Stand back - I'm going to let fly! (This means I'm givin' out.)

When I started publishing books, I did that on Createspace. Naturally I joined the forums and began to follow posts. What a mistake!

I joined Amazon forums and even with my first question got racial abuse with the phrase "You Irish and people like you..." Of course it was a Brit who did that.

Later she attacked others, who were not native British, and eventually she was banned and her posts had to be removed.

Probably by now she has returned under an alias.

Then I started to follow posts and forums on Createspace itself.

I stuck it out for about a year before the quality of the Q&A's drove me mad.

"How long should a paragraph be?"

"Do you have to enclose speech in speech marks?"

"Yes they are called quotes and they enclose speech."

In "unpublished excerpts" only.

"Please read the first chapter of my published novel."

When you do and reply "It's rubbish, you can't spell, have no idea what punctuation is, and besides you already published it on Amazon, where it stinks up the rest of our work."

Eventually the man who said he was an editor and because of that we all believed he was helping others in editing their work, broke the rule and unknown to us posted the first chapter from his published book. 

It was terrible, silencer suppressed rifle shots echoing in the hills and a broadband office set up in the mountains on a satellite dish and a bit of cable. When I pointed this out and commented that to get a signal from a satellite or another dish you needed a subscription. He went ballistic.

Then I suggested that in order to get the grammar checked, he needed to use a particular product, which he had been pushing,  he went totally  ballistic. I suspect I touched a nerve, that is, that the excerpts from others that he was correcting he had run through the checker.

Again I got abused, and I left.

Then as I am on Linkedin I followed their forums, and shortly after ceased following the forums there.

Recently I started to participate again. Then I joined a Book Marketing Group, who told me I could not post links to my book. The forum it seems was only for advising each other on marketing books. I suggest changing the title to "advice on marketing your books", and was invited by a member to leave. 

Then the moderator asked me not to leave. I evoked the Groucho  Marks axiom and left that discussion group.

Now I have to leave the Linkedin Forums as well. This morning someone posted poetry that had no punctuation AT ALL. And a poster was bewailing that he changed the point of view of a character, from third person to first person and now needed to go back and give him a romantic connection.

Then I suppose the poster who wanted to know would he dream about his work in progress, took the biscuit.

So my conclusion is that some people who say they write and have produced 23, 34, 42, 56, 9,7 or whatever number of dross books are not writers: unless each and every one of those books are selling. 

They are just pulp mills ruining the World's resource of trees, and that some forum posters are completely nuts, abusive, uneducated and do not respond to criticism at all.

But then again I did find some genuine helpful friends on all the forums, and I feel for them when they get abused. So much so that like me they cease to participate.

But I still look in now and then, and now I can do it for amusement.