If you appreciate SHU IOC Forum, it's no accident.
A bit of history on SHU IOC Forum will be a helpful reminder to all of us.
In the Fall of 2011 after the PZ revealation, devistating words by Duma all but cancelling Gulf LNG and a brewing Constitutional and Judicial crisis in PNG Yahoo MB was over-run with mis-information, as never before and since. Navigating Yahoo even with an ignore list of over 2000 became nearly impossible.
That fall, an e-mail came to 2 of us from a key poster, that said Quack at the the time, expressing he'd had it with Yahoo and asked us if we would want to start a new 'private Message Board', invitation only and only for people that we literally had met, most had met in Spinnaker Lounge, and trusted or had a substantial posting history on Yahoo which stood as proof that they did DD, understood and remembered foundational facts and were willing to share their opinions based on facts and evidence.
Short answer after about a scond of thought 'Hell Yes, we're in'. A few forum hosting sites were checked out and 1 was chosen. We started and had the Private small group Think Tank IOC forum running for a few weeks and then expanded the membership invitation to a few other trusty IOC holders, some posters and some lurkers and in those replies came 2 suggestions.
1) Our Forum should move to SHU as SHU had long been the go to resource for all things IOC.
2) Ongoing education is critical, make the forum public and allow others access to a clutter free discussion and daily DD.
We agreed to the move with 1 caveat. Membership was the domain of forum gatekeepers and from our small group of 5-6 the 3 original founders were nominated and appointed membership gatekeepers. Within a month or so Hemi had set the forum up on SHU and that is why Hemi is an administrator. He and STP are the sole administrators.
That is a thankless volunteer job that we owe these guys thanks for tackling. We owe it to them to police ourselves and to not bother them with any petty requests. Save their involvement for big deals.
Dec. 11, 2011 we began posting IOC matters on SHU IOC forum. By then we had e-mailed an expanded group of about 15 and they all signed up and moved from Yahoo to SHU IOC.
We've had our fair share of growing pains and heated arguments over the board and board management and some of the PMs and e-mails exchanged by all are down right blunt and tough. Membership matters became a big issue nearly immediately as STP as SHU host was the contact for application to join. Most applicants were approved as we were attracting the good guys from Yahoo at that time. We did not allow several applicants to join us as we didn't trust them, they didn't add substance to the exchange or were the type of finger pointing shareholder we left behind on Yahoo in the first place. To streamline membership we agreed that STP use his discretion with applicants and we were were attracting new people from in the financial services or that were specialists with experience in law, O&G, accounting or investing. This new blood has substantially enhanced the brain power that posts on SHU IOC.
The logic on membership was this: STP would use his good sense unilaterally, check with gatekeepers in gray areas and newbies would be given a 5 second run-down on how important it was to 'keep the discussion real' and to not allow the MB to become Yahoo II. Each new member also knew membership came with obligations not rights. They also new that they could be booted.
Well, membership grew quickly, SHU IOC forum attracted most of the decent Yahoo posters and with growth SHU IOC started to get some posts out of character with the intent of SHU IOC. Call it whining, complaining, laziness making an argument and not backing it up, being indignant if challenged and overall being needy or plain out suspicious. The answer was a simple set of rules that Hemi posted in July of 2012. Note that we were decently self-governed and behavior policy laid out wasn't needed when we were smaller for 7 months.
Fast forward to today. There are still heated membership discussions and tough decisions to make but they will be made and have been made.
There is absolutely no effort by anyone on this MB to silence discussion or intimidate anyone from posting. There never has been and never will.
The board will benefit, and all those guests too, if every poster will provide back up info to support whatever opinion or position they have. Where we get into trouble is when people post rumor/heresay and SHU IOC has never been about rumor or people post they are frustrated, tired of waiting and generally whine about daily pps action. If you are concerned about owning IOC shares, show us why and we can all beneit by talking it out.
The reason I google my fingers off is I want to know if anything genuinely bad about my investment develops and all I find is basically good news which beefs the long position, submarines and makes the short thesis more lame by the day and the good news enhances already strong fundamentals:
10 Ts gas, experienced management, onshore rich in condensates, likelihood that leases will hold many more Ts, close to LNG market, best production economics in the Asian region, LNG macro always improving.
Believe me, if I see something reliable that is ugly about IOC and I find it first, I will blab it to the world on SHU IOC MB.
I know I'm not unique in that on this MB.
Going forward, I can do better, you can do better and new members will need to do better. Also, going forward there will be tough membership decisions made.
Trust that those that make them wil be just and will only have the best interests of the other members and the 100s of guests we have daily at heart.
As Kenny says "Together we are stronger"
ps. Read the early posts when we were first formed you will see that even back then we had to call each other out on behavior too. Because we did SHU IOC prospered.
