A special thanks to all the posters who have helped me out/made me laugh/argued with me, don’t think the new eu blog will be half as much fun or have half the feeling of community this place has.

However, after a month or so, this site’s comment submission parsing engine placed all my posts into the moderation queue only to resurface days later when the text I was attempting to relay was then out of date.

This was doing neither my own site, nor the PlayStation community any favours.

So, I then dropped my references to 1upGamers, and used ThreeSpeech as a convenient place to store & retrieve any interesting snippets of news I found whilst surfin’ across the World Wide Wait. I always knew I could direct traffic here if I couldn’t be bothered to find the original source

It was a convenient arrangement that increased the “impression count” on various pages here, and in turn meant my attempts to promote 1upGamers.com on other Forums were disguised.

I then stopped being selfish & started to read the comments made by others. In majority I found an adult-oriented forum where people with differing views could discuss the various PlayStation brands, Sony & subsidiaries, first & other party development houses, and many aspects of the video gaming industry intelligently & without fear of recrimination.

A few years have passed since then, but I have not found any other forum-based site on the Internet in the last 14 years I have been online that has not been spoiled by one or two recurring visitors, or by those who have their own agenda & dismiss comments made by anybody else who does not agree with their own narrow viewpoint.

Now the time has finally come to say farewell, I will certainly miss ThreeSpeech; not least for what it offered me, but for what it offered the video game industry as a whole.

On a number of occasions, Three Speech have approached me to write content for the site, but because my articles would eventually be moderated by a Sony representative, I ultimately felt this was too much of a restriction as what I wanted to say would not be published as I intended it. Constructive criticism may have been allowed, but general negativity would certainly not have been tolerated. So, I thanked the kind offer those at Three Speech had placed before me, but opted to continue as I was not “selling out” or succumbing to the temptation of seeing my name promoted to article author knowing that what I really wanted to say was somewhat different.

The nature of this Forum with the lack of moderation of individual comment text has meant that anything I have submitted has (eventually) been published without editing, and for this fact alone, I am proud to be a regular contributor.

Once Three Speech has closed their virtual doors this week, if the alternate suggestion from Sony does not offer me the same freedom then I will not be participating. I have not bothered with the current European PlayStation forums as I find the content too difficult to navigate, and the US Blog is so full of “me too”, “first”, and “awesome” posts it just dilutes the content where somebody actually raises a worthwhile point or useful suggestion.

Three Speech ‘regulars’ voice opinions, raised issues, and offer suggestions the likes of which I have not seen anywhere else. It will be a real shame if the community built up here in the last two & a half years is forced to go elsewhere if the official Blog is not ready in the immediate or very near future.

In the meantime, if you would like to participate in the next generation of semi-official bloggery… please make your intentions known now, as I will be recruiting for “Four Word” soon

BFN,

fp.
Clan Officer
ThreeSpeech Regulars