MartialWay.com's Temp Admin Disses McDojo's!

**Phrost** · Posted On: 7/03/2002 4:18pm

First off, I just want to say that McDojo's is totally cool with MW. It's the best site on the net for information on Martial Arts in general and its staff is top notch...

...except this new guy. Arashi (which is Japanese for "uncomfortable skin condition") is the new guy filling in for PJH while he's on vacation.

Anyway, I'm a regular over there and dropped in after about a 3-4 day lapse to find a couple of their posters slamming me, and our beloved site.

After responding to them in my fashion (which was remarkably low in profanity for some reason), A-rashy apparently decided that the threads had then become nothing but pointless flames. Good work, Watson, maybe next time you'll be able to recognize that slandering someone is pretty much the same thing.

So, he/she/it deletes the "offending" threads, having nuked my responses to such statements as "Phrost is a fraud", "McDojo's is full of crap" , and many other jewels. Instead of making a big deal about it, I simply start another thread that basically said that McDojos is 100% user-based content, and if someone didn't like a viewpoint expressed here, they were encouraged to submit their own article/link/download/picture/video/whatever to represent it.

Well, Rashy-A apparently had just finished reading "Website Marketing for the Handicapped" and decided that my post was an attempt to "trick" his innocent, unsuspecting users over to McDojo's.

He deleted the thread, and sent me this private message (to which I could not respond because he'd disabled his own."

this is nothing personal, but your posts about mcdojo are beginning to look
like a guerilla marketing campaign which is a violation of our tos under
member conduct, section g:

"You agree to not use the Service upload, post, email, transmit or
otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising,
promotional materials, "junk mail," "spam," "chain letters," "pyramid
schemes," "guerrilla marketing," or any other form of solicitation. Including,
but not limited to using the MartialWay.com Forums service to post unsolicited
hyperlinks or engage in false dialouge to market a website, product or
service."

i know you are responding to a flame about your site that
someone started here, but that post has been removed.

from what i read on your post "if you dont like mcdojos..." you are marketing
your site, telling people to go there.

it is almost the same as posting unsolicited hyperlinks which is also a
violation of the mw tos.

mw is a losely run site but it depends on its traffic.

it very much appears that you are trying to draw traffic away from our site to
go into yours.

this isn't personal but it is my job to warn you that we wont tolerate that.

we will continue to link to your site from our homepage and ask that you
return the favor on yours, but please do not post anymore topics about your
site in our forum.

this is not meant to be taken personally, so just consider this a friendly
warning. i don't want this role, but i will play it if push comes to shove.

thanks.

Of course, he hadn't bothered to find out that MartialWay.com and McDojo.com are on friendly terms and Paul J. Hale, the regular admin/site guru over there is an advocate of us sharing a userbase. I tried to get him to email me so I could forward the chain of emails Paul and I exchanged on the subject, but he was apparently too busy hiding in the "Bat Cave", polishing the "Bat Pole".

So he didn't get to see this:

From: "Paul J Hale" paul@martialway.com
Reply To: paul@martialway.com
To: admin@mcdojo.com
Subject: RE: Your MA Store...
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 17:03:19 -0700

I have noticed some people from MartialWay at McDojo, and some McDojo
people joined our board too. I expect McDojo will really grow. Besides
McDojo simply being a good idea that hasn't been done yet, MartialWay
gets in the neighborhood of 27,000 unique visits a month, which is more
than some of the more "high profile" sites like martialinfo.com, so I
expect McDojo will get some of that referral traffic. I think it's a
pretty good strategic linking situation that we've set up.

I look forward to seeing you at MW and McDojo.

Best,

Paul J. Hale

I believe that information, like boobies, needs to be visible to everyone, so I posted this over there, and I wrote up this little report on the issue for your viewing pleasure.

Please don't get me wrong here. MartialWay.com is the way to go if you want info on Martial Arts. The site's the bomb, and the members over there on their forums are pretty cool in general, even the ones I personally disagree with.

I just wanted you to get a glimpse of some of the crap I have to deal with every now and then as a result of the many clueless people that are out there wasting oxygen that could be better spent on the more functional members of society. It's been a tough, uphill battle so far, presenting this site to the MA community. It's almost like being a Catholic, running a website that exposes child molesting clergy: something that needs to be done, but nobody has the stomach to make it happen.

PJH: Hope you're enjoying your vacation, but like the postcard says, "wish you were here."

--Phrost