Hi Rob;
First, welcome to our board. It would appear that your initial experience of our group might have been a little less welcoming than is customary. The atmosphere here is, on the whole, warm and congenial; and new members are very welcome.
I hope Bob doesn't mind if I mention that he is one of our most knowledgeable and helpful members. Bob tends to keep up with used Alembic prices much better than I do, and I thus find his contributions on market prices to be quite helpful.
Internet communication can be much more difficult than communicating in person. We lack facial expressions that convey in real time a lot of information. It is quite easy to quickly write and post something that can be worded in such a way that it will be read by others in ways that we perhaps did not intend. This problem can be compounded by the fact that many of us sit at our computers working on several things at the same time, with several different blogs and discussion groups open at once, typing away, posting as quickly as possible.
It would appear to me that in this case Bob may have been a little less than careful in his wording, especially in light of the fact that he was responding to a new member who did not know him as well as many of the rest of us do. It does appear that in his second post, he was trying to be a little more helpful and a little more careful in his approach.
There are a lot of messages posted in our little forum every day; and many of the regulars here try to read as many of them as possible. Thus we can sometimes tend to hurry through, and perhaps not take the time that we should when posting responses to messages.
We do actually have posting guidelines, and they can be found
here. I hope you will take a few seconds and read through the guidelines; it's fairly short. I think it reflects the spirit of our community here. Generally, the members here do tend to follow these guidelines. And I really do think that this is a great forum. The members here are a great group of people from all over the world.
Second; we do not like to remove threads. I've received a number of requests in the past, and I've turned them all down. If we were to remove a thread, it would set a precedent that would cause further problems in the future; so we just don't think it's a good idea. So while I do understand why you might wish to have the thread removed, I do hope you will understand that, given the overall context of moderating the forum as a whole over time, I don't want to remove the thread.
I also hope you will give consideration to the fact, though your initial experience of our group may have been less than positive, that you are welcome here; and I invite you to read some of the other threads posted here. I think you'll find it really is a great group.
Thanks,
David
