Two brief thoughts

Couldn’t agree with this more. Our comments are read by many more than just the active members here. I always try and ask myself before I comment on something, “is this contributing to Tolkien collecting at all” before I hit publish. I would encourage everyone here to ask yourself the same.

Still, it's a public service to post information to help book buyers avoid disappointment.

I wish I remembered just when it was that I first learned about Smyth-sewn books vs. glue. The article might have been in the New York Times Book Review, and I am virtually certain that, wherever it was, the article was published in the 1970s, probably around 1974-1978.

This article, wherever and whenever it appeared, was a real eye-opener for me, so I told my best friend about this intriguing difference and why it was important. It was momentous, comparable to the occasion when I introduced him to fanzines several years earlier. Thereafter, both of us would examine books closely to see if those excellent "stitches" were there or not and talk about this sort of thing.

Dale Nelson wrote:

Still, it's a public service to post information to help book buyers avoid disappointment.

I wish I remembered just when it was that I first learned about Smyth-sewn books vs. glue. The article might have been in the New York Times Book Review, and I am virtually certain that, wherever it was, the article was published in the 1970s, probably around 1974-1978.

This article, wherever and whenever it appeared, was a real eye-opener for me, so I told my best friend about this intriguing difference and why it was important. It was momentous, comparable to the occasion when I introduced him to fanzines several years earlier. Thereafter, both of us would examine books closely to see if those excellent "stitches" were there or not and talk about this sort of thing.

That's an excellent example of some guidance that you got, that helped you learn more about book collecting and how to spot differences in quality. If that book review had just said something like "this binding quality isn't great", you might have avoided buying it, but not learn why and how to spot quality elsewhere. They added information about binding styles to their review and that helped you and your friend well beyond that one book - and that's what I would like to encourage in people's feedback and commentary here as well.

What I seem to remember from the NYTBR was not even a review of one book in particular, but an account of a bad trend in publishing. It unforgettably made me alert to the issue of binding ever after. When I write reviews, I often like to say something about the binding, especially if it is better than usual, as has often been the case with Kent State UP books. (They really let us down with Peter Grybauskas's A Sense of Tales Untold as compared with another recent book, McBride's Tolkien's Cosmology. McBride's had sewn signatures and was bound in buckram, while Grybauskas's was glued like a paperback except it had boards covered with some kind of illustrated fabric. The prices were the same. "Shrinkflation" of quality in a year and a half.

[Admin: this post was moderated for personal attacks, but has been restored]

There is an uncomfortable melding (in terms of treatment & approach) of community forum content (i.e. the posts of members) and guide content proper (i.e. content curated & presented by the site owners/moderators). These are not the same content & I do not believe you should be treating them as such. Other sites with community forums don't seem to have the same problems separating these two content streams. Conflating the two leads to some of the problems you have had & are continuing to see.

There has been, & continues to be, repeated attempts to control, silence, and otherwise influence the content posted by forum users that isn't helpful. There are lines that any community forum has to draw, of course; but when you personally (Urulókë) start saying you are going to "ban" the use of the term toilet paper, then this site (& you) lose all credibility. A community forum does not need this kind of heavy-handed finger-pointing post moderating. If you don't agree with people, maybe it would be better if you didn't as a moderator say anything. Moderators are not here to police opinion. You are increasingly doing this.

You should reserve this kind of control, naturally, to the wider guide content; the more curated, long-view, article-style content that I think you greatly desire for those other parts of TCG. It's a melting-pot right now though, and the delineation (certainly visually) isn't always clear (to me). I think you also are struggling to see the difference, as is self-evident in some of the issues covered above.

AndyBirdUK's stamp posts are the perfect example of content (created by users) that you should be elevating up (with consent) to guide content proper i.e. that shouldn't be buried away within the forum for future users to have to find by accident. Don't bemoan community discussion not always rising to this level though; this is, I think, an unrealistic expectation of general posting.

To be clear: I've made all these points to you before. It should be made known to anyone else reading this, that myself (& Stu) stepped back from our moderator roles because we felt (amongst other things) constrained within the community forum context in what we could & couldn't say i.e. the fine balance between presentation of personal vs. moderator opinion/content. Since most of the conflict rested on opinions of collecting ideology generally, criticism of HarperCollins, and site direction—it's obviously deeply annoying, after having stepped back down to being a regular Joe poster, to continue to see my (& other's) largely objective criticism, of the likes of product quality, continually challenged by moderators with nonsensical counter-argument, borderline partisan defence of the indefensible (e.g. publishers), and the like.

I think we all appreciate that you'd like friendly discourse & a lighter tone. But there is, at present, a wider economic backdrop (I think) to some the current discourse that seems to have passed you (& others) by. A community that lauds poor quality products, that normalises spending thousands of $/£ regularly on items (or implies this is the expectation of one who collects by continually sighting such sales/auctions sans context)— is neither (to me) inclusive to people of low economic means or particularly welcoming to people who find the mercenary language of the community slightly distasteful. If you want a broader church, we all might want to be a little more mindful of some of these things.

Can I also suggest that if you (& other moderators) are attempting to further develop relationships (or foster friendly interactions for favourable access) with Tolkien's publisher(s) (& artists etc)—that you will inevitably lose objectivity in criticism of said organisations/people. This seems pretty self-evident. If you want constructive criticism in the community forum, then let other people speak. Stop quoting invented TCG "policy". Take good content & elevate it; leave poor content alone. Encourage those, who post eloquently at length in research fashion, to write articles; which, again, you can elevate from the humdrum of community chatter. Recognise that your own "news" posting is not quality content. While it's important to collect contemporary publishing information (for archiving) this copy+paste content should be viewed as the starting point for community discussion & debate, not the end.

And probably dissuade yourself of the notion that any community forum's "post archive" is a particularly useful or easy place to search for information in the future. It's not. Use the main TCG guide to preserve what you think is important. Community forums are what they are, many voices, many opinions. Maybe another idea would be to consider a separate but closely aligned TCG blog to gather, collate, & distil your own thoughts & opinions that you see playing out in the community forum. The current approach of seeking to control community discussion (which is absolutely what you are doing) is not a route, in my opinion, you should continue to pursue.

I completely agree with Khamûl. No need to “silence” people’s opinions, however harsh they may be, as long as it doesn’t get personally insulting (which has never happened here, I think, as most of the regular posters here know each other and express their feelings as responsible adults). This is (well, in part) a discussion forum of people with different voices, all serious and passionate about collecting, so of course things get heated and emotional sometimes. Maybe it is indeed a good idea to (further) visually separate the discussion forum from the actual guide-content, with different levels of moderation.

[Admin - this post was removed for personal attacks, but has been restored]

Deleting my post is totally unjustified & petty. There was no personal attack in my post. Just more opinion that someone doesn't want to hear/read. Shameful behaviour.

You couldn't agree more, but delete my posts? You've literally silenced me.