Ok, time to come clean.
I was Joe, or better phrased, HALF of Joe. Madtown was the other half. Until 5/20/2011 in the middle of the night, when for inexplicable reasons, Madtown changed the password on the Joe account, and also changed the password on this account. It took me two weeks to figure out how to change it, and then it was just a fluke. I’ve called him once every day since, trying to get an explanation, but as some of you who know Madtown might suspect, those calls have not been returned.
At this point, I really don’t know why he’s done what he did. My best guess is that he intends to ride back in here like the savior on the white horse and save you all from the evil Joe. Just a guess though, I really have no idea what he’s planned. I also have no idea how long this post will last. But for those of you who get to read it, at least you’ll know the truth.
Many of you watched Madtown melt down several years back. Trust me when I tell you, that maintaining this place is a thankless job. He was doing the bulk of it by himself, and burn out doesn’t even come close to describing it. He reached out to me, and we concocted this scheme to keep the place running. At that point, he really couldn’t continue by himself.
I had no interest in the software aspect of this whole thing. I have no idea how to do it, and little to no motivation to learn it. What I was willing to do was to keep accounts activated, read the posts, answer the pm’s & emails and deal with all the administrative bull. Zool has stated on here before what a PITA it is, but it’s necessary, and someone had to do it, and Madtown couldn’t any more.
Let’s face it, there are about a dozen folks here that I couldn’t stand. Complicating things further, they couldn’t stand me either. Putting me in charge of that stuff wouldn’t have worked. So, in came Joe. If you read the bio correctly, you’ll see that it’s a combination of me and Madtown. The posting was 95% me, and the ideas were a conglomeration of both of us, but largely his vision.
Trying to be “partners” with him is the most frustrating experience I’ve ever had. The first year, I largely spend begging him to initially upgrade the software and the old stuff was so outdated it almost didn’t run any longer. Later, it was switched to begging him to implement the new software.
I think we started this in April 2009, I finally gave up and bought the Vbulletin suite myself in December 2009, and then begged him to implement it, finally going live in November 2010.
When you don’t have the password to upload files to the server, there is only so much you can do.
To those of you doubting me at this point, I only ask you to remember how long the homepage was down, and how many months it took to get a link to the forum. Even I could have put a link to the old forum. But if you cannot upload a page to the server, what can you do? Beg. And that’s what I did.
Was I perfect? Oh, hell no. You sit there trying to figure out what to do and there are no clear answers. You’ve got a small group of folks, who are active posters that want to express themselves in any manner they choose. If they want to insult someone and their opinions, well, so be it. If that person doesn’t like it, tough. Then you’ve got another group of folks that want to tell you what they think, any time they choose, with absolutely NO criticism of their opinion regardless of how stupid it might be.
Oil and water. No? You can’t balance that.
So I tried to control it the best I could. Clearly didn’t work either. You create a Favre thread to mitigate the damage, just one example, and get mixed results. Some of the other things I tried, I got no results. Or bad ones.
If you guys recall, I, as Joe, posted a sticky in the Packer forum one day asking those without an account to email me and tell me why they didn’t want to join us. I got 12 replies that all pretty much said the same thing. They were worried that if they offered their opinion, they’d get brutally criticized. 12 isn’t a large sample size, but it was what I had to work with. And there was some legitimacy to that.
Look at the early replies to Waldo56. Brutal. Was the guy always right? Hell no. Was he crazy? No. He was a good poster. We drove him away. Then you read what happened to Woodbuck and Partial. You can certainly say that they brought it on themselves, and that’d be true, but why would you register here? So, I tried to move that stuff to the Garbage Can, or at least the Romper Room. That clearly didn’t work, and that was my decision.
Let’s talk about Partial for a moment. He was my friend. I met him, and liked him. But I banned him. I got pm’s and emails from Madtown for months. “You gotta get rid of him”. “We can’t move on without him”. On and on. I agreed with him, but tried everything I could think of first and finally was left with no other options. Partial was a good guy, but jeez you can only take so much.
So I banned him, WITH MADTOWN’S FULL SUPPORT. I have over 75 emails from partial after I banned him. In the span of 30 days. The vast majority were threatening. I reached out to one member privately and asked what I should do. I got some counsel back from an attorney that this person knew, and got some very good advice, which I implemented and the problem stopped. But now, I read Madtown ask if he should bring him back. I know what happened. That’s why I think he’s trying to come in here as the savior.
Maybe all of you will let him. I have no idea. Maybe he’ll fix what ails this place. I have no idea about that either.
In any event, there are a few folks here that I know, whom I have misled about whether or not I was still involved with Madtown. I apologize to each of you for that. In the end, that’s why Joe didn’t post very much. It was too difficult to keep the personalities separate.
Kudos go out to Justin Harrell, who was the only guy (I believe) to figure it out. I think in the end, Joe talked him out of his opinion, but he got it. Or at least, he was the only one to make the accusation. Congrats Justin. There is one other person who can confirm that what I’ve told you is true. They can speak up if they wish, or forever remain silent. It’s entirely up to them.
My time here is done. Some of you will be happy about that. Enjoy. I’ll miss this place, and miss my involvement in it. At the end of the day, I was just trying to make it better, and keep it going. And I truly loved being here and being a participant. My self assessment is that it didn’t go very well, certainly not as well as I had hoped. Hopefully now that I’m out of the way, it’ll go better.
I’ll answer questions if you have any, until Madtown logs in and sees this and either deletes it or bans the retailguy account. Since I trusted him, I don’t have a backup account so I’ll have no other way to even read this. If this remains but you get no replies, that’s why.
Those of you who have my email address, I invite you to contact me if you wish.
Thanks all.
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Originally Posted by retailguy
