More bad manners

I visited what is now known as the Adventure Radio Forum (AR) today, and noticed that in place of the single discussion board for Wainwrights On The Air (WOTA) there was now a whole set of boards for general discussions, summit alerts, summit news, activation reports, special events and information tips. There is already a set of discussion boards on the WOTA site that cover most of those topics. It looked a bit like an attempted takeover of WOTA after I have done all the work (more than a fortnight's solid effort) in setting up the site.

A couple of hours after I noticed this I received an email from Gerald, G4OIG, who had created these new discussion boards. He expressed the hope that "you will see it for what it is - an opportunity to publicise the scheme on a wider base."

Had I been asked beforehand, I would have expressed the opinion that I thought the existing WOTA discussion board on the AR forum already served that purpose. The creation of several sub-boards seems to me like unnecessary duplication, likely to cause confusion for active participants as to which forum to post to, or extra work as they post their contributions to both.

Using the Adventure Radio forum for WOTA discussions could have saved me a lot of work if the offer had been made before I set up WOTA's own forums. But although plenty of people on the AR forum knew I was setting up WOTA, no-one volunteered to assist at the time. Now that WOTA is clearly popular, it appears that some people now wish that they had done it themselves, and want to muscle in. Perhaps that wasn't the intention, but that's how it looks.

This bad feeling could have been avoided with a simple email beforehand asking what I thought of the idea, instead of telling me about it after the event. I'm wondering if we now spend so much time in front of computers we have forgotten the rules of good manners.