Other home inspector sites

I noted that both of the message boards that you praised and promote are, and have been from their inception, very heavily moderated.  That explains why someone can post a question or statement in March and expect a response in May....especially with the rarely frequented TIJ blog.

And then you choose to criticize the InterNACHI message board for being moderated.

I resent and oppose censorship myself, Scott....but hypocrisy - specially when pretending to be providing information to the public - is wrong, too. 

Sorry for not providing my name, before.  I did not mean to leave an anonymous post. 

Thanks for clearing that point up and admitting that the two message boards you recommended are privately owned and moderated...just as you criticized the InterNACHI message board to be. 

As to the many posts that lie dormant on TIJ, waiting weeks for someone to come along and read them, I think that they are all dated and one can see for himself when he clicks on the link that you provided.  Many forums have not been visited or posted on since last year.

Most home inspectors consider the TIJ as a blog where the slanted and off-beat views of its owner take precedence over anything that might be of importance to anyone in the industry.  Since only a few people will put up with his ramblings and nonsense...his blog is rarely visited.  Again...a quick click on your provided link offers all the proof anyone needs.

InterNACHI is far from perfect...as no associations of human beings can claim to be...but as one who has been loudly critical, I find more right than wrong with it. 

Hi Scott,

Thanks for your kind words about TIJ. As for moderation; the only posts on TIJ that go into a queue for review before they are posted are those that involve marketing or those that are simultaneously posted to the front page as soon as they are posted to the forums - things like Net News, Latest News, Coming Events, Picture This, Links, and Product Recalls. 

I realize that Jim is a little spoiled because vendors are free to clog up his hero's forum with their sales pitches; but, unlike his hero's site, which is in reality just a discussion/education forum provided by the owner of a public relations firm to his clients, and is paid for by the annual fees Jim's hero charges those clients, TIJ is completely free, doesn't collect any members' fees, doesn't have any clients, and relies solely on revenue from authorized sponsors to pay for it's bandwidth and programming. Oh, by the way Jim, I've never strong-armed one of my sponsors and threatened to duplicate their product and give it away free if they didn't offer TIJ's member's a better deal - can you say that for your hero?

Jim makes a big deal about the fact that some forums aren't posted to for days, weeks or months. Well, maybe that's because folks don't care to talk much about those forum topic areas or maybe it's simply because it's easier to plug stuff into open topics or something similar. One thing is for sure, about 95% of what you read on TIJ is strictly about the business, unlike his hero's site where I'd guess that 98% of the posts ever written deal mostly with egos, chest pounding, oneupmanship, insults and intimidation of those who don't share the same point of view of a few bullies that have circled the wagons around Jim's hero.

Oh, by the way, the last time I looked, sleepy little TIJ had more threads initiated over its history than my friend Brian's site at IN. That's not to diss Brian, he and I are friends and I love his site, visit there daily and his site has been around longer than TIJ. Who knows? Maybe if I were to stop deleting all of the attempts at posting ads for penis enhancers and porn sites and allow all of the discussion on TIJ to devolve rapidly into gutter talk and the atmosphere to change from friendly contemplative discussion to one of a biker bar with 90% of the patrons brawling with one another, TIJ could one day too play with the big boys.

Enough dwelling on that. I really meant to clear up some misperceptions about how TIJ operates, rather than allow myself to be suckered in my Jim's machinations.

TIJ is operated like a web magazine; that means that its focus is primarily on providing content that inspectors can use. Sure, there is sometimes bantering on our forums and there can be the occasional spate of less-than-civil discourse, but by and large it's kind of like a neighborhood coffee house frequented mostly by patrons who are in the same profession. It's owner (me) expects his patrons to behave themselves, to respect one another and to respect the fact that it's a place where folks want to come to relax and learn - not become embroiled in schoolyard name-calling and obscenity-laced soap opera drama such as Jim is famous for fomenting on his hero's site.

