Wow, I checked that CT thread just a couple of days ago and it seems just like the ol’ tiresome back & forth. Did not realize it went to the breaking point where BG got banned. My opinion is that’s a big mistake. It polarizes the situation and forces some people to choose sides, and, just as friends get divided up in a messy breakup, it never works out the way you had imagined it to be.
1) Ten creates Chiptalk and it's awesome
2) Ten changes what made Chiptalk great by trying to make the great things a paid feature
3) People don't like having to pay for what was once free
4) The site goes down repeatedly and is dog-ass slow for the people that did pay for it (myself included, $200 lifetime membership)
5) People flock to another site that has a lot of the things for free that Chiptalk had when it was awesome
6) Ten gets butthurt that people are bitter about spending money on an internet forum (which is virtually unheard of, btw) and having the service suck
7) Ten starts "defending his family"
A lot of good points made here. CT started something great. It bonded the “special interest” groups out of 2+2 and homepokertourney.com and gave us a voice, which also fostered new interest for new poker chip lovers. CT was what got me into this hobby. It was great for a while, and then one day I find myself really turned off when certain features like posting on the classifieds required “credits” that I have to pay for. Then I find out I can pay to have special privileges which I’ve never heard of from an internet forum. Then, one day all my PMs got blown out due to a site issue, and things like email notifications stopped working for me which to this day was not fixed (explanation was just “it affected some people but not all.” Great.)
Then due to life/work I stopped posting for a while, and came back to find that the site did not improve in my absence. I tried getting back into CT, but I just couldn’t. Not a lot of new threads, and I find the organization difficult to navigate through. I messaged some people, a few reply, but most don’t. I think they left the site too.
I discovered PCF sometime in 2014 but wasn’t all that into it. I didn’t understand why it existed. By chance, Tommy was buying some stuff from me on
eBay and suggested I join PCF. I was hesitant. But later I did, and I was really glad I did. PCF reminds me of the early days of CT when there was rising enthusiasm for the hobby, not the fading/worn out/jaded/negative energy that I get from CT nowadays. The most exciting thing I saw there in 2015 was probably the John Boy saga, and that’s pretty sad.
At this point I’m still reserving final judgment and not saying that I love one site more than the other, but the way to win people back is certainly not through banning them for speaking out. Ten did not win any points with me with that action (not that I particularly matter anyway). The way to win people back is by fostering a good environment which will then promote good content.
Just my two cents.
