axolotl

I had no idea that CGOAB had forums until somebody posted something here about them a year or so ago. I have never posted anything on CGOAB, nor have I ever registered on that site. After reading some of the CGOAB forum thread that you linked to, I'm glad I had been unaware of the forums there. That thread is a cesspool. In addition to the posts you cited, posts #28 & #44 would have been enough to make me never want to go there again. It's conspiracy theory nonsense. Post #44 has many links to echo chamber crapola which I suspect the site owner spends a lot of his time on.

I read the post (actually a rant) that the CGOAB site owner posted here in reply to you that he has since removed. He inadvertently did a good job confirming what you had written in your post here. With what I know now, I would never post a trip report on CGOAB, and if I had, I'd remove it.

indyfabz

The P&R forum is open again. Just sayin’.

unterhausen

I never thought the CGOAB forums were all that useful. I have spent more time than I like to think about reading the journals. We don't need to discuss Neil or his politics here, in fact it's against multiple forum rules.
I doubt you would have any problems just posting a journal there.

OneGearIsEnough

A different perspective about possible problems posting journals on CGoaB: I once had several journals published on the site. For various reasons, but mostly because I had become uncomfortable with the site owner's angry, off-putting rants, I "unpublished" them (set them to private). (This was in mid-2016, a year before things really took a turn toward the weird on the site.) I planned to later download them. Within hours the owner emailed me, demanding to know if I was leaving the site. He made it clear that he had carefully tracked everything I'd been doing on the site the previous few days, including clicking "disagree" on something he'd posted . He gave me a day to download my journals before deleting my account, and referred to me as a "hostile actor". This all happened while I was in the middle of a tour, in Wyoming. I had to scramble to download everything using a motel's wifi.

Based on that experience, I would not recommend that anyone entrust the site with their journals.

John N

I did not get to see what Neil posted before it was deleted by Neil/BF/the OP/?? so can''t comment on that. However, regarding your post, I somewhat disagree. Let me give you a bit of history.

I have been touring for about 45 years and have easily 75k plus miles of loaded touring around North America and Europe. While I don't know everything of course, I do know a lot due to my experience. In order to "pay back" to the touring community, I am actively involved in Forums, mainly on ACA (which is the most civil of the Forums) and previously CGOAB but not so much here because BF already has a lot of experienced posters.

To get to your quote, I actually think about 10-15 years ago, CGOAB had the best Forums by far. It had posts from a wide international audience, interesting topics from even round-world-tourists who really knew a lot, dozens of new threads per day, etc. Occasionally, Neil would rant and the community as a whole would let it go. Anyway, since about 2016 or so, CGOAB has steadily had less and less posts to the point now there are only a couple per day. And many are not timely, i.e. a large percentage of the posts are about historical information (biking in the 1800s). While that is fine and dandy, to me it is not that relevant to today's touring. So CGOAB Forums were relevant but are no longer, IMO

In several cases when there was a dust-up on CGAOB, i.e. the one Neil referenced above, I personally believed Neil did not do that much wrong other than get too emotional about it. But he is an emotional guy. But where Neil and I differ is that I very strongly believe in the right to free speech even if you say nasty cruel things about me. As I have said, it IS his website so he can do what he wishes and he mostly does, for better or worse. I feel the issue is Neil can not separate his personal beliefs from the CGOAB community beliefs. Sure, to him they well may be one and the same. But I would guess that for the vast majority of the users of CGOAB (or BF, ACA, etc.), they don't look at CGOAB as going into his house and saying these things with him personally standing there and knowing where he stands. They just go to CGOAB to get info, post, or to give back and Neil happens to be the owner and participant.

IMO, an admin of a publicly accessible website/Forums needs to be much more Free Speech, not My Speech, oriented so long as the post is not truly threatening or illegal. And better yet, an Admin needs to be less directly involved with the Forums unless absolutely (by COMMUNITY standards) required. There is every flavor of society on this BF forum and some of the posts I strongly disagree with. If I disagree, I usually blow them off because I seriously doubt I will change their mind. On occasion I might respond with a factual response, much like what I did above. Could you imagine if the Admin of BF let their personal bias come into play here and close of topics immediately or rant about their personal beliefs or banned people because they kept pushing their point of view? It would be like CGOAB.

If my posts contain a negative tone, I try to give a balance view (like what I did in the previous post where I said I do not hate Neil and tried to show some things positive about him or CGOAB). While I did not see his post that was deleted, I would guess that Neil thinks I hate him and his beliefs which is sort of weird since he knows we share a lot of the same beliefs, to a certain extent. I am a strong conservative (not necessarily Republican), love animals, dislike cruelty in almost all forms, while I don't own guns I am a supporter of the 2nd Amendment, I think the cancel culture has gone WAY too far in their methods to get their point across. etc. One big difference between us is that I am a strong Christian and his faith is in the Spaghetti Monster (search CGOAB for info). Other than that, we hold similar beliefs though his may be stronger and/or maybe "misguided" beliefs such as the election results. But I do not hate him. I just don't want to put up with his BS any more and when I got banned for agreeing to the post regarding the part about too much politics, that was the last straw.

My previous post above was to answer the person's inquiry as to what it takes to raise the ire of Neil, not to dump on Neil. But I couldn't just say I got banned without giving the background, which includes Neil and his beliefs and thus CGOAB's website beliefs. Everything I said was factual.

Finally, while I know you do not think Neil or his politics should be discussed here, to me it is relevant to the OP's question since Neil and his belief's ARE the same as CGOAB (a journal hosting site) and if someone is posting a journal on a website, they may want to know what is going on in the background. So basically, I agree with you in parts and disagree with you in parts.

Anyway, best to all and may you have Tailwinds in your tours, John

unterhausen

I think we better close this for now while the mod staff reviews. I'm sorry to hear people have had problems with cgoab, I really have derived a lot of enjoyment from people's journals.