Scott is right, everything posted to the few forums that do queue is normally not in queue for more than a few hours and isn't edited or rejected unless it violates the very clearly printed policy that every TIJ user agrees to. Do we bounce users? Heck yes; violate the rules that you insist on ignoring and you'll get warned, blow off that warning and you'll be shown the door. They do that here too, don't they? Are the rules repressive? I don't think so or I wouldn't have emulated those of another site that's popular with inspectors - JLCOnline.

Anything that a TIJ moderator or administrator posts to TIJ's Links Library, Document Library, Net News, Latest News and Picture This is posted immediately; however, material submitted in those subject areas by persons who are not moderators or administrators goes into the queue so that we can review it and ensure that it isn't pornography or laced with obscenities and isn't a sales pitch disguised as content.

Isn't that what an editorial staff is supposed to do? Would you expect the Editor of the Journal of Light Construction to allow it's readers to post obscenity-laced diatribes to the front page of it's own webzine at JLCOnine or to allow every Tom, Dick and Harry vendor to clog up their site with sales pitches?

The Picture This area at TIJ is different - I use the same criteria for it to be approved for the home page but we don't rotate that frequently; so, yes, someone can submit a photo of a deficiency for that area and it could be a long time before it goes up because those are posted first come first served and are left up for days, sometimes weeks, before I rotate them. That doesn't mean that the picture is censured; only that it has to wait it's turn. If users are unhappy with having their picture in queue, they can always duplicate their post in one of the forums that will not go into queue.

As for the Calendar of Events, that works the same way, I allow legitimate non-profit home inspector professional associations to make a one time announcement of their events free of charge on TIJ's calendar of events; this includes chapters of Jim's here's public relations firm because I consider them to be true organizations run by their members, unlike the headquarters. If organizations want to go beyond that basic announcement, I'm always happy to talk to them about a banner ad. I don't apologize for expecting vendors - even when they are organizations - to pay to advertise on the site outside of the events announcement. Should the editor of any webzine, newspaper or magazine be expected to.

I will usually not allow a for-profit vendor to post his classes, lectures, events in the events calendar unless that vendor is a TIJ sponsor. I have made exceptions, but that's always been when I've found the event via the topic feeds that I review and have decided that the event is something that inspectors can benefit from and should know about. In these cases, I've never called one of these vendors and solicited or demanded that they pay a fee to TIJ and I've never, not even once, received any revenue from anyone other than one of the publicly viewable paid sponsors on TIJ. Jim, can you say the same for your hero?

I guess the one area that I am severely deficient at is reviewing new links and documents that are submitted to our directly in a timely manner. I must individually review every new link to make sure that it's got some relevance to home inspections, will benefit inspectors, and isn't to a porn site or some other less-than-desirable topic and I have to individually review the documents to ensure that someone isn't posting something that will violate someone else's copyright. I admit that I don't do it daily. Heck, sometimes I'm so tired at nights that I don't get around to it for days; but that can hardly be construed as censorship or heavy-handed moderation. Give me a break, I don't have a staff like those other sites and I don't do this stuff full time like Brian does; I've still got a home inspection company to run.

Yeah, TIJ isn't the busiest place on the net - we only have about 5000 good addresses in our registered forum members database, and about 14,000 in our newsletter address data base (down about 5,000 since the recession hit); but for home inspectors TIJ is the most credible source for technical information available on the net and it provides, for free, most of the stuff that inspectors like the most about joining one of the professional home inspector associations, or becoming a client of Jim's hero's public relations firm all without any sort of annual dues or fee.

All-in-all, though TIJ is not for everyone - especially those who don't play well with others - it's not a bad deal as free goes.

ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!!

Mike O'Handley, Editor, The Inspector's Journal

Hi Scott,

Thanks, but I don't know if I'll be back anytime soon. I have a profile over here someplace but I'm not sure where. It took me 20 minutes to figure out how to find my way back here and I have absolutely no idea how I found you this morning.

Is it just me or is this place kind of like a maze; seems like it could use some more organization.

Take care, Friends.

ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!!

Mike O'Handley, Editor, TIJ