gmherps said:
Legit question here:
Why does it seem that things are changing on a regular basis here? I sometimes feel the need to re-read the TOS every single time I log in because something is ALWAYS being changed. Why do things change so much with this site?
To what other sites are you comparing this one?
Actually you have been one of the major complainers about the way things have been working around here. Regardless of the number of times myself and the other mods explain how a truly even handed absolutely perfect enforcement of the rules is if not impossible, highly impractical, it just doesn't seem to sink in with people.
So I am taking stock of what issues of this site have been a major pain in the butt to me. Your complaint is one of them as it surfaces over and over again. The simply solution to that one is to have NO rules at all, so there is no problem about enforcement. Some people probably won't like that scenario very much, however. ANY rules at all will have a problem of uneven enforcement. No way around it. Not unless I hired a single person to do it full time, gave him or her an exacting list of what exactly constitutes a rule infraction, and hoped that he/she had no emotions at all that may cause him to interpret a phrase one way when in a good mood, then another when in a foul mood. But honestly, I think that kind of person would be pretty hard to find. I would STILL bet big money that people would STILL say the enforcement is biased because they got a warning point for something and so-and-so pretty much almost said something that could be construed the same way if you look at it right.
At this point I'm just not sure how I am going to change things. Going to NO rules, while very attractive to me, just may not be the best choice. Maybe cutting back to just enforcing only the worst and to hell with the rest may be worth trying.
So, Greg, to answer your question, this site is a work in progress. I am trying to adapt it to changes I see in how the members participate here. EVER rule I have ever made up has been after the fact from something someone has done, and it seemed prudent to warn members to not do something like that again.
But some are just judgement calls. I don't like the distractions that a signature area can cause with graphics and dozens of lines of text. Trust me, I have seen this sort of thing carried to such excess that you could not read the actual text in the thread messages. So I had to draw a line somewhere. Certainly people wanting 5 lines of text would think it extreme, because there isn't that much difference between 4 and 5 lines. Whereas someone using only a single line might think the rule is excessively lenient.
Animated avatars can drive you batty. Yeah, it's real cute the first time you see it, but after reading a thread where this person has posted 2 posts on every page, by the end of the thread you would like nothing more then to strangle him.
But anyway, these are the things running through my mind. And honestly I may wind up not doing much at all. Just leave things as they are, and simply boot out anyone who just can't seem to fit in here. No warning points, just *boot*, you're gone. That's pretty much how I run things over on CornSnakes.com and it works extremely well. That site puts down more posts per day then this site does with a third of the active members, and I rarely get any problems from that crowd. So maybe that actually is the ticket on how to run things here.
I will say though, sticking on-topic, that I believe Chris's dominating personality thoroughly managed to shine through (under the old, "wild west" regime) well-enough while still staying on-topic.
