Just posted on Lonely Planet's sadly fallen Thorn Tree site, where I used the handle "TrevorGudsell" for reasons deep and irrelevant:
"Welcome back" - and goodbye. After 11 years, this is Trevor's last
post to TT. I joined in 2002 and for several years TT was my companion
as I planned my annual walkabouts. When I lost hundreds of posts during
a previous transformation, I shrugged and moved on. I was never into
building up a big post count. But in this latest transformation, TT
ditched 1200 posts, most of which were travel related questions or
answers, including one massive sequence of posts - my "Notes From ..."
series - containing first hand observations and information posted "from
the front" during over a year on the road across Asia 2010-11. They
contained much information that corrected the LP or could not be found
in the LP. I risked my life walking across Kabul to post updates to my
Afghanistan thread. I spent money on those posts that I could have used
to travel longer or do more sightseeing. I chose to post them on TT
rather than my personal blog because I thought the information would be
seen by more travellers here, I thought they would be safe here, and I
wanted to repay some of the advice I had harvested from TT over the
years. Well, you fooled me BBC. My blog is still there, dusty and
unfinished, but my "Notes From ..." threads are gone from here. BBC, I
grudge you the loss of those posts more than the loss of all the rest.
I met my wife through this forum - we were on converging paths and
eventually ran into each other in Nha Trang. Since the forum was at
that time our only point of contact we used PMs to arrange a meeting
without inviting the world. Despite that, most of my PMs received and
sent were travel related and they served a privacy purpose that Twitter
and Skype never can. Whoever decided PMs have no part on a site such as
TT needs to have their head examined.
The absurd notion of imposing a secret bad words nanny list - use one of
these words and we won't just delete the word, we'll block your post;
but we won't tell you what those words are. You'll know you used one
when your post fails to appear. Good luck salvaging it if you forgot to
copy and paste the content into a text file before attempting to post
it to TT. Sorry guys, but when I'm posting or answering a question
using a flaky connection from a public PC in some nasty hole, I don't
have time for that. It's exactly those moments when I possess the most
valuable information - current! first hand! - that I don't have time to
fool around making sure Aunt Ethel won't raise a blush if she reads it.
For those I've interacted with over the years - so long and thanks for the fun! For the faceless BBC suits - goodbye.
I waited to get my PMs. I hoped sanity might prevail by then. It hasn't. So goodbye.
Posted here just in case it gets Moderated out of existence on TT.
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