Wednesday, March 18, 2009

The Death of Yahoo's IronCountyWatch group

It seems that the Iron County Watch discussion group
has finished its run. It existed for about 5 years. I
quit the group some time back in November of 2007
because it was, for me, a waste of time better spent
in other ways. The best responses ever mustered there
were based in what I considered to be ignorant dissent,
the worse were truly vacant hate pieces.

I looked in on the group the only way a non-member could,
at the top page that gives the mission statement, the
size of the membership, and the number of posts by month.
The final record I have was from March 3, 2009 when there
were 182 members (down from a long term stable membership
of 183). By March 9th there were 27 postings for the month
which is slightly over 3 per day. The group, unless I was
a member and posting there, never did very well with the
usual level of participation resulting between 2 and 3
posts a day with a national election cycle peak of more
than 8 per day during September of 2008. I guess it is
possible to excite a few folks in Iron County after all.

The good news is that I saved an older posting I was
directed to while I was still a member. It was posted
on November 28, 2005 by the alias

"gustlehtin" .

It was signed at the bottom by "Poor Richard."

"Poor Richard's Almanac" was published in colonial
America by Ben Franklin.

I was told that the original of this piece, that has
an date of February 1996, was distributed around the
region by someone slipping copies into mailboxes in
Iron County. The main villain in the piece is
John Archocosky, currently the City Manager of
Iron River.

It was a tad on the offensive side, that is to
say--it was a severely critical piece, so I hesitate
to post it to a public page in my name. I would put
it on an angelfire web page, but the difficulty
there is that at the first "terms of service"
complaint from anyone, Lycos/angelfire kills the
web page. I am not going to sacrifice any of
those pages I've had up for several years now.

If you'd like this Poor Richard piece I'll be
glad to email it on request. I will ignore random
unidetifiable email addresses. I'll have to know
who you are before I'll send it to you as an HTML
file.

As far as the death of IronCountyWatch goes, it
was poorly managed and I am told that someone
posted a bunch of naked porn pictures there,
causing the owners to pull the plug on it.

Please note that the long term membership had
been stable for at least a couple of years so
far as I could tell looking at the stats page.
So it seems likely to me that someone who took
exception to the contents of the group wrecked
it on purpose. One of the issues that caused it
to almost be killed off a few years back was an
explicit discussion about homosexuality. In fact
the mission statement was modified at that time
to include the following statement:

"You will notice the yahoo chat icon...use it for
issues that don't really belong here, to talk to
other members, those issues being the
"homosexuality issue" as one of them."

What became the IronCountyIndependent was spun
off at at that time as a place where all discussions
were permitted. So it seems very strange to me that
that web page became a bastion of fundamental
Christian discussions.

These events lend validity to my decision to keep
a greater degree of control over the several blogs
I offer to the community. It doesn't take many
warped minds to wreck a good thing, and heaven
knows we have our share of them in the county,
with a goodly representation of them in political
offices in Iron County.

Well written emailed articles will find a home
here. I'll post them even if I disagree with them,
but I reserve the right to reply.

Bill Vajk
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