I have found this site to be an incredible source of information. I look around my room now, and I see four tanks with happy newtlings in them thanks to you guys. In everything I have done to those tanks and with the newts, my primary source of research has been this forum. There is no other like it.
Who knows, maybe the guy posting the add knows exactly what a 'Mountain red spring salamander' is. Maybe there's an entire group of people who know exactly what that is (cause I shure as heck don't... but anyway). I haven't seen much research into the linguistics of newt nomenclature, but I'm willing to bet there are some people that have some names for some newts that I know by a different name. Who really knows anything about the guy posting the add?
OK, so he's trying to make money. I know, newts aren't property, they're beings, but just suppose someone treated them like commodities and wanted to sell them. Wouldn't they want to have a quality product? Not that I'm saying that this guy has quality products, but in general, I'd rather buy a healthy looking newt than a snaggle toothed one. I bought my first newts from a pet store. If that store hadn't had those axolotls, none of me or my friends (who introduced me to newt keeping and this site), would have ever developed an interest, and we would have never had any reason to put 'axolotl care' into a search engine to discover this wonderful site.
Speaking of axolotls, where would their species be without people selling them either as pets or as food? How many axolotls are there in captivity as compared to in nature?
Freedom of speech is vital. Mad props for deleting the locality info, but why delete when you can respond? There's no reason people can't make their own decision. No one else really has the right to make the decision for them. Where do you draw the line? If you think someone's add is bogus, write about it and tell everyone why. People are smart, they can make their own decision.
We want to hear and talk about newts. I have noticed a recent descent into jugement matters that have seemed to be resulting in little skirmishes here and there, usually berating people with conflicting views. I'm not saying that you're not totally legit in berating them. Most of those people are probably not what I would consider good newt keepers, but it just seems like it's a distraction from the focus of the site.
They most likely don't care. From the conversations I've seen on this site, I'd say most of the people who visit it do care, so why not let them make the decision for themselves. If you delete the cause of the controversy, you delete the responses that would follow which could resolve it. Those responses empower everyone to see for themselves why it was wrong, or greedy or whatever in a way which simply deleting it would not.
I think it is important for everyone to agree that not everyone has the same point of view. Sometimes we all question our own point of view, and why not compare it with others. Maybe there's a point of view of someone else's out there that if we could just see for a second, we might be able to find the key to our own, weather ours be like or opposing. Wouldn't it be sad for us if that point of view had been wiped out of existence because someone else didn't like it and found it of no use? I think so. What is the point of censoring? Let the knowledge flourish like we want our newts to flourish.
The beauty of this system you got here is that anyone can just come along at put in their 2 cents no matter who they are. I think that's just great. I don't like censorship.
... than again... if you reeeeeally need some hard drive space, I would totally understand.
