Chief Delphi - FIRST-A-Holics Anonymous Mailbox

Some of you may know about the FIRST-A-Holics Anonymous (FAHA) mailbox, but for those of you who don't .. it's a forum where anything you post gets filtered by a moderator, stripped of all personal/identifying information (names, team names, etc.) and posted by the moderator, in order to get feedback on the more touchy subjects that may need to be posted.

This forum was created to stop some of the creation of anonymous accounts that happens every now & then. A new feature is that replies can be sent via private message to the FAHA moderators, so that users can respond anonymously to the original post.

Here is a message from the two new moderators that will be helping out (Beth Sweet and Bharat Nain):

Quote:

Well I guess I found out what happens when you post a thread about sections of CD that other people are running. ;)

As many of you may have read, after years of dedicated CD service, Ken Leung has been forced to step back from his duties. This includes the forum that he piloted, FIRST-A-Holics-Anonymous. We’ve come to a “changing of the guard” now, and after much talking and consideration, Bharat Nain and I have decided to take over the FAHA forum.

A little background on the two of us. Bharat is a sophomore at Nassau Community College. He is majoring in computer science and is a mentor for Team 25- Raider Robotix. I am a senior at Michigan State University. I will be graduating in December of 2008 with a degree in accounting, although I spent most of my career at State studying Journalism and Spanish. I mentor the team that I co-founded, Team 1504- The Desperate Penguins, my pride and joy.

Now that you know the new moderators, let’s talk a bit about the forum. FIRST-A-Holics-Anonymous was the brainchild of Ken Leung. He saw the need for a place where FIRSTers were able to just open up, to talk about issues, but at the same time, didn’t have to own up to the issue and possibly embarrass themselves or their teams. As such, FAHA was born.

So before I close off this introduction, I feel it only appropriate to explain quickly how this forum works. If you have a question or a sticky situation to present to the CD community for advice, no longer must you create a fake name to remain anonymous! Simply go to the FAHA forum and create a thread there. From there, either Bharat or I will take it and post it under one of our names, asking for replies. We ask that you censor out team numbers/names and the names of anyone involved. This will save us the time of doing it for you. We know that there is a fine line between what may embarrass people and what may help them, and we do not wish to cross it.

Bharat also has thought up a great idea for any replier who may wish to remain anonymous for one reason or another. We ask that this be used only if there is some reason that a person feels they cannot post under their name, however, if said person can PM one of us, we would be happy to either forward along the message to the original poster, or post it ourselves.

Both of us are quite excited at the prospect of taking this on, and we hope that the CD community will make great use of this forum for those “tricky situations” where anonymity is just needed!

~Beth Sweet