Hmm ... this is interesting. I just wrote a long reply in my word processor and was about to paste it in and now I see Blues edited the title -- that's a new capability! With the UBB software we used until recently it wasn't possible to edit a thread title. That changes things....
Well, I'll still paste in my post, most of it is still valid -- but the conclusion isn't.
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I don't know if anybody reads just the titles and makes their decisions without reading the whole thread. If anybody does they put their faith in some thieves and miss out on some good dealers, and not just from jokes. You might say if there is anybody who'd take the word of some stranger on the net without bothering to look at the replies he got deserves to be misinformed, but what about the dealers gaining or losing business without deserving to?
There are people who seriously argue forums like this should be abolished, trial by internet is always mistrial, consumers are not intelligent enough to read what other consumers have to say about a dealer and sort the wheat from the chaff and make an informed decision for themselves. Obviously, I disagree with that viewpoint....
Speaking for myself, I don't find the endlessly repeated joke amusing; I didn't even think it was funny the first time -- but this forum was well established before I got myself suckered into moderating it, and so was the joke. There's no question of going through all archives and deleting it wherever it appears, much less deleting every thread that comes to an opposite conclusion than the title. Every now and then someone objects to the joke and we have a discussion about it, and then it gets less common for a while ... but it always comes back again. I'm afraid we're stuck with it.
