Ski Club of GB joins North Korea

The Ski Club of GB has decided to close its chatroom to the outside world, obviously in a move inspired by isolationist state North Korea. The website claims the change was made today to preserve a fantastic resource that contains "extremely valuable information about resorts, ski schools, websites, equipment, accommodation, and a lot of general chit"

Although it seems the real reason was a poor user interface (based on Microsoft software) that let imposters register the same usernames as existing members and then post insulting messages. For a few days readers were greated to a 'sub-Matrix' spectacle of posters arguing with themselves.

It seems a bit unfair that many non-members contributed to the extremely valuable information as the Ski Club puts it and will now be deprived from fair use. Although to be honest, some of the valuable information was blatent cut and pasting from other websites, contravening copyrights.

Regarding the Ski Club claim that they could no longer afford to fund freeloaders. Surely they could have come up with a more imaginative way of funding the forum, say through advertising? Especially if their claim of 60,000 posts this winter is true.

Some of the posts that the Club objected to claimed that the typical member was a crusty Telegraph reading pensioner who wouldn't know one end of the Internet from the other. It remains to be seen wether a closed forum is sustainable and can remain a valuable source.

Ho hum, I'm sure j2ski members will join me in welcoming any Ski Club of GB refugees here.

Yep, all SCGB (non-member) refugees welcome here - no paperwork, jackets or counties accents required... (;^) ...only an interest in snow / winter sports.

Actually David, I thought your desription of the SCGB site interface as "lame-ass" was more appropriate... :p

powderhound wrote:
Actually David, I thought your desription of the SCGB site interface as "lame-ass" was more appropriate... :p

It was a bit poor to be honest but I didn't use the term here because I didn't want you to get into trouble with the SCGB politburo!

How can a club that is open to anyone be called isolationist?

Cliff wrote:How can a club that is open to anyone be called isolationist?

I think it is fair to say that to close what was previously an open discussion forum without any warning just because there are one or two people (not me I would like to point out) who questionned the SCGB's raison d'etre is isolationist.

I particuarly didn't appreciate the 'party line' that they'd gathered enough information from outsiders and now wished to commercialise this and didn't need these 'outsiders' contributing to their nice forum anymore.

Or maybe you didn't bother reading past the first sentence of my original post and think about any of the more serious points?

There does seem to be a raging issue over the SCGB's right to deny access to non-member's input into the fora. May be a question of copyright involved. Any lawyers out there? Serve the self serving bunch of G & T swilling lot of them right if they've exposed themselves to a potential legal action. Har de Har Har!

Certainly an ill-thought move, that will either be a catalyst for change or a nail in the coffin...

I'm a ski club uk refugee. I think it's a great shame they closed their forum (without notice) i used to spend many hours on their forums and found it was an excellent source of information and opinions. I shall miss that site but on the other side of the coin, i've found this site :D