OK well heres my take on this. (If you know of a member who has left over this situation please make sure they read this)
I guess it all started a few days ago when I received several rather angry prank phone calls about CF. They had an American accept so I assumed they had used a whois lookup. I didn't think anything of them at the, just assumed they were just some prank calls.
Fast forward a few days and I log on to CF and find my inbox FULL of forwarded pms to be about boycotting CF unless demands are meet. My reaction is at first suprised because I had no idea people felt this way or felt so strongly about it. Some of the pms were worded very angrily aswell.
I decided to check out this forum and when it loaded up I saw words like 'the CF secret society' and I saw alot of members and even some of my own moderators on there. I couldn't go any further though because the forum was set to private and wouldn't allow me to register which made me suspicious that they had something to hide. I also saw there was some 'approval' system whereby you had to be approved with your original CF username.
This made me recall the angry prank calls I had and put together with the 'secret society' and private board I became very suspicous and very angry.
I felt annoyed and betrayed that members and even moderators whom I had trusted with control of CF had created this forum and spammed all the members on CF that I had tried hard to create in the first place with hateful messages that I took personally because I create CF.
How else am I meant to react in this situation. After
- Angry prank phone calls
- They spammed CF
- Tried to steal the CF members
- The forum appears to be a private 'secret cf society'
I took action against who I thought were the ringleaders and one of the ways I thought to neutralise the spam and stop this 'secret hate society' from spreading was to 'censor' the address by using the swear word system ( I don't read private messages because they are private ). I simply didn't want this to explode any further that it had already.
I later spoke to arrizx who tried to explain that the forum was only setup as a 'petition' and they didn't mean it to blow out of proportion like this, but my question are:
- Why not use an online petition site? surely that would have been better and this whole thing would have never happened. I would have visited and would have immediatley realised its only a petition.
- Why all the secrecy?
- Why the private boards
- Why spam everyone on CF in the first place?
- Maybe if I were aware of the 'demands' before hand I would realise it was some sort of petition.
- Why not just contact me via PM or email about the whole situation?
Now about the demends themselves:
HTML signatures seem to be a popular one so we'll take that as an example.
Does anyone know what the following
HTML code does?
It redirects your browse to the specified site. So lets supose that a spammer joins and enters that code into his signature and points it to his spam site. He then posts in a thread. Anyone who tries to view that thread will then be sent to his porn site. I'm sure you can imagine the kind of caos this would cause.
So having a co admin would not get HTML signatures enabled any quicker, the fact is that HTML signatures are not practical. I have never seen any forum myself that enables them anyway.
I have tried to explain this everytime a thread about HTML signatures appears in the suggestion lounge but I appreciate it may be hard for someone who doesn't understand HTML to woner why they haven't been enabled after creating their thread.
Whats going to happen now-
Ofcourse I want to keep members happy, I held some competitions recently and gave out $80 cash in prizes
I've received messages and emails from those envolved explaining that it was not meant to happen like this and the site was created and I'm going to unban the members I banned previously and re-instate those moderators.
But what is going to happen to this other forum that has been create? Now that it is all out in the open and were are discussing what they were petitioning for, personally, I see no point for it to carry on but thats up to the people who started it. If its an innocent petition then it has now served its purpose.
I hope that explains I reacted the way I did and also why some suggestions cannot be implemented so I hope we can lay this to rest now.