Thanks again, Callaway. Those were some important and relevant links.
I think WolFish should join us and give his side of the story. I hope he does.
I have always appreciated the opinion of the Abominable SnoCone:
My take on it...
all communities need their seedy bars, even the aspie community. But it doesn't make sense for the seedy bar to be right next to the glitzy respectable corporate office, even if half the employees go right to the seedy bar after work. It would make the corporate office look bad, give a bad first impression. So while I will miss Intensity I can understand the decision. I am sure someone will start a new Intensity-type site elsewhere and I look forward to letting loose again when it starts up
Had I to do it all over again I probably would, except not so many hands in the pot and Intensity on a separate server. And anyone but me to herd the cats. I only work well with the kind that have real fur and claws.
Neurolands was meant as a site where people could network for employment purposes. It was inspired by the failed efforts of another asper to do the same thing. Bob encouraged us to do it, but when the site went up he began encouraging people who were dissatisfied with WP to come there. All it took was one bad WP drama and the place was flooded with refugees.
Silly us, we tried to accommodate them. We cannot live in the real world so we had a marvelous idea. Create a city online. Divert people away from Nlands into places (suburbs=subforums) where they could be refugees or whatever they wanted. We asked for ideas. Intensity was one of them. Gestalt was another. Their leaders were given forums linked to Nlands.
Vivi objected to the way Intensity was being run. There were several attempts to try to divert her attention - she was given Ramoth Harbor and also set up as advisor to Gestalt. She ranted to Nman about how harmful Intensity was, how badly people there were treating women. Nman went and looked and liked what he saw so he refused to take it down - and yes, she did ask. Somewhere (because gmail deletes nothing) we have the archive of that.
Shortly after he refused, the site broke. And meanwhile, our techie, having had a misfortunate meeting with one of the other leaders of Nlands (there were 5), left. He reappeared long enough to express dismay at the turn of events (by then Bob was railing at Nman everywhere in public) and then he left for good. He refused to help. That left Nman, who was by then very ill, trying to fix the forum and keep his job which was being threatened by his supervisor who could be described as a bully. Nlands and Intensity were both broken. Gestalt, Ramoth Harbor, and another site (Sockpuppet Theater?) were unaffected. Nlands had a corrupted database entry. The same fix applied to Intensity fixed only part of the problem.
Bob, after much abusive language and disclosing of information previously agreed upon to be private, left to create this forum (I-squared). The Gestalt owner declared that Nman was trying to control her site because he asked her to display the Nlands logo along with her own (the subplot there was that she felt he was ignoring her advances, which, since they were personal and not of business nature, he did). She left after doing the same sort of thing that Bob did though on a smaller scale. She accused Nman of being controlling, etc.
Meanwhile, there were only two people left to run Nlands. Nman was literally sick and tired, so Wolf put on his construction helmet and did what he could. Vivi spent a lot of time messing with Nlands by doing heavily sexual flirting in inappropriate threads with one of the few people who managed to get himself banned from I2. He was stalking Shima, another leader of Nlands. A lot of people left. Some went to other places, some went back to WP and some came here.
Intensity was meant as a place where people could learn to stand up for themselves, to fight at least the verbal battle. The history of its start is on Nlands in one of the forums there.
The bottom line is that there were too many cooks, including one who stuck her head in the window and tried to get the whole stew thrown out.
Our mistake was in trying to use that as a diversion while we tried to fix something that was broken beyond our ability to fix it. We trusted no one to help (part of the same mistake). That meant it was about a year and a half before I realized how the database had been sabotaged. Someone had broken it; it wasn't us, but there was no one around to tell. Everyone was here by then.
There is a lot more to the story but I can't do it right now. Maybe later you can ask me questions. One of the reasons I don't come here a lot is that without Jack/Nman hat I have a hard time figuring out what to say. I'm seriously autistic.
Pyraxis is welcome to speak for me. She might be idealistic, opinionated and pugilistic, but she's intelligent and she doesn't lie. And even if it takes her a few days or a few weeks, she can ken a lot of words.
I on the other hand, now have a severe headache and will have to kill countless zombies and innocent plants until the painkillers kick in.