Richard
you're quite right to say that offline does not
need to share his knowledge with the rest of the forum, but I would think that he might
Want to do so - after all, it's part of what the forums supposed to be about.
my Initial post was to serve a couple of purposes...
1 - To prevent any more reports of potential off-classifieds trading. Simply seeing that a Mod had posted in the thread directly below offline's message saved anyone else reporting the message, ie to show we were "on the case" so to speak... This had to be done promptly, otherwise we may have had many more reports.
2 - to serve as a gentle reminder that we don't allow trading outside the classifieds. Despite what seems to be the popular belief - staff are unable to read other members PM's - they are just that PRIVATE MESSAGES. Hence, my message had to cover a number of options - it might have been that offline simply wanted to contact you re something in another thread, and he'd decided to flag it up in here. It MIGHT have been that he had a pallet of APS film tha he wanted to knock out at a fiver a roll. And thankfully, it turns out that he's a thoroughly nice guy, who wanted to do you a favour. My point is from a simple "you've got PM" message we can't tell - and neither can the people who reported the message.
The last thing I want is for people to stop doing favours of this nature. I think it's one of the best parts of being in a community like this, and indeed I'm not averse to doing the odd favour for my friends in F&C myself, as I'm sure some of you will remember.
When I say it's a grey area in the classifieds/trading rules, what I mean is that I would like to see a simple line in the rules stating that non-profit altruism of this nature is allowable, and I'll be mentioning this in the staff room once I finish this missive.
That way, we can be completely open about it - offline could have simply said "Our Sainsburies are selling some film off at £xx, how many rolls do you want me to pick up for you?" in open forum, nobody would have had to RTM him, I wouldn't have had to upset everyone in a forum I consider my "comfortable place" and we could all go back to taking photographs and lurking in darkrooms.
There have been quite a few threads that I remember where people have offered to "pick things up" for another member, in open forum, which have gone well for all parties concerned. Since I've been on the staff, when i've seen one of these, I've made a point of posting in the thread, stating what a good idea it was, or what a nice gesture it was - partly because I believe it IS a good thing to do, and partly to save RTM's appearing in the staff room's inbox.
I suggested that a quick RTM might be a good idea, just so staff are aware of any favours, purely because I'm not around all the time, and I do think that some form of staff "stamp of approval" on these kind of threads is a good idea - if nothing else it saves people getting the wrong idea about whats going on.
I'm sorry you didn't like the blue messages, Richard, but it was for a reason - I DID want people to sit up and take notice - primarily you and offline (I do so hate calling people by their forum name rather than a proper name - it seems so cold!) The first message was to elicit a response and to stop any further RTMs - the second was to explain everything was ok. To have typed the second normally, would, by your own admission given it a lesser impact, and therefore it also needed to be in "
MOD MESSAGE BLUE" - it's a standard formatting used by the staff - bold blue for messages to be considered from the mods/admins as a whole,
bold red for warnings.
Still - as this is
my explaination of why things were dealt with this way, at least I can type this in normal spindly black
I'd just like to add, on a personal note, that I never meant any offence to either of the parties involved, and I hope that it won't put people off from doing each other favours in the future - i'd just like to see it enshrined in the rules that it's okay to do so.
. 
