EDIT: Wow, a lot was posted when I was writing this.
Most of the stuff you've sad is valid, Rusty. A couple things, though...
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Another thing - a warning system needs to be established. Teff's ban, Cola's ban, my multiple bans - confusing. Strange. Ridiculous. And the warning system needs to be tweaked to certain rules - again, if someone's doing something majorly wrong, then they're banned, no problem. But if it's something like cursing, and if they're known to not cause trouble most of the time/all of the time, then there needs to be a few warnings preceding the action.
COLA and your bans weren't without warning - I know I've personally pmed COLA multiple times about profanity (and other modmins have as well) and I'm pretty sure you've been warned, too. One thing we've been trying to establish is a much more structured warning system, but to do this we'd need a much more structured offense-tracking system. I suggested a new offense-tracking system a few months ago, and everyone agreed on it, but we haven't been able to get the OK from a higher power like Stu or Tom. As you can see, we're trying to get Stu to give Rad and Ram more control over the forum to accomplish things like this, but we active modmins have been working as hard as we can to make warnings and bannings as fair as possible with what we have. Don't think we've been slacking off; we've really been trying.
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For the mods, there needs to be an established line between "spamming" and suggestions to better the forum. I was banned for speaking my mind about the forum a while back, and it's frustrating that this is still going on - people should be able to speak their minds here, it shouldn't matter if it goes against your beliefs, the pre-established rules, which leads to this -
Just for the record, as far as I know, we've never punished anyone for suggesting ways to improve the forum. The problem is, until now, there had never been any civilly put suggestions.
But, that doesn't matter now. I think we're going to continue to disagree on how well the modmins have preformed up until today.The important thing is that we're listening now, so there's no need to chastise us for what we may have done previously.
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Just because those rules are there, doesn't mean that they are the final solution to everything. Things can change, but the people who run this forum are apparently afraid of change. Change isn't neccessarily a bad thing - we're running on a rule set that was made a few years ago. And if you're getting a lot of "trouble" with people complaining about the rules, maybe it's time for a change in those rules.
By "people who run this forum", I assume you mean Stu, Dot Com, etc. II don't think you're giving them enough credit, though. When we modmins proposed our rule changes in August, Dot Com helped us fix them, and since they went through, obviously Stu didn't have a problem with them.
Again, though, this doesn't matter now. Things are changing now, we understand.
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Stu. He's a jerk, he's a bad admin, and he's lazy. He's not even around often, but when he is, he just fills me (and I'm sure this applies to other people) with a negative vibe. He's not a nice person and he's not a good administrator. His first solution is to ban, ban, ban, get off my forum because you're a problem, and I don't want to deal with you. He doesn't want to deal with anything, so he gets rid of it. That's why I like Ram and Sree - they're willing to talk about the problem instead of just straightforward banning someone.
As I said before, insulting people is not going to help your case, Stu's not a bad guy, and I don't know where you're getting the "ban ban ban" impression of him from. He's just not on often enough and not engaged enough with this community to be an effective admin. It's got nothing to do with him as a person.
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Don't know why everyone here is so afraid of change, because sometimes, it's a good thing.
I think the presence of this thread shows that we active modmins are all pretty open to it (We've been trying to get some change ourselves for a while)
Sorry if I sound nit-picky here, I agree with most of what you've said and I'm glad that you're trying to help fix this mess. I just don't want anybody thinking we haven't been trying. We really, really have.