Response to Croupier's Post

[VPJunkie]

Croup, on a personal level it's very disappointing that you've chosen to believe the propoganda that's been published about us, without ever asking me what was going on here. It's also very disappointing given the fact that I've protected you and taken the blame for some of your actions all these months.

- It was you that called for Dean's expulsion and locked him out, yet you've allowed me to publicly take the blame for that for months, allowing Dean to get away with his lies.

- When Arkyt accused me of hogging the PR from our new website a year ago, it was the first I even knew of the new website. You and Dean had changed it without telling me, yet you never told anyone that. You allowed him to blame me for it and neither of you ever stood up like men and accepted the responsibility for it.

- Two different times you took the board offline because you couldn't deal with the heated issues at the moment.

- When I was trying to make GPWA self-sufficient in the summer of 2002 by getting us on our own server and setting up Links Manager (and paying for it out of my own pocket), you talked me out of it for months, until DT took the site down. There are countless more incidents of my taking the heat for decisions YOU made. Only you and I know what those are, but suffice it to say I'm very disappointed in the one person I trusted enough to protect.

As to your version of how you came to GPWA.....

Shortly after Cindy started the GPWA on a free ezBoard it came to my knowledge. I had started a similar forum about 2 weeks earlier and after we discussed the situation we decided that it would be best to have a united front, therefore I closed down my ezBoard forum and joined with the GPWA.

Shortly after joining I accepted the admin role at the GPWA.

I had posted at WOL in April of 2001, asking if there were any webmaster associations - I'm sure the post is still there. After no response for 2 weeks, on May 5th, 2001, I set up GPWA on an EZBoard and made the first announcement of it at WOL. A few days later you wrote me a letter telling me I should shut down GPWA because you already had an association, but it was by invitation only. (I even remember who your members were, and they weren't all portal owners.) I replied to you that my association was democratic, and let's just see which one succeeded.

Approximately 3-4 weeks later you wrote me telling me you were closing yours down, and asked if you could join mine. I was delighted to have you join. A few weeks after that, I made you an admin at the board because I trusted you so much; and in public, I referred to you as my partner as an honorary term. Dean came in a few weeks later and built the website as a surprise for us. However, maintenance on that was extremely limited, and I'm the one that managed the links pages which quickly grew to a 4-5 hour a month job.

Another problem was money. Whenever money is factored into a system which has been grew solely by the group effort then problems are going to occur.

I left the GPWA shortly after this because of personal & business reasons.

At the time you resigned, there was no money being taken in, so this was not a factor. You resigned because of what Dean and DT did to betray you and the members. You posted so, and everyone that was here at the time knows that, so to misrepresent it here is not right.

You knew, coming into GPWA, that you wanted nothing to do with the management of it. We've made mistakes - everyone does - but we're still here. It's very easy to sit back and criticize when one has never even made the effort to do themselves what they're so critical of.

We'll be watching. Good luck.

[croupier]

I'll just post one reply here then I think that should be enough, I don't want to start another personal and public fight.

It was you that called for Dean's expulsion and locked him out, yet you've allowed me to publicly take the blame for that for months, allowing Dean to get away with his lies.

I've never hidden the fact that I called for his expulsion, I put the case towards the VP team and they called for him to be locked out. In fact, he was locked out by a member of the VP team before he had chance to read the last few replies and put his final statement forward and it was me who requested he be let back in. I let him in, waited for him to complete his final statement, and then locked him out as per the decision of the VP team.

To tell you the truth, when these posts start turning into personal battles I generally switch off - I either don't read them or skim to see if there's really anything worthwhile. I don't think I've ever seen Dean say it was you who locked him out or called for the expulsion.

When Arkyt accused me of hogging the PR from our new website a year ago, it was the first I even knew of the new website. You and Dean had changed it without telling me, yet you never told anyone that. You allowed him to blame me for it and neither of you ever stood up like men and accepted the responsibility for it.

Arkyt didn't accuse or blame you for it, he pointed out that an elite few shouldn't be benefiting in this way, and I was the first to post the reasons for the change. I also told you on MSNM about the changes but you always seem to forget that chat.

Two different times you took the board offline because you couldn't deal with the heated issues at the moment

Actually, I only remember one time but you may be right. The time I remember is when I was hosting the site/forum on my server which was actually part of a friends server which hosted a multi-million page/month site. We got threats about taking us offline which meant that a friend who had no connection with the GPWA would have his business seriously hurt for no reason of his own.

Well, I couldn't allow that to happen to a friend so I informed the membership that the site would be going down and would be up ASAP. I had many kind offers for hosting from the membership and we had the site back up in a very short time.


To tell you the truth, I can't be bothered going over the rest of the post. You make individual points which I could put my perspective on but then you would simply add your further perspective and we'd get nowhere.

What this boils down to is the overall actions taken by you in regard to the GPWA. You claim it as your own when it was a group effort which would have got nowhere without the belief that it was group owned.

Your claim of ownership and statement that 95% of work was done by yourself is a slap in the face to every member who has ever contributed to the GPWA.

When I registered GPWA.ORG did this mean that I owned it at that point in time? While I hosted the site/forum and held the registration to GPWA.ORG did this mean it was totally in my control? After I transferred GPWA.ORG to you and held the domain GPWA.ORG with a mirror of the dB did this mean we had a 50/50 partnership in the ownership of the association?

I call upon anyone who wants to contribute to a true association that is group owned to email me at craig@croupier.org