I agree to a point. I've been expending a lot of energy in avoidance of this because I'm not out to crucify people. This opens a can of worms like "who are you to judge", followed by "how dare you make half-baked assumptions". I can tell from the defensive repetitive posture that the mods are anxious right now. I won't deny Mike and Jaime have put significant effort into their site and have clear goals what they want out of it. I think the sticking point slowing this thread is the nonchalant, "you read the terms of service" with "not my responsibility" making the staff sound more like used car salesmen making every effort to pass the proverbial buck. This sounds mean-spirited. It isn't meant to. We are simply dealing with a passive-aggressive set of rules that occasionally brings on aggressive behaviour. It becomes clear this is a source of antagonism. My goal from the start was to navigate around this aspect in the fairest way possible. The proactive approach won't help everyone but it will reduce the number of potentially explosive noobs. I think this is worth pursuing because as we can see this can affect inter-board politics. If we can mitigate at least one "AYN" angry-young-noob I think it would be worth it.

For less noobers and those who are continually accused of submitting unsubstantiated conspiracy bunk, a constructive way out of this is to simply add a few notes related to conspiracy-driven guidelines in the rules." The hard part is arriving at an agreeable criteria level of where we can all accept a point of no return is. That's a barometer level that will have to be developed over time. Here is what I'd like to see in the guidelines regarding conspiratorial content.

• An incremental approach
• heavy referencing,
• a longer delay allowing moderator input

and most importantly " a non-negotiable vetting process over and above what is currently covered in the rules.


How about simply a conspiracy box? This way when someone continually becomes difficult, this gives the mods the breathing room to say "the box" which can then be handled later at a more leisurely pace.

This is more for the people than the mods because this sort of thing happens behind the scenes anyway. My point is well it would allow the AD audience a level of disclosure that has up until now been hidden. Make them feel a little more part of the process so when the next big pop comes - we all know where we stand and if somebody had it coming.

If this sounds like too much work, does anyone have a better way of making people who 'don't get it 'to 'get it'? This whole exercise is where the vast majority of us have taken for granted (myself included) the behind scenes nature of AD debate. Knowing this effort is going on in good hands would give me greater confidence in negative matters. Thank you for your time.

Thanks everyone, we appreciate all of the input you have provided in this topic.

The original poster's message was read, understood, and noted.

Instead of continuing a circular debate where we state site policy and members object to site policy and we state site policy and members object to site policy and so on, I'm going to go ahead and close this topic.

If you have any objections, feel free to PM me or Jaime. We will take your PMs under advisement when constructing site policy in the future.

Thanks again,

Mike