What is it with obsessives arguing over commercial entities?
The Groundspeak forums have a set of guidelines that are written to be as straightforward as possible and to prevent conflict in the long run. The issues occur when people refuse to interpret the guidelines the way that they are intended to be - if at all.
Back in April, two of the three volunteer reviewers and forum mods stepped down from their posts as a result of being forced to moderate the forums in a way they didn’t see appropriate, stepping down due to their issues with Groundspeak.
The run-up, 19th April, rapid change to cache adoption rules leads to a healthy discussion.
This all started over Groundspeak’s closing of a charitable fund-raising thread on the 21st April (originally opened on the 3rd), for cachers doing a ‘commando challenge’. Soon after (21st), a thread was opened cautioning us not to open threads without thinking first. Jaz666 made a good roundup post of previous commercial cache issues.
This was rapidly followed by the opening Mandy of Us4&Jess’ charity calendar thread (Apr 22nd) and closing of the same thread on the same day, the warning post having been around for at least a day already. AFAIK, the issue of her methods of advertising the calendars had been brought up with Groundspeak before - unsolicited spamming from what I’d heard. As such, it seemed the Groundspeak clamped down on the reviewers to enforce the rules without the previously allowed leeway.
A message giving the mods a vote of confidence was opened on the 22nd, and remained with little argument.
And then the fallout begins on the 23rd. Lacto’s retirement message, Ecky does the same, and Deccy’s left on his own to mod the UK, his roundup message. Shortly followed by SP’s call to boycott the forums. Mandy questioning Why? the retirement.
Tensions are obvious elsewhere, the thread questioning what a commercial cache is quickly dissolves into a US vs us argument. And, a thread wanting to split the UK out of geocaching.com, both are obvious signs of the tension of parts of the community.
People continued to stir, it finally died a little after the news had settled. Luckily, Mandy reached some agreement with Groundspeak and was allowed to advertise the calendars a little on the forums.
… skipping big spat cos i can’t recall it…
More recently, late August, the commercialism issue was brought up again by Simply Paul’s “Monkeying about” event, which is a standard event linked to an optional commercial activity. The issue here is that the cache page’s contents were posted to the forums before being OK’d by the reviewer. It seems that GSP got wind of this on a standard browse and asked the moderator to pull the plug (my guess, it is hard to second guess who’s choice it was, although if GSP were to pull it, they’d use their own account).
Naturally, SP was annoyed at what happened, and this argument was the result. I’m sure it’s partly a bad aftertaste after the heavy-handed bans earlier in the month.
The most recent calendar thread started off another spat between the community and Groundspeak over the charity and commercial nature of the post. The thread was closed by our moderator, Mandarin, but I’m not sure whose choice it was. A question was asked of Mandarin to confirm why the thread was closed, although (imo) clearly stated on the closing post of the offending thread:
Closing this Topic because it relates to a charity payment and therefore breaches the Forum Guidelines.
The guideline it was breaching was posted by Mandy in the Question thread, Hornet does make a good point that the post was made ‘in good faith’ and was not soliciting any further monies. However, the standard argument of Us vs GSP over commercialness ensues.
A forum bug resulted in a missing first post on a thread by Matrix entitled “Commercialism“, the assumption was that the post had been deleted by TPTB (probably leading from raised tempers from the previous thread closure), however, a hamster had just died whilst putting that post online. 
Unfortunately, this resulted in a rather extreme response, luckily it was quickly resolved, and no caches were archived.
Tags: forums, Geocaching
Hey, you could take up journalism. Start easy: Wikipedia.