Speaking as one of those people that lets his temper get the better of him, Michael is absolutely right. There have been times when I have REALLY crossed the line, and times when I've just gotten to the edge of the line. I have tried VERY hard to control myself, and in many cases I control myself just fine by simply not posting anything. However, I am not always able to control my temper and sometimes I have made mistakes. To anyone that I have insulted or offended, I apologize with the hope that we can start fresh.
Now to the griping:
There seems to me a pervasiveness of people who decide they don't like someone and then just start reporting every single post of that person's in the hopes that they get a ban. On top of that, there are confirmed cases of new members of the forum receiving "warning PMs" from older members, saying that the new member should steer clear of members X, Y, and Z. And finally, there are the flamebaiters. These are people who make inflammatory comments with the express intention of pissing someone off. Not exactly as obvious as a troll, the flamebaiter is an insidious creature of the internet that should still be eradicated. Our TOS does not cover these three situations, and as a result they are prevalent.
We do need strong leadership on the forums, and those people in the administrative ranks used to be those leaders. It used to be that when a clamoring of people requested that a post get sticky status, it would happen. And it used to be that these elder members of our community would share their wisdom with others. Those posts are still present, and they are still useful even if the content is outdated. Now, when I see a post by any administrator, it means that either someone has gotten a ban or the post has been locked. Or both.
The issue as I see it is in communication. We have no communication with anyone in charge of these forums. If we had more than one person actively moderating the forums, we might have more things done to these boards in a more timely fashion. If we had multiple active administrators, we might even have multiple perspectives on subjective decisions. I ran a video game guild with over 300 members in it, along with administering the website that facilitated events in 4 different MMOs. This board is worse (from an administrative standpoint). I had to have help on my board. I created an officer to manage each of the games, and an officer for every 50 members of the guild. A lot of that overlapped, but it made the whole process a LOT easier. I can't even begin to imagine trying to administrate a forum like this. We have 5052 members on the forums. And we have a team of 5 administrators. Of those 5 administrators, 2 have never posted EVER and 1 of them hasn't even been active this year. Of those 4 that have been active this year, only 2 have been active in the last 6 months. Of those 2 that have been active, one is Jason Hardy, who was active to create the Crossfire mission creation thread.
What I'm saying is that this is too much for one person to handle, and it's not fair to that one person. I cannot in good conscience recommend any member of this forum for administrator status, but I believe it is critical to the success of this forum that we have more than one person actively administering the boards.
