Interestingly it isnt my 1st post bt yet i concur wid wot tat person said...
we shud really stick to d rules maintained for d forums....irrespective of the fact in wch one is posting...aftrall its all for MBA aspirants who wish to seek the guidance of experts out here(..who so evr he may b...)....n hence shall be done wid sheer spirit of camaraderie keeping personal motives/intentions apart.
Moreover apart from being a separate thread its more of a PUBLIC forums so d utmost is to safeguard d decorum of the community rather than infringing the line of demarcation in deciding the extents of wot is liberal n wot Outrageous.
May b the thread is governed/created by one specific person....bt still tat doesn't guarantee 100% satisfaction to evryone....sometimes....d advise of one can b good for someone....n d advice of another can b much better than d previous one....so on a more general note, i think...WE(..d public/students..) shall decide whom to listen .... n aftrall its HELP provided gratis so one shud not help problem that ONE is helping oders. Atleast we wud like to listent o evryone n thn decide whose counsel is more helpful/appropriate to us. !!!!!!!
I hope not ther isnt any contradictory point in wot i stated being an active member of the forum n d privileged to share my view point....."d RIGHT to speech" shall be maintained for evryone, living a democratic environment. :)
Dear letsrock31,
This is gonna be a long post but I will try my best to put things in perspective here. I've put in a lot of effort to gather my thoughts, so I'd appreciate it before you go through the complete post well before replying :).
A couple of months back, the MAT-CET section was nearing death in the number of posts and participation and it was worrying. There were endless questions but no answers. Patrick was called in because there were a large number of questions being asked that were going unanswered. To that effect, I would give credit to him for getting life back in here to some extent. To his credit, I wouldn't want to steal his thunder for what he has done. Before this thread, Patrick has been helping people on the forums for years without much self-plugging for his institute.
boywonder82 on the other hand has been found spamming esquaremc all over the forum and if you check his posts, you will find a lot of moderator edits. I do not discourage boywonder82 from posting on PG, but as an Administrator I wouldn't want to endorse users who do not differentiate between outright selling on the forums and helping out people. This is bad for the forum's culture overall and we don't want PG to become a place where every other dude spams.
I am not going all out to endorse Patrick and his brand here or disbrand esquaremc. All I am saying is that we have to give people credit for what they contribute to the forums. PG gets its edge due to the content on it. Unfortunately, a lot of people begin to misuse the freedom under the garb of 'helping out people'. Either the forum can maintain its independence and content quality or come to a point where posts have advertisement links all over and lose its charm.
Another thing - as you guys might have observed, we have been trying to get some 'official' people into the forums since last year. We had the Directors of SIBM, SCMHRD, ISB, MICA and Career Launcher's Arindam Lahiri and IMS's Gejo Srinivasan to bring in an expert's point of view, parallel to the normal student activity running on the forums. Patrick's thread is part of that. The problem we face on the forums is that bschools and coaching institutes keep taking their chances at spamming in student-driven threads, which as users we don't like one bit. Official threads such as these help to isolate commercial entities on the forum in a separate thread (Any commercial entity is free to open a thread with us (it's a free service) provided we are comfortable working with them and know that they will not misuse it for blatant marketing).
Now imagine what happens if we open up these threads to everyone - first, the thread becomes redundant to the usual student-driven thread, and secondly, the next time I go to a coaching institute to ask them to come on the forums to put in an expert opinion, they are going to say - "Dude, the users on Pagalguy won't let us answer and another coaching institute will hijack the thread!"
It is going to make the moderators' jobs very difficult! Please see things from our point of view and help us manage the forum :). At the end of the day, there is still the other CET thread which other people can participate in, so it is not like nobody is being allowed to post and answer questions. So if you do not want to listen to Patrick's answers, that's fine and you can use the
Mission CET thread!
Hope I have been able to put things into perspective.
Cheers,
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