Snoskred - Life in the Country

One of the very first kayaking blogs that I stumbled upon quite by accident back in the days that I did not know kayaking blogs existed was Yakabout.

I have learnt a lot from reading this blog, and many of the things I have learned have changed our experience of kayaking forever for us. For example the shark skins - had we not heard about them on Yakabout earlier this year, we would have put the kayak away during the winter months like we did the year before. Thanks to Yakabout writing about them we got the shark skins and kayaked ourselves silly during the winter months.

At some point during the last few months with us making the decision to get into fishing from the kayak, I wanted to learn more about the fishing aspect of things. So I looked around the web with Yakabout’s links page as a starting point, and I found a kayak forum called AKFF - the Australian Kayak Fishing Forum. I lurked for a bit, getting a feel for the water, and then I signed up and began posting.

I won’t lie and say that I felt comfortable right off the bat there - there was a lot of discussion between people who clearly knew each other personally. There was also a fair bit of “Aussie” humour, some of it funny, some of it not funny at all. That is usually the case with Aussie humour, I tend to find. You take the good with the bad, though.

Earlier this week a big argument broke out when one of the members posted a photo of their dog in a thread asking members to sign a petition. Their dog happens to be a Dingo. It is legal to keep them in NSW providing you follow very specific rules, which the person in question was doing. Frankly I wish every dog breed had rules and you needed a permit to keep them, having been bitten twice by dogs I hate it when people just let their dogs run loose in the streets. It happens a lot where I live.

It seems on this forum when people have an argument, nobody reports the posts, the mod team don’t bother to step in even when they can see that rules are being broken and personal attacks are being made, and then when asked why action was not taken, they state that nobody reported the posts.

Once the argument is over - or even while it is ongoing, members of the forum will jump into the thread posting completely off topic and somewhat stupid things to try and break the tension and calm things down (hello, that is what happens when the mod/admin team isn’t doing their job properly!)

So when I saw a totally offensive (to me at least) image of a dead cat on a road posted in that thread with a sign saying “Free Cat” pointing at the run over animal, I reported the post.

I can’t remember exactly what I said when I reported it, maybe just something like inappropriate image. If I was shocked by the image, I was completely flabbergasted by the response I got from a moderator on the site named Leftieant.

As I have now been banned from the site, I am unable to post a copy of it, however I remember him saying that the image had been sent by email a lot, and he believed it wasn’t inappropriate or offensive.

I responded saying I had never seen it before, I was offended by it, and that I knew there were quite a few members on the site who were under 18, and that I hated to think of kids stumbling onto that image as a surprise to them. I also quoted sections from the rules that the image specifically broke.

I did not receive a response to that private message, and no action was taken about the photo. It is still there as far as I know. It was about this time that I began feeling this site might not be a great place to hang out.. what happened next certainly proved those feelings to be correct.

On Sunday afternoon, I visited the AKFF forums only to find a couple of threads with ……… in the title, one of which was soon deleted. I then discovered that the signature of one of the forum members - Astro, who is a contributor at Yakabout - seemed to have been modified and now made no sense.

It now said - Kayak Fishing Correspondent http://……….com.au - and I knew that it should have said Yakabout where the dots were. Hmm.. I dropped over to Yakabout where people were already chatting about this bizarre phenomenon in the shoutbox.

That same day, Yakabout had launched a set of forums on their site. Jealous much, AKFF guys? There was no reason to be - there is plenty of room on the internet for everyone to have their own forums. However with Yakabout being as well known and as popular as it was, they clearly felt threatened by it.

I wasn’t about to keep my mouth shut about this. I felt that any community that would act so childishly towards someone as awesome as Josh from Yakabout was probably not a place I was going to spend a lot of time in the future, so I was happy to be quite outspoken about it and you can clearly see that I was in this thread which I am surprised still exists - read it while you can!.

However I did not break the rules - being an Administrator on other forums, I know better than to do that.

Josh from Yakabout also posted about the goings on, which you can read here - Days Of Our Lives.

Imagine my surprise when I returned home from a kayaking trip on Monday only to find that my forum account on AKFF no longer existed. I am in excellent company though, because Yakass (Josh) no longer exists either. No explanation from the people on AKFF, no discussion, no mention of a warning, nothing. They just threw away two members of the community.

I am assuming (perhaps someone from the site reading this could comment and let me know for sure) that they made the decision to ban Josh, and they felt I would not keep quiet about that either, so they banned me at the same time.

