talkmagic.co.uk

A frontpage then maybe.... with the forum area locked until you can answer a few questions?

As mentioned before when this topic was aired, answering questions means someone has decide on and set those questions in the first place, there's a wide variety of magic to involve and it would be inappropriate to set questions regarding, say, an Erdnase, and expect someone who isn’t interested in card stuff to know that answer. Once those questions were established and set, to ensure fairness to all other newcomers, they should never change. The downside is that once word gets round it would be easy for answers to be passed on. In addition it would need a lot of Moderator time on a swift and regular basis to check the answers and then manually change the settings for the successful new members to be admitted.

bronz wrote:Come on mods, it looks like there's enough consensus on here to justify a serious debate on the issue of Making Registration Harder.

Abraxus's idea was particularly good IMO, giving initial access to only a couple of forums then slowly opening the doors to further wonderment. Combine that with a more stringent registration program and you've got a nice tight ship that hopefully should weed out the Benets of this cyberworld.

Hope posting a day after the last post isn't waiting too long. I'm still new here.

Anyways, the idea is perfect.. For weeding out laymen and people who just want exposure of the tricks or whatever.

But it ends up 'hurting' those who are just here to be a good honest.. uh.. membership sort of thing.

I don't exactly know how to word that, but I hope it makes sense.

magicdiscoman wrote:people like this i get a fair amount of as i have a public e-mail as well as pm with regards to a raven question i usualy as them to get a length of cat gut 2ft long and a long weight and to get back to me, if they do i tell them they will also need a spirit leval bubble and three half inch holes.
if there still insistant i tell them to look up section j4 / 778.4 in the libary ie the entertainments section.

i make no apologies for helping genuine magician's or people who pay.

Ok, got the cat gut, weight, spirit leval bubble and the three half inch holes. I went to that section, but found nothing on the raven or any of these things and how to use them together... so what now?

in that case you definatly need a consultation currently £50 per hour plus travel.
or £10 per e-mail via pay-pal, you'll also need to send me a pick of your raven so i can see which version, at time of going to press there are three no1's and two no2's, you have.

The trouble with questions is that you need to make them general enough to not keep out genuine newcomers or people who don't do coin or card magic but difficult enough not to be googled and answered in 5 secs.

The method I always thought would be successful would be to charge for membership. Almost all howie-diddit posts are from free-loaders who don't want to sacrifice a penny to learn magic. If you charged to access the forum - such as $30 for a year-long membership - then you'd keep them away.

pcwells wrote:Following more pleading PMs, I simplified the message to say that he was asking about a tool, and not a trick, and there was no point in him knowing what it is and how it works if he wasn't going to buy one.

I predict he is the most tiresome kind of snot creature. This combination of (lazily) hunting down methods without having the intelligence or application to learn and practise them once he finds them out (you can just see him reading each one and whining, 'That's so lame.') suggests to me this: he is exactly type of person who'll shout out the method when a magician is performing, ruining it for everyone, but grinning from ear to ear as he believes showing that he knows how something is done, when he can't do it himself, actually makes him look cleverer that the magician doing it.

copyright wrote:The method I always thought would be successful would be to charge for membership. Almost all howie-diddit posts are from free-loaders who don't want to sacrifice a penny to learn magic. If you charged to access the forum - such as $30 for a year-long membership - then you'd keep them away.

To be honest, I wouldn't be here if it were a paid forum.

First of all, there's nothing stopping a good number of laypeople from paying just to get in. It happens, they're the same people that go to ellusionist and buy some effects they've seen just to see how it's done.

Secondly, I have an extremely limited budget. I buy books because, working at a bookstore, I can obtain them at reduced cost.

Finally, I'm not here to learn magic. In fact, I don't really think that's why talkmagic exists. I'm here to discuss magic, to throw ideas around about philosophy and performance with other magicians or magic enthusiasts. I can't be entirely sure but based on posts I've read, I don't even believe that the restricted forum is a "teaching" area. Meaning, you can't learn tricks there, the rules on exposure are just less strict so that it's slightly easier to discuss magic.

I don't know what could be done to lessen the amount of headaches and people here for the wrong reason, but I hope it doesn't involve membership fees...

Mage Tyler wrote:I hope it doesn't involve membership fees...

No chance of that, if we had to pay to be members then we'd have a very much smaller membership !

I can understand and heartily support the idea of keeping TM standards as high as possible and as much as we can, excluding the idiots but it's an ongoing process and needs equal amounts of tolerance and vigilance from all of us. There always have been and always will be people who register and cause trouble like this but we can soon exclude them once we are sure that they aren't just confused or having problems trying to fit in.

Mandrake wrote:just confused or having problems trying to fit in.

As excluding those would exclude 95% of all magicians.

why hasnt this thread been locked yet?

Because I still had something to say to you, I guess it's fate. First of all, an "exposure site" I considder to be something more like Magicworld where there's no questions, and there's magic tricks exposed that are even copywritten.

Moreover, MagicHat has been updated, it not DOES have a forum, has better methods that are taught, not exposed. Because mind you, there is an acces level system involved, and while it may lack 100% effectiveness, it's more effective than sites which hand out golden gems of copywritten tricks on a silver platter.

On a more general note, I am glad that the answers to the questions have been removed so as to help aid wth the integrity of our barrier to block out laymen and hecklers.