Sovrun Paraleguls

[longdog]

The Polar Bear is a wonderful building but in all honesty the chances of getting a decent pint in there are not good. Fifteen years ago was one of the main gay pubs in town and the starting point for a Thursday followed by a walk up to The Tap and Spile (now defunct) for 'one on the way' and then down to gay night at the also now defunct 'Sils' nightclub.

Around 2005 it ran into financial problems when the gay scene moved into town and Sils shut down. It needed a lot of money spent on it including the toilets which were notorious for being some of the worst in town and the owners decided to shut up and sell. Following this it reopened briefly as a football pub which failed and since then it's been open and shut repeatedly and never really regained much of a foothold.

If you do go to The Polar Bear on a Tuesday or a Saturday I'll probably be round the corner on Princes Avenue somewhere

[Burnaby49]

Given the declining fortunes of British pubs in general a significant number of CAMRA heritage pubs I've visited are in sad shape. Some don't even serve cask. However a good pint, normally a priority, is irrelevant when I visit a CAMRA heritage pub. My goal is to see the great pubs before they close for good.

[littleFred]

What relevance is this pub-talk to Sovrun Paralegals? None at all.

[Burnaby49]

I'd suggest you make a formal complaint to one of the moderators.

[longdog]

What relevance is this pub-talk to Sovrun Paralegals? None at all.

It's a sub-plot

[Gregg]

What relevance is this pub-talk to Sovrun Paralegals? None at all.

None whatsoever, but since its still interesting and doing no harm it's fully in the spirit of the long Quatloos tradition of not having real rules as much as guidelines, open to liberal interpretation when it suits us.

Your concern is duly noted, filed in triplicate, folded, stamped, sealed with wax and affixed with a thumbprint in red ink, stuffed into the back of a disused drawer, forgotten, recalled, considered, reconsidered by a Queen's Bench, appealed, denied and quietly ignored.

OK?

[littleFred]

In my view, filling threads with off-topic material damages the utility of the forum. Readers who are interested in the topic need to wade past irrelevant stuff. Writers are discouraged from posting useful information when this will get buried in irrelevant stuff.

The problem is peculiar to the UK forum. The USA and Canada forums don't have this problem, which makes them far more readable.

If Quatloos is sufficiently freewheeling that it allows off-topic pub-talk, then I'm sure it also allows my moans about it. (Just as you are free to ignore my moans, obviously.)

OK?

[longdog]

In my view, filling threads with off-topic material damages the utility of the forum. Readers who are interested in the topic need to wade past irrelevant stuff. Writers are discouraged from posting useful information when this will get buried in irrelevant stuff.

The problem is peculiar to the UK forum. The USA and Canada forums don't have this problem, which makes them far more readable.

If Quatloos is sufficiently freewheeling that it allows off-topic pub-talk, then I'm sure it also allows my moans about it. (Just as you are free to ignore my moans, obviously.)

OK?

I suppose it depends on what you are expecting. If you're looking for a thesis or a dissertation then perhaps off-topic posts are a bad thing. If you think of it more as a conversation in a pub then the occasional side-track is no bad thing.

[Burnaby49]

In my view, filling threads with off-topic material damages the utility of the forum. Readers who are interested in the topic need to wade past irrelevant stuff. Writers are discouraged from posting useful information when this will get buried in irrelevant stuff.

The problem is peculiar to the UK forum. The USA and Canada forums don't have this problem, which makes them far more readable.

If Quatloos is sufficiently freewheeling that it allows off-topic pub-talk, then I'm sure it also allows my moans about it. (Just as you are free to ignore my moans, obviously.)

Freddy, Freddy, I think you're getting a touch overwrought in your striving to be the conscience of Quatloos. Damages the utility of the forum? Wading past irrelevant stuff? All that from a few posts on pubs? Quatloos isn't the Washington Post reporting on Watergate, it's a bunch of people passing the time more or less discussing topics. This discussion is approaching 200 posts. Let's be honest here Fred. Go back and read them all from the start. How many are relevant? By relevant I mean;

1 - Providing new information on the topic under discussion.
2 - Providing new analysis or insight on the topic under discussion.
3 - Giving new opinions on the topic under discussion.

Apply that to the plethora of posts just on this one UK topic and advise us how many of them you think meet that standard. I'd guess under half. But I haven't seen you becoming the Quatloosian taskmaster on those superfluous post until I mentioned pubs, an issue that has aggravated you to comment in the past.

However, not let's argue, I'd agree 100% with your comment;

The problem is peculiar to the UK forum. The USA and Canada forums don't have this problem, which makes them far more readable.

