[NT!]

in general, if i could simply suspend someone from starting threads in OOT, i think it would do away with a huge number of bans. it is not like i love banning people, i just don't have many other options at my disposal. believe me, i have tried to explain rules to people over and over and over. it generally seems to make things worse - hell even half the mods here can't understand them. if you think i am going to get into a ten part PM convo every time some tard can't understand that his particular medical problem is not OOT material, get bent.

i think people underestimate how much the cumbersome software on this forum limits the mods. no IP checks, inflexible options regarding user rights and monitoring, lack of centralized info, user notes that are in disarray and sometimes get deleted, etc. these were not things that we could have anticipated needing when this was a close-knit strategy forum - but now that we are a high-traffic forum with a variety of communities and our requisite share of persistent trolls and jackasses, we need the tools to deal with it.

in the meantime, i don't think there's any problem with the bannings as they are now. i really don't want to sound like a malcontent mod, and this isn't the first time i've made a comment like this, but a lot of times we don't get information right away from admins and we don't get new tools to deal with troublesome users, so it bugs me a little bit when, every month or two, people start saying 'why aren't we doing something different?' well, we aren't doing anything different because everyone pipes up to complain every now and then, and nothing comes of it. it's not that mods aren't adjusting policies and trying to be flexible. we are.

if you want to pay me to do all those things and more i would happily do it. hell it would be an ideal job for me. but as a volunteer it's just not something you can ask of me given the amount of time it takes and the relative thanklessness of doing it.

this is why i am excited about the new software. i really think it will give us some tools to do some good stuff and make the forums better. i hope everyone will be this active in the discussions when we actually have some tools to change things.