• Please use real names.

    Greetings to all who have registered to OPF and those guests taking a look around. Please use real names. Registrations with fictitious names will not be processed. REAL NAMES ONLY will be processed

    Firstname Lastname

    Register

    We are a courteous and supportive community. No need to hide behind an alia. If you have a genuine need for privacy/secrecy then let me know!
  • Welcome to the new site. Here's a thread about the update where you can post your feedback, ask questions or spot those nasty bugs!

Administrative: Dismissive Posts Not Allowed!

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
We cannot promise you that all photographs here are worthy. But you know that. In posting we trust that folk who recognize something interesting and valuable will spread the word. However, the opposite does no one any good!

I've had to spend time in the past week dealing with wounds created by extremely dismissive comments. Even such, when profoundly witty, have no place here. These comments will be promptly removed. Let me know if you experience anything that's grossly disrespectful.

We all have good qualities and some degree of worth. Everyone has their own individual needs, values and aspirations, but we can share our different ideas and reactions, (positive and negative) to pictures here.

Invest time in those pictures that earn and deserve your appreciation. If one can't offer balanced comment, then send it privately. Ignore what seems trash to you. Fate will deal with those images, anyway.

We won't tolerate trolls insulting folk just for their own perverse fun.

Thanks for helping each of us on our individual journeys.

Asher

Comments are welcome, but posts relating to any slightest manner to a specific incident will be deleted to protect all concerned.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Now I really wonder why you feel the need to state that.

Jerome,

Let me address this valid question to the entire readership of OPF.

I have spent a week trying to reassure folk who were recently insulted, even when the offending remarks were deleted before a lot of folk could see them. The person(s) claimed, as a defense, that he/she has no sense of empathy for anyone else and essentially enjoys the freedom to poke fun or do as they wish without reference to other people's feelings. I'm trying to help them work within the guidelines of this place as a community and not as some anonymous, unaccountable WWW bulletin board! The people involved have resolved to all be helpful to each other and they actually agree to take the best from each other and so everything is fine right for now. :) Their kindness and openness to an outsider for reconciliation is something they can be proud of and for which I'm so grateful. I hope the commitments made will be respected.

Still, it has been a costly diversion from my own work and I resent that unneeded waste of tight resources. So it's a line I want to draw to remind the very few folk who get "kicks" from diminishing others have fair warning and also to let everyone else know we value and respect their work. Not all work is good or worth our attention - because of its quality or our diverse tastes. However, we need to send any purely negative &/ mean-spirited remarks privately and the rest should be balanced, exactly as most folk here do anyway.

Those negative comments could actually be the most valuable, vital and honest.

However, when put out in public, likely as not, no benefit is gained as the recipient will tend to close up and be defensive and hurt. So purely negative analytic, de-construction is only likely to help the recipient, (if at all), on a one to one basis. Only then, where the original poster/writer/photographer can rethink things in private, are the conditions right for being received in a beneficial manner............ and that's why we have PMs!

Frankly it's very time consuming and not something I like to do, but when things get out of hand, with rudeness or crudeness, we have to intervene. We can't have good people being chased away by purely self-serving behavior. So I did intervene and very definitively.

I do not see the point of having a public ongoing debate about this now that I've provided sufficient of the facts of the matter. Needless to say, we are not running the critique section of the New York Times, where it seems to be a public duty to also be destructive. Also we are not trying to guide folk into which photography is worth collecting. That's not our mission. We're just passionate about photography-sharing in a congenial atmosphere. It's the latter that's being protected.

Any further questions please provide in a PM.

...and Jerome, thanks as always for your key position and contributions. Your efforts are always appreciated.

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Is that a ' case dismissed ' :)

Hopefully, LOL! But in truth, Fahim, it's difficult for folk to concede without feeling that they are "loosing my right of "freedom of expression" or to be "honest". I hate censorship too! Thank goodness we only have 1-4 people a year who cause others to demand that they be "dealt with". Spammers get booted out without discussion. The others get courteous pleas, and then warnings and offers to mediate. There have been just few occasions where we cannot, in private, bring folks together amicably. But then after that, the rare offender might feel too constrained in their own needs to exercise their wit and insights without being destructive. Not being able to act out their impulses, as before, they might brood and then give in or else slink off, anyway! Over the years most have settled in but some just can't hold back. They can be forgiven only scant few times! It's like a need for some troubled man to expose himself in a down-escalator in a major department store. In a party, hey, his excuse is that he was drunk! However, as a habitual repeat performance, it frightens the shoppers!

Asher
 
Top