Why would that be? I'd hazard a guess that it relates to you UK posters. You seem a very collegiate chatty bunch that enjoy socializing through your posts along with providing actual to-point topic discussions. Extensive, sometimes seemingly endless musings about Sweaty Sue, Tom, Amanda, and all of the other various targets of your discussions. If you go through the Canadian topics you can find numerous postings on my pubbing in Vancouver and my intense aversion to Canadian big-brewery beer, but, by and large, we stay directly on topic. The UK is different. Very different. As an example take this discussion;

viewtopic.php?f=52&t=11141

Do you really thing that warrants 610 posts? Or what about the Godzilla of them all, Tom Crawford;

viewtopic.php?f=52&t=10330
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=10722
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=10688
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=10614
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=11057
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=10946
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=10829
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=11381

I make that out to be 10,118 posts about Tom, a story about one family not paying their mortgage and getting evicted from their house. Now, again, let's be honest Fred, how many of those 10,000 posts met your criteria of being relevant and on topic? Yet I can't recall you speaking up at the time about how pointless, irrelevant of posts about Tom were destroying Quatloos' credibility. But when I make a few posts from time to time about pubs you rise up in indignant wrath about how I'm destroying the "utility" of Quatloos! Really?

A bit of background. Quatloos was a sedate, slow-moving website covering American and Canadian tax and sovereigns issues then suddenly, seemingly in an instant, you UK posters came storming out of nowhere and blindsided us. One day there were no UK topics or posts, the next day there was Tom Crawford. You'll note that there are very few moderators trying to keep control over the UK postings. Largely Gregg, Arthur, Notorial, Observer, sometimes Wes, and me. We were overwhelmed. We could have followed your advice and saved ourselves a lot of effort by simply clamping down on you all, stomping on all posts and posters wasting our time with irrelevant posts, banning anyone who wasn't precisely to point. But Quatloos is a free-speech forum. So we decided to moderate the UK with a very light hand and, largely, let you all go to it. As Gregg said we take a very casual attitude to the issue of whether posts are directly on topic or not. Unfortunately this appears to conflict with your opinion of how the website should be run. However you seem to be a lone voice in the wilderness. If this lack of discipline upsets you that's unfortunate but you're stuck within the dictatorial and entirely subjective grasp of we mods. Which will include my ramblings about real ale and the decline of heritage pubs, a topic I'd wager is of far more vital interest to Britain's future than Tom and his brood.

[Burnaby49]

Full disclosure, I wasn't indulging in craft beer when I made the preceding post. I was drinking Spire Mountain Dark & Dry Cider (5% ABV) from the Fishtail Brewery in Olympia Washington. However later today (it's 2:10AM) I'll be heading over to Callister Brewing Company;

http://www.callisterbrewing.com/

to get a few growlers of Adam Chatburn's Blackburn Bitter. Adam is a Lancashire lad who makes a true northern Britain cask ale.

[notorial dissent]

Enjoy one, or even several, for me.

[doublelong]

And I was going to jump in reminiscing of my 4 years spent at Hull University and I visited the pubs you mentioned more than a few times.
Seems our sovereigns are having a get together of sorts on the 29th July.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izcnb5zedkA
But because they are sovereigns it is called a Sovereign Seminar. Worth a watch just for the wordplay as our David is falling even further down the rabbit hole. Seems he has been doing research (watching youtube videos) into directed energy weapons HAARP and the Cern hadron collider and its impact on the space time continuum.

[Footloose52]

impact on the space time continuum.

Does that mean that there will be commentary on the activities of Q and his meddling as well as some ill informed twaddle about the Hadron Collider?

[Gregg]

In my view, filling threads with off-topic material damages the utility of the forum. Readers who are interested in the topic need to wade past irrelevant stuff. Writers are discouraged from posting useful information when this will get buried in irrelevant stuff.

The problem is peculiar to the UK forum. The USA and Canada forums don't have this problem, which makes them far more readable.

If Quatloos is sufficiently freewheeling that it allows off-topic pub-talk, then I'm sure it also allows my moans about it. (Just as you are free to ignore my moans, obviously.)

OK?

This merits a better and longer answer than I should give in the thread. If you'd like to continue this at length, let's start a new one.

viewtopic.php?f=52&t=11463&p=246742#p246742

(please don't yourself, I am doing it and will post a link when I'm ready.)

[SteveUK]

Meanwhile , back in sovrun-land (TM) our heros have scored another great win !!1!!

[longdog]

Presumably the idiot involved would now have to issue proceedings against the court in court but is it even possible to sue a court or its employees? Wouldn't they have crown immunity?

That or a commercial lien of course

[notorial dissent]

That was a very short and succinct FOAD letter, which of our sovrunidjits was this again?

[rosy]

Burnaby said "growlers"

I'm glad to see that more courts and companies are sending FOAD letters rather than just round-filing the sovruns' nonsense. Ignoring them seems to encourage them.

[Gregg]

Burnaby, please pick up the red courtesy phone in the moderators lounge....red courtesy phone....thank you.

[notorial dissent]

Burnaby said "growlers"

I'm glad to see that more courts and companies are sending FOAD letters rather than just round-filing the sovruns' nonsense. Ignoring them seems to encourage them.

It helps to prove the case so the idjits can't claim ignorance when there is definitely a paper trail of them being told they were wrong, and were given proper information.