What do you do when your local hang gliding Yahoo Group gets "taken over" by a separate (80 - 150 miles away) HG club?
This other club (Rochester Area Flyers) has gone and spent over $30,000 of their club's treasury (many years worth of member's dues) on an aerial tow set up. Now, to maximize their profits (replenish their treasury), they have invaded our club's email list in order, as best as I can figure, to reach the maximum pilot population in the course of promoting their new tow business.
However, almost all the pilots they are communicating at (and with) are already members of their club and very likely already able to receive messages from their own club's Google Group.
As an Elmira Club member, I don't have any interest in tow activities (too far to travel and too costly once you get there). Heck, I've got two mountain sites within 5 miles of my home. So, I posted a couple messages about this Rochester club flooding our Group with its own club's tow news (actually very obvious promotion) and I find myself deleted from the Yahoo Group. No reason given or even a message sent informing me I've been ousted. Whatever happened to the idea of freedom of speech?
Problem is, the "owner" of the Yahoo Group is a single individual, who hardly flies. And while he promotes his Yahoo Group as an Elmira/Binghampton HG Club communications tool, he does not and will not refer to any of the club's leadership in the course of managing the Yahoo Group. Club officials would rather allow him to exclude someone (me) from the list then confront him and have him possibly delete the whole Yahoo Group.
A good number of individual members of the Elmira/Binghampton Yahoo Group are also interested in towing and don't want to be identified as fighting to restore me to this email Group. Nobody wants their tow pilot to be pissed at them for siding with me. So, nary a one of my long time "flying buddies" have posted anything in my defense or to urge the Yahoo Group owner to allow me back on the email list.
I don't figure that anyone here will have an answer toward solving this problem. But having it available as a topic for the larger hang gliding community, at the very least, puts it "on the record". And if you want to see directly what's going on, do a search on Yahoo's Group home page for the "flyhg" Yahoo Group. The tow post invasion from the Rochester club should be obvious.