I am SO done with online forums!

Every now and then I get a piece of pretty good advice from my wife that I should listen to and take heed of, and instead of doing that I’ll totally ignore it and go ahead and do what she says I shouldn’t do anyway. And I’ll inevitably pay for it when the advice I’ve ignored turns out to be pretty damned sound.

Such is the case with online forums. To give you a little bit of history, the wife and I got involved in an online motorcycle forum called “V-Twin Forum” waaaaay back when it was a small forum being run by one guy and had less than 2,000 members. It was also called something else that had “Harley-Davidson” in the name but the MoCo sent the owner a letter threatening to sue over the use of the Harley name without permission, so he changed the name. The forum got really popular and literally exploded in membership; about this time I made a comment concerning how bad the drivers were in New Jersey (where I was living at the time), and a friend of my wife’s – whom I never liked from Day 1 but tolerated because he was a friend of my wife’s – went apeshit on me online. Seems that he was from New Jersey and took offense to my calling a spade a spade. It got nasty quick, and ended up with three broken friendships and us leaving the forum.

Right after that we got involved in another forum called “Harley-DavidsonBikers.com,” and after about a year of some pretty good experiences on that forum, that one went south as well. There was this one guy on the forum who claimed to having ridden 125,000 miles on his bike in one year, and I took him to task on it. When I pointed out that in order for this to happen, the guy would have to ride 342 miles per day, every day for a year, I was roundly chastised for my non-belief. There was another guy on the forum at about the same time who flat-out didn’t like me and I didn’t like him, either, so rather than stick around for the abuse we were both going through, my wife and I said the hell with it and left that forum as well. (At this point I must be fair and tell you that there is a forum named “HarleyDavidsonBikers.com," but it is NOT the same forum of which I speak. That one shut down shortly after I left for reasons other than my departure.)

That was pretty much it for my wife and forums, but as for me….well, some things I learn quickly, and some I don’t.

At this point I have to point out that I’ve met some really fantastic folks through online forums, and one of them is one of my closest friends to this day, a guy I’ve ridden to a couple of rallies with, had over to my house twice, gotten drunk with, and just generally had a ball with. You know him as BulldogChief, author of the blog “Motorcycles Have No Doors.” Bulldog is my "brutha from anutha mutha" and the closest thing I have to a real brother, and there isn’t much I wouldn’t do for him. And I know he feels the same way about me, because he’s told me. I met Bulldog on the next forum I got involved in after HDB went south, and together he and I watched that forum self-destruct through no fault of ours or anything we were involved in.

Next stop for me was a very brief stay at "FFMB.com," which lasted about two days. I made a joke about Yankees (not the baseball team) that someone from the North didn’t appreciate, and the membership pounced on me like a pack of wolves on a wounded sheep. Not being one to stay where I’m not wanted, I told ‘em all to go pound sand and left.

Then I got a call from someone I knew from the old HDB website, who invited me to join a new forum he was putting together called “EliteRidingGroup.com.” This was going to be a by-invitation site only, and in order to get in you had to be sponsored by a member of the forum. That was an excellent way to keep the troublemakers and the trolls out, and I must say it worked. I got involved in the forum in a very big way, volunteering for the Membership Committee and helping screen new members. And I gotta say, it worked. We had a simply excellent site going, with about 65 members or so, and it was great! No fights, no back-biting, no trolling, none of the usual crap you find with “open membership” forums.

Then I got wind of something that the founder was up to that was going to involve him circumventing the rules for membership; he was going to bring someone into the forum without having him go through the Membership Committee. I called him on it, and he turned on me like a rabid dog. When I made my last post and said I was leaving the forum, I didn’t air any of the dirty laundry that had piled up between us. All of the arguing we had done was done in a private section of the forum where only the Membership Committee and Admins could see, so when I left it came as a big surprise to everyone. Well, almost everyone.

And it was at that point that I had proven to me just how much some of the member’s words of loyalty were worth. To this day, I have not had one single member of that forum contact me and ask me what happened, or to come back. Not one. But the owner/operator of the site has had a ball slamming me behind my back. Nice guy, huh?

