Changes

[daniel]

I swore I was not going to do this, because I don’t owe anyone an explanation for my actions, so I am doing it for myself.

As you may have noticed, there have been some dramatic changes in the room in the last week.  Expect more.

There are two new moderators: Eileen and Darcy.  These are the the first new moderators added since Max (Woz) passed away from cancer nearly 3 years ago.  If this shows anything, it shows I didn’t take this lightly.

Also, a lot of long time and short time idiots have been disappeared.

Why?  Many, including myself, have noticed that the health of the chat room has been declining.  The mornings have turned into nothing but petty bickering and absolute filth.  The evenings have more intellectual conversations but still too much bickering.

Most people think the best way to handle it is to ban the people when they bicker.  That doesn’t work.  The problem has to be viewed as an infection and with any infection you can’t just hide the symptoms, you have to destroy the organism(s) causing it.  That is what I did.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I scoured over years of chat room logs and synced up the data side by side with all of the other analysis tools I have at my disposal.  I won’t bother to describe them here because to be very blunt, few are educated enough to understand it, and when they don’t, they resort to making stuff up and spreading rumors instead.  The details are posted elsewhere on this site so you can find them and read them if you so desire.

In the end I came up with a list of 6 long time and 10 semi-regular members who should probably be banned immediately.  There was no single event that got them on the ban list, it was the sum of their entire history in the room.  The list contained only the names of people who continually sow the seeds of disscontent in the background.  Their activities created an environment of perpetual crisis and angst.

I also consulted other long time members, and without any prompting they mentioned the same names and could give highly articulate reasons as to why those people should go.  I also had other people come in who were not familiar with the room at all and asked for their impressions.  None of them knew the names on my list.  In the end, their list closely matched mine.

The people were then prioritized by level of egregiousness.  On the long term member list, two were banned immediately.  One more was banned today.  The final three have been issued final warnings and will be observed.  If they make another mistake, they too will go.  On the semi-regular list, all 10 were banned immediately.

These bans are forever.  There is not a single chance in hell that these bans will ever be removed.

Today one additional person was banned for coming into the room, spreading a lie that the room is shutting down immediately and he then advertised another room to go to instead.  Even though this idiot did not ask, I refunded his previous donation in full.  His money is not wanted.

What disappoints me the most is that everyone in the room believed him and were angry.  Add to this the number of people who have been spreading unfounded rumors or outright lies about every decision I have made lately and it’s just all too much.  I find this incredibly insulting and hurtful.


Happy 16th Birthday, Disabilities-R-Us!

[Serendipity]

A huge thanks to Eileen and Darcy for taking on the often thankless and unappreciated job of moderators, I hope everyone can do their best to make them feel welcome and appreciated in their new roles.

As regards the housecleaning, just a very few people have caused probably ten times more problems than anyone else in the room, consistently over a long period of time, and in order to improve things for everyone, it was necessary to remove them.

Let's keep things on the up, Daniel!  Good job getting at the root of the problems!  A big thanks to Daniel and all the moderators for making DRU the best place to chat on the internet!