Now I'm annoyed...

Bart/Al,

I'm glad to see you are both flying the banner of free speech. Quite frankly Bart, how dare you lock that thread. Al, judging by your post I trust you support this action? In you capacity as chairman you are obliged to protect my rights within IFAS, not surpress them.

I have a right to express my opinion. I have not been offensive or personal- I have raised criticisms that I feel are valid and worthy of others opinion.

This is a bully boy tactic, a childish move to have the last word. It is a colossal error of judgement. I see I have also been prohibited from posting on Barts latest thread. It is personally insulting and damages the reputation of these boards.

You have both abused your positions.

David

I have set up a dedicated forum for discussion of the website.

To say you are being denied your free-speach is simply not fair. The discussion went on for 5 pages and went round in about 20 circles. The points have been made, and a decision has been taken.

It is not possible to keep discussing the same thing for ever and ever, it will get us no where and will result in no work ever happening on this project. To move things forward I have made a decision that I have been told is mine to make. The decision is made, it is now time to move on.

To help us move on in as positive a way as possible I have set up a dedicated discussion forum for the design of the site. I would ask everyone to contribute there but to bear in mind that there are two policy decisions which have been made and are not being re-visited untill Version 3.0 of the website is live. When V4 starts being discussed then we can re-visit those points. For this itteration of the process the discusison is closed to allow us move on and actually get something concrete done!

I hope you understand why I have taken this management decision in this project. It is most certainly nothing personal and I really hope you will partake in the ongoing discussions and in particualr contribute to the two threads I started today, both of which you are perfectly placed to contribute to in a very real and productive way.

Bart.

It is most certainly nothing personal and I really hope you will partake in the ongoing discussions and in particualr contribute to the two threads I started today, both of which you are perfectly placed to contribute to in a very real and productive way.

But by placing the restriction on the file format for the logo, you've just blocked off Dave's input (unless he uses GIMP, in which case I apologise)

Photoshop and Illustrator are the industry standards for logo design.

It is most certainly nothing personal and I really hope you will partake in the ongoing discussions and in particualr contribute to the two threads I started today, both of which you are perfectly placed to contribute to in a very real and productive way.

But by placing the restriction on the file format for the logo, you've just blocked off Dave's input (unless he uses GIMP, in which case I apologise)

Photoshop and Illustrator are the industry standards for logo design.

No, I havn't, I EXPLICITLY set my requirements so that Dave can use Photoshop. It was EITHER .xcf (GIMP) OR a LARGE PNG (ang software package worth it's salt).

I have a right to express my opinion.

Which you are doing...

Bart has set up threads for discussing the design of the site. The previous thread was going nowhere, drawing a line under it and moving on to sensible discussions on the site might not be a bad thing. I'm sorry that you feel so strongly about the topic being closed, but I think we all had made our points (over and over) and there didnt seem to be any hope of convergence.

One thing I am obliged to do is make sure that the webmaster can do his job, something that he was getting criticised for doing. I basically told Bart to get on with it, and make whatever decisions he needed, get whatever user advice and help he wanted. To this end Bart has created a section for website development discussion, which I think is a good course of action.

Cheers,
~Al

I'm sorry bart, but I will not be taking part in any more discussions regarding the website. There was no need to lock the thread. I think your motives are quite clear to all. Are you going to lock every thread just because you feel frustrated? It is an insult to my intelligence. If you don't like what I'm saying you don't have to respond, especially if you cannot do so in a civilized fashion.

IFAS can consider this a formal protest. I'll be sticking with astronomy posts from now on.