Now me, I can understand. I am nobody in the kayak fishing world. But Josh? Who is probably one of the most well known (not to mention popular) kayak fishermen in Australia these days? That’s a bad choice, guys. That one will come back to bite you once your members work out what is going on. Oh wait.. you’re not ballsy enough to explain it to them, and they’re gonna have to figure it out all on their own?

Let me give you an example of how you are supposed to administrate a forum. When you ban someone and create a new rule as a result of that, you need to let people in on the secret.

Recently a member on The Mudflats borrowed money from other members promising to pay it back - and then did not pay it back. When we Admins found out about this, we chose to ban the member and we also created some new rules as a result. Here you can see the post where we explained the banning, and here you can see the new rules.

That’s how you do it, AKFF people. So why don’t you explain the banning of Yakass and Snoskred to your members? Oh wait.. you don’t have a good reason for doing it? Ohhh.. right.

There were some people on AKFF who I looked forward to meeting - I guess that won’t be possible now. That is the one thing I do regret about all of this.

Not one to let things like this upset me, I have built the bridge and got over it - and joined a new kayak forum which Josh assures me is awesome, and a quick look around over there shows me it probably is the better place for me anyway, they have a local fishing group. And I see some of the people I had hoped to meet are members of this new forum also too.

It’s 1:30am and my mind is wide awake. The other half went to bed quite a while ago now, and I don’t want to go in and read till I’m tired because it will wake him up. Much of this post won’t make a lot of sense. It’s ok, I just need to get it out.

I’ve made many mistakes in my life, but the one that keeps annoying me today is why did I place my faith in other people when I should probably have struck out on my own and created what I wanted to create, especially when those other people suddenly decided they didn’t want me to be involved in things to the same extent I originally was.

Those people let me down and yet, I continue to support them. Those people say nasty things about me when they think nobody else is looking. Well, people are looking and whether you like it or not, they have no good reasons to treat me badly, so they let me know what is said. And I don’t say anything, and I probably should, but I figure for the good of everyone, it’s better just to let them talk and try to show them by my actions that I am not the person they think I am.

I know this - I have done a lot of good things. I don’t talk trash behind peoples backs - if I am going to say something about you I say it to you. Maybe I should have done what everyone was urging me to do - create my own empire, make my own site, do my own thing, but that would have taken the focus away from what is really important, and it would have meant a lot of the work I have put into things would have to have been put into creating the empire, and realistically that would have been a waste of my time and energy.

People think I’m holding grudges, but I don’t. I’ve put the past behind me, well behind me - they are the ones with the chips on their shoulder and no real desire to remove them. I was told to build a bridge, and I did. And let’s face it, someone who said some very nasty things about me, and continues to do so from what I am told, recently I put a fair bit of effort in to doing something nice for them - for the good of the bigger picture.

People ask me why, when I was treated so badly by certain people, I continue to stick around. It’s a good question and one I find myself asking myself today. I have a little piece of paper on my desk. You might have seen it in the doll pictures. Maybe you can’t make out what it says, but it is the answer, and that is why it sits there on my desk, right in front of me, day after day.It’s entirely true. What it says is - sometimes taking the high road is no fun at all.

It hasn’t been fun. I’ll be honest with you. I don’t enjoy the way certain people treat me. But the good things that have come from me taking that high road are very worthwhile and one day, maybe, those people who have been so unpleasant will come around and see my actual actions instead of making sh*t up. They’ll look and see and maybe they will eventually think - damn, she did that, even while we were talking crap about her? Even when we kicked her in the teeth, and then kept kicking her in the teeth, over and over till most of her teeth were missing? What would I have done in her shoes? Would I have stuck around? Would I have stuck it out? No f*cking way. I’d have resigned publicly, made a huge fuss, gone off and made my own site, and split the community even further from what it already was.

Right now today, I am truly wondering if this has been worth it, when people won’t let go of the past, and they still seem to think kicking me in the teeth is a great idea. And maybe what I should do is exactly what *they* would have done in my place - resign publicly, cause a huge fuss, go off and make my own site, and split the community. But I can’t do that, not because I can’t go make my own site, I have in house technical support and my own server is finally back online etc, but because I believe the community is split enough already, and further fractures will only do more harm.

It’s time. People need to stop trying to hurt each other, and remember why they are involved in any of this at all.

Today I did go make my own site. It’s actually for all my stuff, because now my server is back online I’ve managed to get things into one place, and some kind of order. It’s got all my scambaiting audios there in one place, well a lot of them anyway. I’m going to get back into doing more of that stuff soon.