Here is the reply: This was posted on Trainorders this morning.
Date: April 23, 2007 06:19
Re: RYPN board is down this is terrible (
Author: co614
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Suffice it to say that I am very saddened by the decision of Mr. Kading to terminate RyPN as is evidenced by my immediate offer to go away quietly rather than see the site ended.
What you see posted on that link to the NG site is the culmination of what I (and many others) viewed as an increasingly worrisome practice of deletion/locking of postings that were in the view of many (in some cases a clear majority) worthwhile and on subjects that had relevance to the efforts of the railroad preservation industry today.
I posted a comment on a thread that was posted( by others) in celebration of the 32nd. anniversary of the American Freedom Train. Part of my comment dealt with the difficulties I faced in getting corporate sponsorship funding for the AFT project due the the general negativity caused by the Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal. The moderater deleted my posting on the grounds that it was a political statement and thus against the forums guidelines etc. It was literally the straw that broke the camels back. I recieved nearly 50 emails and pm's from users who expressed their unbelief and outrage at this deletion (and subsequent locking of the thread) and some of them at my request wrote also to the RyPN folks to express their concerns.
But as I said above this incident was but one of many of late and many of us regular participants were becoming increasingly concerned that the apparent effort (at least on the part of the recently appointed Webmaster/Moderator) to achieve political correctness in everything was quickly making the forum immpossible to use for anything beyond discussions on topics such as clothing and who was the latest to die.
IMHO one of our most treasured possessions as Americans is our Freedom of Speech. I realize that each forum has its rules and customs and every user agrees to abide by those rules in order to participate and I fully support that. However when peoples expressions and opinions (again this incident was but the latest of many- affecting not just my postings) are being arbitrarily errassed for no good reason then there's something very scary about that.
I too hope that the RyPN forum will reappear soon as it certainly was a valuable tool for the industry. If not, I'm confident that one or more of the other good sites will take up the slack.
To the many who were witnesses to the whole incident and have written to me with support I say thank you. To those who have only witnessed the last inninng I hope this message will help your understanding that there was an important principle involved here. One worth fighting for!!!
Respectfully, Ross Rowland
what a jerk..(Ross)
RYPN is gone because this whining baby shouted "lawsuit" because he feels his freedom of speech was taken away because a moderator locked his thread because he was making inflamatory political comments, which were clearly against the forum rules..
what an ass..I cant stand people like that..
so now a great asset to the preservation community is simply gone, just because one guy has a seriously overinflated ego..
pathetic..
its the same as when threads get locked on this forum for going off-topic into flame wars..they SHOULD be locked!
and no, its not a "freedom of speech" issue at all...because when a thread gets locked on a train forum no ones freedom of speech is being taken away..you are still free to say anything you like!
just take it somewhere else..
if you want to talk politics, take it to a political forum..there are only a billion of them..a TRAIN forums moderator SHOULD lock threads when they go off-topic into areas that are clearly not train related..
the forum rules always clearly state that..
so the threads get locked because someone is being a jerk and causes the thread to be locked..
often in those cases, the person being the jerk gets all "high and mighty" and writes a rant all about how wonderful and innocent he is and how wrong the forum was, and he is just the poor innocent victim that was "wronged" by the forum moderator..yeah right..
In reality he has it backwards..but he is too self-important to see that and can never, ever, admit he was wrong..
see above for a perfect example of that..

Scot