Some of you may be reading a few snide comments in recent days about moderation. It is true that we have decided to be a little more active in regards to site moderation in an effort to "tidy up" the
Forum a little. Unfortunately, there is some confusion over what this is all about so I shall explain...
Firstly - nothing really has changed, only that we are appealing to everyone to restrict their posts to proper qns, answers, advice, statements etc and to avoid posting replies, or followups that are so cryptic that only a select few people might understand what's going on. Over recent months there has been a slight trend by some to take
liberty with our previous policy of only very slight moderation, however things have become too out of hand to the degree that we receive a lot of complaints from people who feel "left out", "alienated" etc. The
Forum is meant to be read and understood by all who read it - not just a group of people who may have actually had the good fortune to also meet in person.
We are very conscious that many people have found great enjoyment out of some of the lighter side of this
Forum and there is no reason this has to change! Not at all - its just that posts such as "I'm bored...." is not appropriate in our view. Posts like "I'm bored... talk to me..." have flooded in recent months - the problem is they have initiated lots of responses, but this is starting to take a toll on our site operating costs to the degree that we have decided to be less tolerant of this kind of post and I have already started deleting them as at 31st July. Surely, you can all still have fun, be friendly, helpful, polite, etc in your regular usual posts but leave out the "dribble" as I call it.
Some people over the last few days have mistakenly taken the view that we only want posts that are strictly "4WD or Travel" related. That is NOT what I said.
What I did say was that posts had to have a purpose and not just be dribble. There are so many topics that float around the side of our "travel related site" however, this is NOT a chat room with an open policy on content either and to some degree the posts should be relevant to the topic of this site as a whole. If you require more entertainment than that, then please use other sites in the meantime for your daily dosage of entertainment and return here for your ExplorOz style discussion.
The main issue we have and that we are taking action upon is that too many responses and followups are appearing in posts after the original post is answered - and these followups/replies denegrate to simple remarks and private chit-chat.
When we first identified a problem with the number of chit-chat posts, we setup and offered "Member Messaging" in the hope that people would use that system for the more private kind of correspondence however we are disappointed to see that many people still wish to "chit chat" in the public
forum. We DO receive complaints that this alienates those not in the "click" and that is certainly not what the EO "community" is all about.
Mostly, the ExplorOz
forum self-moderates which is ideal and I'm sure we can all work to that again with some guidance as to our ideal "code of conduct" if you want to call it that. I don't get enjoyment out of deleting posts and then getting invovled in debates over it.
I trust that explaination helps you all to understand our wishes for how you are invited to use this resource and that the snide comments you might read on the issue in some posts below are quite incorrect.