I dunno if you ever venture over to the dark side of the forum but we’ve been getting a LOT of threads from kids in their teens lately. It’s pretty tiresome, and I doubt we ever actually convince them not to use.
I was thinking a sticky we could direct them to might be of use; a collection of studies about the effect on your endocrine system (dt79’s posted some good ones, cycobushmaster’s really good for it too, and of course KSMan’s pretty solid on that front as well).
We could direct them to that, and if they still want to use help we’d them out. I mean if they’re going to do it anyway I suppose we might as well try and make it safer.
We can’t deal with this flood of ignorance and stupidity. We can wet nurse these kids but it never stops. Meanwhile the forum has become quite useless for the members it is meant to serve. We almost need a preschool forum that we can banish them too. I don’t know quite how to restrict them.
Yes stickies would be helpful but do not seem to be fashionable at T-nation at this time. The result is more like a chat room instead of a library of collected reference material [because the stickies are gone]. To provide guidance to the new kids, we have to type in the same shit over and over again when some might be intelligent enough to read stickies if they are visible. Failing that one can simply type “read the stickies”. Stickies are needed so we do not have to repeat our selves all of the time, and may have burned out trying to do the right thing.
T-nation has some great material and the search engines lead many to the forums hear. That is driven by the strength of the threads. But now we have may threads by the kids that are simply stupid. We are a victim of our own success.
New kids are not going to find the links I put in the 2nd post of the "About …] sticky by them selves. So we need to type this into every new guys post:
Please follow and read these links in the 2nd post of the 1st forum topic:
yada yada yada
more yada
And some simply cannot understand what those words mean.
it’s been awhile since we saw a new sticky in any forum.
I think there is better information available today than when the first stickies showed up in this section. I actually don’t really direct anyone to the stickies here anymore.
That being said, KSman nailed it. You can’t fix stupid. I think most of the really dumb posts we see (which are plentiful) would still be showing up.
You know what would make a lot of sense? And KSman sort of alluded to this. We have a beginner forum in the ‘regular’/bodybuilding section of the site. It would really make a lot of sense to divide the pharma section in half. A beginner section and an advanced one. I don’t really think this will happen, but man would it be useful. I think it would actually elicit some better conversations amongst some of the vets here. I know I, for one, don’t even ask advice anymore, but I might throw some more higher level topics out there if there was a better place for it.