The Blimp company has not been perfect, and there are definitely some things it needs to improve on, but I do believe that they are working their hearts out and at the end of the day they have managed to get a Ron Paul Blimp in the air, an awe-inspiring achievement that has brought great dividends to our candidate's campaign.
It seems like there is a good deal of grassroots energy and initiative that is trying positively to help the Blimp team, but the forum is pretty heavily infested with trolls who do everything possible to derail or interfere with the Blimp's success. Some of them are probably working for other campaigns, and some of them are just those kind of people, but whatever their motive, they're constantly getting in the way of anyone who starts a thread trying to organize and strategize effectively to support the Blimp. They inject argument into fundraising threads, they bury productive threads, they post the same questions over and over, and when an issue gets addressed they just latch on to a new one. It's pretty clear that there are two camps here - those that are often frustrated with the Blimp team's effectiveness but really do want to move the project forward, and those who really want to shut it down or move it backward. For whatever reason, the moderators don't seem to be on top of controlling the trolls to the level needed to allow enough productive motion.
For those of us who have chosen to support the Blimp and want to be able to get things done and influence the project positively, I'm going to pose a question: should we just set up a new dedicated Blimp forum somewhere else (on a different server) and moderate it more heavily? I think too much effort (both on the part of the Blimp team and on the part of the real motivated grassroots blimp supporters) goes into dealing with the constant friction of the derailers - if we're going to fly the Blimp to victory, we're going to need to get rid of that drag somehow. Setting up a separate blimp forum outside this site has definite downsides - it splits the grassroots, limits crossover eye traffic, etc - but it would get us past the friction so we could get more done. It might be worth it. What do you think?
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