Before you start chimping out no im not changing anything.
By the end of this thread you may understand more site ownership and moderation questions that you have about me and some answers to your questions about the possibility of changing the website.
I want to make a thread about a few topics for the site. Not saying I'm going to change anything and not posting this in /q/ because users probably don't even read /q/ apart from staff.
Topics:
- Is the site disorganized?
- Are more boards required?
- Should /q/ be removed for it's inactivity?
- Should namefagging and IDs be disabled in one board but enabled in another? (Some users like to be anonymous, for some reason)
- Should we ban EVERYTHING we don't like?
- Should we just have a meta thread and not a meta board considering how inactive /q/ is?
Allow me to pre-amble. Other the course of a few days or so, people have been getting upset at other users for relatively minor things and some users have been urking me out really badly too, and given the wrong ideas on what is and isn't allowed. There are users getting upset at other users and people saying constantly that they will take breaks or quit because of them, this thread will essentially address a couple of ideas and ultimately you will walk away with a general idea of why many of your ideas cannot be done and will not be done on the site.
We've stopped pinning hangout threads in an attempt to make the site feel more like an imageboard and not Discord. I understand this, but to some extent I think that community matters greatly. Anonymity on the website allows certain users to get away with bad things. On other websites like 4chan and the sharty, derailing is effective due to a lack of proper filtering of anonymous people, people can get away with posting disgusting things. I vividly remember the first time we had an anonymous /g/ general on the sharty, in a matter of a few seconds, someone pretended to be another user and posted pornography. From that point onwards, we always stuck with IDs at the very least.
Certain features like flags and random names add a charm to the site that not other sites really have, they give the site a certain flare of character that actually incentivizes you to make new threads as the names are decided once per thread. In one thread you could be Furgeorge Floyd and you could be Furadolf Hitler in another or something like that. These features are fun and harmless.
What we're trying to build here is a community, a community that knows eachother, this might be uncommon for imageboards, but it's another thing that makes us stand out from other sites, and this isn't standing out for the sake of standing out, it's providing an alternative to platforms that have monopolized the idea of community and have worsened them in the process by forcing everyone to interact with the worst of the worst, whores, porn artists, etc. They're making people believe that only Discord can be used for something like that when in actuality, there is nothing saying you can't. This site is very much like a forum, but it uses imageboard software, or something like that.
But there are users here, new to our community, being annoying, trolling, posting ponies, not posting anthros, not drawing anthros. So what can be done about this? Should we make a new board just for them? Should we add /qa/?
I'm not sure, leaning towards maybe no.
Allow me to lay out some things:
Site is getting to a point now where it might need some organizational structuring for the purpose of quality. Multiple users have come to me with requests to do things or else they use the site less, this has resulted in some users not wanting to use the site due to concerns with AI among other things, in this case it's beneficial for the site to perhaps enforce restrictions on a board like /anthro/ to ban things like AI and other topics like drama or MLP for the comfort of great users who would be amazing additions to the site. The site still gets good activity even if we don't ban those things though, but most of that activity is drama shitflinging, negative behaviour, with most of the board not even really being anthro related, for a board called /anthro/. Adding a board like /qa/ could push more of the off topic stuff into it's own seperate board, and users like Proto1 could be contained, keeping site activity high regardless and keeping some users happy.
The problem with that is that adding more boards will dice up the userbase or split it into halves when the site needs to be one cohesive unit. Adding more boards would create unnecessary division which could cause cross-board wars between users, and as much as I love certain users, I actually don't think bending down to suit their needs is necessary. Theres a huge change that doing so will not mean that they post here much at all, they'll say "This is great!" but the site will go back to 0 pph and lower levels of ppd, the breaks they take due to bad users, they would take anyways regardless if they were here or not.
To conclude this post for now, it seems as if not much can really be done by the ownership of the site to save the site, instead the community has to put in the effort instead of complaining or ceasing to like certain people. When people like Proto or Terry get out of hand, you just have to ignore or filter them and put your grievances aside to help me make my site a better place by giving people alternatives to their shit posts. If the site somehow seriously dies due to a lack of owner conceding on HTSM demands, then maybe it deserved to die, weak users tbh, and anything I could have done would only have extended the lifespan of the site by small amounts. Ultimately, users have to do things themselves to make the site better.
So to conclude:
No, I can't just ban everything you don't like. Sometimes I do do things that might come across as strange, I did unpin the bible thread, but I do not see that as being out of order, all I did was unpin a thread, you can still post in it. And I have unpinned hangout threads also, so now there will be less pinned threads taking up the first page, allowing other threads to reach the top.
I do bumplock coal threads, this decision is kinda arbitrary, theres no rules for it, other than if most people seem to agree its coal and they sage it, then I bumplock it so it can die and coal threads from months ago cannot be pushed straight to the top. I do not believe this is out of order either because you can still post in those threads, but their visiblity will be lesser, ultimately we should work towards putting the best threads at the top and keeping the crap ones near the bottom or something like that.
Thanks for reading my long ass word walls by the way, if you have anything to add feel free to.
