Welcome back to Thorn Tree
Replies: 1,407 - Last Post: Mar 22, 2013 7:37 AM Last Post By: Zabba
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585
Please put the South America branch back up. I relied solely on communication with other travelers to plan my 5 month trip. Here now and it would be great to get some of my specific questions answered. Timing for this revamp could not have been timed more poorly. So many people travel over holiday season. This has seriously lessened my opinion of LP.586
How soon is the Africa branch going to return? I am another one with some important information that was on the branch for a trip in 3 weeks.587
RE# 582 , QUOTE "But I don't think that's a relevant factor in The Great Thorn Tree Meltdown of 2012. "No , in fact if you were worried about the bottom line you wouldn't pre-moderate as that makes the forum more expensive and time consuming to run and may make it less popular.
RE# 583 QUOTE - "First, TT was a mess well before BBC got involved"
You are being a bit harsh there any forum is messy to an extent but there did not seem to be so much complaint about TT from the users in those times. TT did what it was supposed to do .
QUOTE - "Don't even tell me this place is a treasure-trove of nuggets of wisdom buried in decade-old posts. It's mostly a bunch of crap clogging up the servers and wasting band width. "
Well no one suggested that . Whats in the archive is a mixture of good , entertaining and interesting to dross with all shades in between . And the reality of modern servers is they can hold such vast amounts of data that bandwidth and running out of space is not such an issue anymore.
QUOTE - "How long is it taking for posts to post? Are they ALL being moderated before "publication?" "
Yes , and not only that if they have any keywords that may imply they may be off topic they get automatically rejected.
RE# 557 -QUOTE - "I instinctively distrust any poster with more than a few thousand posts"
A post stands on its own merits . I instinctively distrust posters who use different names.
588
587- The LP Burma book is not nearly useless, in fact, you can use the 2006 and it would be just fine, just multiply lodging by 2 or 3...Burma is so stuck in the past you really will be astonished when you get there. Unless you plan to go well off the beaten path (permits needed) you easily figure out Yangon, Bagan, Inle, Kalaw, Mandalay on your own and a book, I did in 2007.BTW- The SE Asia TT is back up, and Montyman and Martin are both active again...
590
When do we get South America back?591
On a side note, please can you get rid of "country not specified" and get new users to specify the country they're from, it is a considerable help when tailoring an answer to them.Examples:- Australians are used to manual gearboxed cars, Americans tend not to be. Lots of Asian based questioners seem to think you can do London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Zurich and Rome in 10 days whilst European tourists based know that you can't.
etc etc.
594
What about the Edit button?I though it was a bit unfair editing a post after several hours of posting it as yo could change it to completely different context even if other members had posted afterwards. But I think there should be a small time window for editing a post after originally posted. I often write a post and hit "Post Message" button just to find out I had made terrible spelling or typing errors or forgot to add some info or link or whatever.
596
It's a great shame the community here has been disbanded after so many years and I feel a lot of sympathy for people who had relied on LP to store their archives of messages and information. Some notice would have been nice, though it looks as if LP went into emergency lock-down mode so perhaps that's not realistic.However...
YC did suffer from endless trolling by characters who would get banned, register a new handle, get banned again in an endless loop. Clearly the TT does reflect on LP and the BBC and it's just as obvious that a forum needs moderation to keep the worst illegal and libellous stuff away. Trolls and Spammers make that task far more labour intensive and hence expensive. Looks like whoever pulls the strings here did a cost/benefit analysis and made some rational decisions.
If someone stops running a free party coz some of the guests couldn't behave, don't blame the former host, blame the vandals. We lost the forums that are gone and whatever was associated with them because a few kids' sense of entitlement led them to believe they were exempt from the rules here.
597
Since TT Africa is not up, and I really would like some uptodate visa info does anyone know where the usually Africa posters have moved to? Is there a facebook group or have they simply disbanded?599
@iamontheroad#601:I am not a "usual" Africa poster, but I also need more information about my trip to Ethiopia that starts on Saturday. Although I have read here about negative experience with TripAdvisor I am happy with the forum there as it contains quite a lot of details. Maybe it can be helpful for you as well.
