having already regular jobs continually waste their time on the news groups with endless posts stretching over many weeks. Needless to say legitimate developers keep their nose to the grindstone in intense concentration to get the job accomplished and do not burn time with nonsense.
Fake stories of Alpha4 problems are posted by hecklers who pretend they own Alpha 4 or hackers, and "reverse engineers" who opened the units damaged them and pretend that they are normal customers. This is accompanied by email harassment with bizarre content.
The remarkable thing is that this circus actually multiplies demand
for Alpha4, making our backlog unmanageable necessitating price
increases.
While this might be entertainment for both owners and non owners of Alpha4
it is ethically wrong and counterproductive. There might be persons wishing
to develop a legitimate product who get discouraged by the low level of
intelligence displayed and lack of civility and ethics.
It must be remembered that RC news groups are open forums where anybody under any disguise can post and create trouble.
In view of this we would advise not to take seriously any post unless you are sure of the integrity and truthfulness of the poster. There are now enough Alpha4 owners so you should have no difficulty finding one to contact. We have large files of posts by the owners on our web site.
For our part the low level of intelligence, lack of civility and ethics has declined below tolerance and we are simply too busy to continue monitoring news group content.
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