So you’d think I’d learn from this, wouldn’t you? Any rational person would, right? But did I learn? NOOOOOOOOOOO, of course not!

Vowing never to get that heavily involved in any forum ever again, I promptly joined "HarleyDavidsonForum.com" and kept a low profile. I’d check the posts every now and then, make a post here and there, but not really get too involved in it because I didn’t want to go through again what I’d been through before. Two things about this forum struck me right away: the general membership seemed to be a “clique-ish” group, not really rolling out the welcome mat for newcomers, and they had an inordinate amount of people who claimed to be “real bikers.” (Remember my post a while back about “posers” and “rubs?” This is where it came from.)

It wasn’t long before I clashed with the loudest of these “real bikers;” for discussion’s sake, let’s call him “RealBiker.” Anything “RealBiker” doesn’t like, he immediately labels as “GAY.” This includes windshields, electric starters, anything with the “Harley-Davidson” logo on it that isn’t a motorcycle, Starbucks coffee, and the TV show “Sons of Anarchy.” He also says that anyone who isn’t a “real biker” by his criteria is either a “poser” or a “rub.” Of course, he never really said exactly what his criteria was, but I kinda got the idea that if you weren’t able to completely tear your bike down into a pile of individual pieces and then put it back together, you weren’t a “real biker.” The clash we had wasn’t too bad, but it left both of us with a dislike for the other – he disliked me because in his eyes I was a “poser,” and I didn’t like him because he was obnoxious as hell.

That was about 2 months ago, and then last week someone made a post about the show “Sons of Anarchy.” Well, as one would expect, all of the “real bikers” on the forum roundly panned the show, with the loudest and most obnoxious of them being – you guessed it – “RealBiker.” He immediately labeled the show as “GAY,” naturally. I made the only post in which someone had the balls to say they liked the show, and “RealBiker” immediately lit into me. Then, out of nowhere, comes another poster who jumps on me and takes the conversation into a whole different direction. This one, who we’ll call “ArmyPuke,” started an argument with me about military Law Enforcement and civilian Law Enforcement not being the same, and that military cops weren’t “real cops.” Naturally, he was neither; he said he was in the Army “25 years ago,” but wasn’t anymore. Along the way he managed to throw the usual insults at the Air Force that an Army puke throws – kids will be kids, you know – which didn’t help things. But he has never performed a single hour of LE work in either community, so naturally he has NO idea of what he’s talking about.

So how, you ask, can he make the statement he did, not having the personal experience? He claims to have the agreement of “4 or 5 officers standing around me” while he was at work who agreed with him. Naturally, he never said if any of them – if they did exist at all – had worked in military Law Enforcement.

Hmmmmm, let’s see…..he’s never worked a day of Law Enforcement of either kind in his entire life, he’s unwilling to take the word of someone who has who disagrees with him, but he IS willing to take the word of civilian officers who agree with him.

Is it me, or is there something wrong with the logic here??

My last post to “RealBiker” was to say that he’d completely missed my point, and that I give up. My last post to “ArmyPuke” was to say that we had two choices: we could either continue on and watch it get even uglier than it already was, or we could just agree to disagree and drop it. He chose to continue, making an insulting post, and before I could reply the admins locked the thread.

After I discovered that the thread had been locked, I said to myself, “Screw this! Life’s too short to put up with this crap!” and cleaned out my account. Deleted all of the information in my profile, deleted my avatar, and changed my title to “outta here….” Then I logged out, erased the bookmark from my computer, and went on with my life. I'm going to go back tonight to send a PM to a person I'm trying to hook up with to ride, but after that I have ZERO intentions of ever going back.

In all fairness, I must say this: there are some really good people on that site, with Dave63 being about the best of them. Unfortunately, the assholes outshine the good ones. They always do, unfortunately.

I have also finally learned my lesson. I will never – NEVER – get involved in another online forum again for the rest of my life.

Seems that you can teach an old dog new tricks after all.

IHC