[SIZE="5"]My position here...[/SIZE]
I am not an Admin and I am not a community leader. My purpose here is to train the new staff.
We apologize for our rushed changes here, and the confusion that ensued. Some things happened very suddenly, and we made a few rushed decisions to compensate for that. Unfortunately, those decisions were made very quickly and may have not been the best way we could have went about doing things.
My official position here is the Staff Manager. My role will very much be out of your daily lives and I will largely only be dealing with and training our staff.
I do not have Admin powers. I, in fact, will do very little that interferes with your daily lives. The day to day operation of this site will be up to your new Super Mod team.
Your Admin team is Juno and Osayidan, who have been here for you for a very long time now, and will continue to be here for you.
[SIZE="5"]Some changes...[/SIZE]
There are some things that were added that have been misinterpreted very badly.
We apologize for any confusion any of this may have caused. It is our fault. We have been listening to your concerns, and we want to let you know that we are amending certain rules to be more clear as to their actual purposes.
[SIZE="5"]Rule changes...[/SIZE]
[s]Do not publicly question or criticize staff members or staff actions. If you have concerns or feel you or others have been treated unfairly, please direct them to an Admin in a private message. Your concerns will be heard, and any mistreatment will be dealt with.[/s]
Firstly, this rule is being removed.
The wording of this rule made it seem as if we had enacted some sort of iron clad dictatorship and wished to censor and silence the members here. That was not its purpose. As such, we have done away with it.
In its place, we have made two minor rule adjustments:
Do not spam, flame, or troll, forum members or forum staff, be it in public threads, profile messages or private messages. Depending on the severity of the act you will receive anything from a warning to a permanent ban, at the discretion of staff.
Do not harass, bully or otherwise intimidate other members (staff included), be it in public threads, profile messaging, or private messages.
These small lines added to these two rules, which should have already been common sense, have been added. Unfortunately, as we would like to believe that all of our members here could understand and realize that staff here are people, and members of this community as well, we are having to remind them in some way that staff members have the same protections from harassment, flaming, bullying, intimidation, etc., that any other member here is entitled to.
You are welcome to, and we encourage you to post your suggestions and feedback, as long as you can remain civil and treat staff members as you would treat any other member of this site. Very simply put, just for a moment change the staff member's name to any other forum member and ask the question of whether you think it would be acceptable to post. If the answer is no, then we think you have your answer.
Hopefully treating members of staff with the same decency and respect that you would show any other member is not too much to ask of you.
There is one other rule we have changed, and that is the word censor. Rather than having a reactionary moderation approach and having to punish our members for using derogatory terms that they have never been allowed to use, whether we had a filter or not, we are turning the filter back on for very select offensive derogatory terms. Please do not circumvent this new filter.
We want to give our members the freedom to swear, but at the same time we would prefer to avoid certain offensive terms that some members may feel they have now been given the freedom to use - which they have not.
[SIZE="5"]Other changes...[/SIZE]
While we initially went into this saying that we were going to be extremely strict and rule with an iron fist, after the first few hours of a new active staff aboard, we realized that such an extreme approach was not necessary.
We are not going to be strict, we are simply just not going to be lax. In other words, we will be on what you might call a "normal" reasonable level of moderation here. So, do not fear. We are not a totalitarian regime and we do not want to dictate and control every aspect of your lives. All we want is to try to bring a little bit of order back to the community that we have lost over the past several months due to a far too lenient moderation where too many things were let to slide.
We understand that some of you may have become accustomed to the recent way that things were, but understand that it does not necessarily mean that it is how they were supposed to be.
Hopefully we can bring a change for the better, to improve the enjoyment of this community for all here.
So, thank you for giving us a chance. And please, be patient with us. Much of the staff here is new and still learning, so it may be a slightly rocky start, but we promise we're going to try our best and we won't let you down!