As some of you may be aware, and even as some of you may have experienced, there have been two increasing things happening on the boards as of late.
For one, many people have been increasingly complaining about the “state” of our boards, or forums, or whatever. References to the “good old days” (whatever those are) aside, people’s complaints mostly stem from the fact that they feel that people are being too negative and uncivil to one another. Threads are responded with “who cares” rather than being ignored, flame fests can begin over rather slight pretexes, newcomers aren’t always greeted at least cordially, and there is a general pessimistic outlook that can be taken over certain threads, posts, or users.
Secondly, this complaint about behavior, in the view of the mods, admins, and staff at large, are true. It’s not simply the complaints of a few hypersensitive visitors, but indicative of a larger behavioral pattern that has crept gradually into our usually welcoming and goofy forum “ccommunity.” We’ve looked at things long and hard, tried to gently steer things in a different direction, and even tried some preliminary strategies to discourage this kind of behavior. In all, while some modest gains have been made, the problem still persists and has a tendency to flare up from time to time.
It’s been determined that stronger measures are required.
Starting from now on, we are going to be dealing much harsher with this sort of behavior. We are going to start warning, and maybe banning, for this behavior under under rules 4, 8, 10, 11, 12, and 13; with special emphasis on rules 4 and 13.
To show that we mean business, the following bans are being laid out, for either past or present examples of this sort of behavior:
***2 weeks bans for - Charlemagne, CyberCompost, Silhouette, Sorcerer, Urkani, Zombie_Ori
***Permanent ban - Exo
Perhaps some of those people deserve less ban time, and some maybe more, but we sought a middle ground to just lump people in. Now, previously when I had initiated a few bans/warnings for a certain kind of behavior, I (and possibly the admin/mod staff at large) was accused of trying to make “examples,” out of people. That wasn’t the case then.
This is the case now. Those people being banned, while some are more guilty than others, and perhaps while some have also transgressed who aren’t on the list; these people have all been a jerk, an asshole, a rule breaker, whatever, to a certain degree or another within a recent period of time. Hopefully this ban will show these people that such utterly disrespectful behavior is not to be tolerated; and that these and others of you who may be on the borderline will realize that to lack a common decent civility around here may result in you taking a forced vacation from our boards of variable length.
This is not to say that we want everyone to play nice, hold hands, sing kum bye ahh, and all that crap. No, all we are asking is to be pleasant when you can, and sometimes if you have nothing constructive to contribute, saying nothing is far better than “I don’t care” or any of that crap. Disagreeing of course is fine, hell we encourage it most of the time, but again, keep it within the rules. All we are seeking is common civility and respect, and we will enforce that from now on if necessary.
Those to be banned have been informed, and they will be back in 2 weeks from now. Have a nice night, and be assured that we are going to try to be more forceful in our prevention of general assholery.
Yeah, I’m sure Zero helped in some way, too!
But I’m not even sure how to 
… Actually, I think you spelled it perfectly. Just … spare us and don’t sing it, will you?
