I made a passing comment about how stupid it was to get into a heated argument over something like that
Bonk took it the wrong way (it was a short post that wasn't a full exposition on my thoughts about the debate), flipped right the **** out, went on a rant and I haven't seen him post since then
Nah, that wasn't the reason I took a break. The Ukraine thread was a gongshow, but it was just a small piece of a larger problem that was manifesting itself all year on these boards. I thought stepping down as a mod would be enough, but I found that even after giving up the "privilege" of dealing with the worst of the worst, I was pretty mentally checked out of here. Don't feel as though you did anything major, me bailing wasn't your doing.
Like I said in the
New Mod Welcome thread, I'm still occasionally checking in to see if this place has calmed down, and I'll check back in around Draft time to see if we're going to have a repeat of last season, or if we can have some sense of a positive community around here again.
BonkTastic
I really hope you did not send that letter to Melynk.
While I'm here, I guess I should clear this up...
No, the entire idea of the "open letter" was twofold:
1) as a form of written therapy about my frustrations with the contradictions coming out of the organization at the time, but more importantly,
2) to open up a line of discussion on these boards,
not necessarily about Eugene's finances
specifically (because he'll never open the books and we'll probably never have a complete answer to that question), but more about:
-
the concept of using the internal cap/ the budget as a public talking point for the team and it's personnel decisions, either as an honest representation of the team's finances or as a fabrication used as a vehicle for some other ploy (casino, season ticket drive, etc...),
- the contradictions that have come from the management/ ownership group about the team' financial viability, and
- the consequences of "playing the budget card" in public with a fanbase in a city that legitimately already almost lost it's team once over budget issues, and whose patience to listen to that line of reasoning might be on thin ice.
I suppose in hindsight, the thread title ("sell the team") was a bad idea, because it had the opposite effect of what I had hoped: instead of generate discussion about the content of the post, it led to a bunch of posts who were reacting to the title and not the content. I knew that it was a much longer post than is normal on these boards, and I had hoped that a sensationalized title/ suggestion would draw people to read the whole thing and discuss some of the points within it, instead of skimming through it. My bad on that one.