My little rant......

Just as an addendum - there is plenty of good valid and factually correct advice new folks can post after being here less than a week - relative newness doesn't matter, such things can easily be found just reading through posts and include:

# of hides
Humidity
Temps
Not leaving live prey in with snakes

and a number of others. I'm not correcting or attacking anyone - I just want to illustrate that the purpose of forums is NOT to disseminate or prescribe information in a nonreciprocal manner. Web pages and care sheets foot the bill nicely when no feedback or input is wanted. THe purpose of the forums is to get people to participate and share. Sorry if that sounded kinda "Barney"

Taking off the Birkenstocks now and tossing the granola over my shoulder.

Much better now with the boots and coffee stronger than heroin. Cheers!

Smulkin.....I completely agree with your last post. Well said. Reciprocation was never the issue....the quality of the reciprocation is.

Cool - too much room for misunderstanding in this burgeoning thread. I think a few new folks mentioned they were hesitant to give advice after having read this - likely what was referred to.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming . . . "OMFG I WANT THAT MOJAVE!!!!"

I am real anxious to find a white-lipped, in all seriousness (that I am capable of).

Sorry if you didnt pick up on my sarcsm in that post lots of it was by the way. Its kind of hard to post sarcsm when you type it. Look at my Forum Etiquette post and you will see what i am all about.

Look i care about everyone on this site and all of thier animals. I guess i was just frustrated to see what this site is turning too. There are lots of sites that are 100 times worse then this. I was a member at Kingsnake.com and all i got was insults. I go to the canopy often but havn't registerd yet to look at all the posts and i like what i see.

I am trying to think of a good solution that will work for all of us including the new folks. I dont like to piss people off and i dont like to hurt peoples feelings. But if it came to the well being of an animal then i will do what ever i can to convince the person that what they are doing is wrong.

Maybe we should leave it up to the moderators to edit the bad post but this would upset lots of people. I think the way we are doing it now is working fine. I know that everyone here tries to use as much tact as possible when correcting someone so we dont offend anyone. I also agree that if someone becomes violent and threatens people then they should be promptly reported.

Maybe we should have a "FORUM POLICE DEPARTMENT" to handle people like this.

I think this could work.

If someone gives bad advice then maybe a "DEPUTY" would give them a warning.

If someone uses foul language in a post maybe they should get 3 warnings then get suspended from posting for mabye 3 days or so.

If someone becomes beligerant an starts threatening people i say they get 1 warning and if it happens again they get their membership suspended.

This will not only keep people from posting bad posts but i think it will make this a better place for all of us. Maybe this would become a kid friendly forum. But it would be up to the citizens to report these people as we know the cops are not always around when we need them. We could also have a Chief that decides the fate of these individuals or we could just leave it to the deputys to uphold the law.

So what do you think of this idea.

And I am not being sarcastic.

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Sorry if you didnt pick up on my sarcsm in that post lots of it was by the way.

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Sorry for the misunderstanding....I'm very sarcastic as well so I know how hard that is to convey on-line, lol.

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I go to the canopy often but havn't registerd yet to look at all the posts and i like what i see.

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Thanks for the compliment, I try my best. :D

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I dont like to piss people off and i dont like to hurt peoples feelings. But if it came to the well being of an animal then i will do what ever i can to convince the person that what they are doing is wrong.

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I am the exact same way. :)

As others have said, we can't keep folks from keeping herps as a result of impulse buys, we can just hope to educate them so that THEY can make better husbandry choices for their animals.

And if someone comes here, reads up on some threads, asks a few questions, and then tells the next N00b who comes along that he ought to raise his humidity and add a second hide for his snake, what's wrong with that? As keepers gain confidence in the information they have (based on the authority of the source, the number of sources with the same or similar information, or whatever other factors weigh in for them), they tend to share it with others, and this is how communities and good herpers are built.

As an example, Paul (sorry to single you out, I hope you don't mind) came here a few months back only knowing that he'd like to get a ball python and that he wanted to do his research before getting one. He didn't claim to be an expert of any sort. Numerous members here gave him input and advice, and encouraged him, praising him for doing his research before getting the animal. He has since become pretty comfortable with keeping his ball and gone on to add a blood python to his household as well, after doing more research, much of it in direct correspondence with the breeder. When it comes down to it, Paul is still a n00b keeper, but I don't see anyone objecting if he offers advice. Why is that? Because you agree with what he has to say? Because he's passed some unwritten test? Because he's demonstrated good judgement?

If we could have a test for aspiring advice-givers requiring that they demonstrate good judgement, I think the quality of advice would improve, but I also think we'd lose both veteran and new advice-givers in the process.

The real test that needs to be passed is that the recipients of the advice need to run it through their BS filters and see what comes out the other end. If someone posts advice like, "It's a good idea to socialize your herp by taking him to concerts and other public events," and then 3 or 4 others post about how much stress that will cause the snake and how people's fear may lead to increased regulation of reptile keeping, and the poster who asked the original question still thinks that the advice to take the snake to public events was good advice, there is nothing more we can reasonably do except try to inform the next person that it's a bad idea.

People use their own judgement, and it is often bad judgement -- you shouldn't have to search far for verification of that -- and the only thing you really can do is count the successes and move on.

I still think a Forum Police Department is in order.

That's what the moderators are for, only with (currently, anyway) less restrictive policies.

WE COULD GIVE YOU GUYS HATS WITH LITTLE POLICE LIGHTS ON TOP.

AND INSTEAD OF A SIREN YOU CAN JUST YELL OUT EEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOO.