runouw.com

Well, Mega, they are listening to you now. It is a valid complain maybe, but the past is the past and it is not happening now. They do give a ♥♥♥♥, or else they would not be here discusing.

The forum cleanup was to me fine. Some changes were needed, yeah, like the rules. It is true they were agressive and unproffesional. I am glad they are being changed. And User Reps are now gonna have more power and more responsabilities. I do not understand the signature thing though. I agree that the limit is kinda small. And maybe a complete cleanup was unnecesary, I don't know. But I do know that most of the changes that are being made are working. I also agree the honoray member stuff being taken out. They are not staff anymore, they are just like any other members and have the same rights and obligations.

I do agree that there needs to be more communication between User Reps and normal users. But being so angry is just not gonna work. The indignation and raging resources should be used when the people in power do not care about listening you, and here it does not seem to happen. Look, the forum is better than it was 2 months ago. No doubt. But it is still subpopulated. It still needs more people. And to make that happen we need to make some changes. Maybe other kind of changes, like announcing stuff more often on the main page, would help.

There is a reason why Runouw.com is not democratic. It is a company, it has an owner. We do not own Runouw.com, the Runouw brothers (or maybe just one of them) owns it. It makes sense a monarchic/verticalist organization therefore. I do believe that a good communication between two gropus is very much apriciated and needed though.

I don't want this to become another flame war between normal users and staff, so while I may have no power whatsoever to inforce it, I kindly ask both sides to avoid insults and such. That doesn't make your arguement sound stronger, it just make it sound weaker.

Also, I would like to add that I complained about a lot of stuff on the rules that did change. Maybe it was not thanks to me that they did change, but it seems as if my opinion was heard.

^ I second that. I'm not the best speaker around here, he pretty much put my thoughts onto a better post. : P

The only thing I'm worried about is if users nominating other users will become a popularity contest. I feel like the entire moderating team is full of responsible, mature people and as such they have more of a right to make an informed decision about who and who doesn't have the qualities of a representative.

Eh.

Doesn't make a difference whether this topic is posted or not.

If it doesn't change anything I'll be dissapointed in the staff.

To me the forum cleanup was simply there to clean up the rules and the pages and topics that had been deserted and left. It might look like we're getting stricter, but we're actually not, we have the same rules as we always had- except cleared up a bit for newer members.

The actual discussion of changing the design of the rules topic and changing the About page etc will actually not affect you guys in the way you think it will. Really, the only changes that affected any members specifically were the group changes, and the vast, vast majority agreed with us there.

You can't say that we don't listen to you, or don't show respect to you. The very fact that we haven't already gone through with everything rules-wise and the fact that we didn't just change the groups secretly and waited for your opinions first means that we are allowing you guys to share your voices too. It's not just the mods; okay so we make the bigger decisions in F23 and stuff, but ultimately we are here to help you- and moderators are there to keep the site clean from spam and arguments or whatever else will come in the way of the forum. We don't use our power for bad reasons to piss the rest of you off and we certainly don't intend to power abuse.

Besides I think we have really good moderators on this site. The site that I used to go to had 14 really really strict rules, the age limits were younger yes, but whole projects by the members were getting deleted by mods for reasons such as "this is worthless junk" or "this is too off-topic", when tbh, rules like that vary in opinions between different mods. What one mod might think is junk, one might think is actually a decent topic to have around.
I can't remember how many times I campaigned there to get simple things changed, like topic limits and post lengths. A 50 word-long blog post is not enough, and no matter how many times we showed our disapproval of it, they continued to add more and more really unreasonable rules.

That's why I value this site so much. We actually manage it so so well and sometimes all it takes to realise that is a totally unfair ban from another site with a ♥♥♥♥ load of pointless rules that built up to a colossal number of pointless rules every month. That's what happened to me. If anyone here was gonna truly complain about a site because of its moderators and rules, it would be me. But I think the systems we have here are really fair for you.

I'm sorry that you feel so bad about all this, we really did want to make the forums a better place for you guys.

From an anarchaic point of view, I like the way the staff is set as it is. Every thing is balanced, no one has more power over anyone else.
If I was on staff, I'd add and change a few things, yes, but as it is, I prefer it this way.

At least the site isn't a dictatorship, right? We should at least be thankful for that.

And we all know if I had the power, I'd be Josef Stalin, so...yeah. Everything is the way it should be, and it should remain that way. I agree with the overhaul, albeit some things could be looked over and edited a bit, but it's all good.