Rule Change (New Staff Power)

[KevinM1]

Maybe I'm weird, but I have always recognized, regardless of what forum I'm on, that my ability to post and be a member is a privilege granted to me by forum ownership.  I don't actually have any right to post since the forum is owned and operated by a private entity who can do whatever they wish with it, and a ban doesn't actually impart harm.

...

Honestly, this staff is by far the most lenient I have ever encountered.  I'm amazed by the patience and restraint they've shown with certain, obvious members.  People that, at PHPF, I would've swung the ban hammer at far sooner.  So, I'm not worried about the nuke being used when it shouldn't because this crew has already shown a remarkable resistance to banning members.

Honestly, that's probably because we try not to run the forums like a private entity, and more like a community. People say I "own" it, and in a legal sense I do, but when it comes to decision making and running the place, it's a joint effort and I don't hold any more power than the other admins. The only non-community aspect is that staff are chosen by current staff, rather than being elected, but we've offered to hold staff elections multiple times in the past and our members always vote overwhelmingly to leave the system as it is.

PHPF was organized a lot like this place, complete with new staff being voted on/chosen from the member pool by current staff. The biggest problem there is that the owner just disappeared one day. Not off the face of the planet, but just from being involved with the forum. He was a drum tech for the Blue Man Group for a while, then tried making some pretty terrible phone apps. He held the purse strings, so when it came to things like renewing the forum license, we were pretty much screwed. We wanted to make some pretty dramatic upgrades, but without access to cash (mostly for licences, access to better hosting, etc.), we were screwed. He'd show up every 18 months or so on the forum, make a dumb post about how much he still cared, and then disappear again. One of the other staff members actually tried buying the forum from him, but he wanted way too much for it. Despite hemorrhaging members and the existence of Stack Overflow, PHPF was still high in search results.

So, it's really nice to be on a site with an active and involved owner. Because not having that, and being stuck with no real way to improve the user experience, really, really sucks.

The rules are long-winded and complex partially because we want the staff to be bound by them as well, so whereas in other forums you may just have a rule "No trolling" and the staff get to decide what trolling is, we have it as well defined as we think is needed.

Yeah, ours just said no trolling or flaming, which is too vague.

I also wish that we had the "I'm now talking as staff" block of text that you guys have here. That would've been really nice because we did get into conflicts with certain members about when exactly we were throwing our staff weight around.