Originally Posted by
Bucking Bar
Question. ...
What do users of this board think of shutting down the ALPA web board?
Apparently it costs money and is a PITA to administer. Legally it has some risks too.
I like the idea that we can discuss crew room stuff without being in the open, but I have been admonished there for vanilla recaps of Flight Ops briefings.
Yet, the same old personal attacks are not interesting.
It says something that we moderate ourselves better than pilots posting to coworkers are sometimes willing to do. I may toss up a resolution to kill the ALPA board. We might be able to talk APC into password protecting a forum.
What does everyone else think?
Good questions.
It's nice to see the L&G behave more like the L&G, now that posters interested in representation issues have focused on the other thread, in good faith (my compliments to everyone for keeping it there, and keeping it pretty clean). I think this is good for everyone.
Some topics entail a lot of posts on one big issue, some topics have few posts, on a variety of smaller issues, entertainment, and discussions. The representation discussion is completely overwhelming the forum, which is pretty ironic considering it's not supposed to take place.
I think it would do a great disservice to the lurkers of the Hangar Talk section, just as in the L&G, to kill the whole thing over the actions of a few. Conversely, I don't think you can stop people from getting at the representation discussion obliquely, and so you have a full-on campaign going on Hangar Talk right now.
The solution might to model the forum after what we have right now on APC: 1) create a sub-section for representation issues, 2) systematically delete everything in Hangar Talk that belongs in that other section. This would stop the practice of deleting terms such as "DPA".
Of course, giving the DPA a place to play on the ALPA forum would presume the reciprocal, where you wouldn't have to be a member to discuss representation issues to participate on that website.
Bottom line is: there are a lot of users to these forums besides us frequent posters. If there are real obvious trends, and some people require their own place to play, or a topic obvious requires it's own place, then it should get a specific space. It's really very simple.