I'll keep everything short. I had a bad experience in the chat room relating to the way rules are enforced. The following are my solutions to better ensuring people have a great experience on this website. I myself have a decent amount of moderation experience.

Here is a link to the current rules: the-chatroom-rules-updated-10-05-11-vt117054.html

• Because this is a pick up forum, it is not uncommon for the average person to assume that they can post porn in the chat.
• In light of the recent legalization of marijuana in some states, the average person would assume that it is ok to talk about legal controlled substances. In addition to medicinal marijuana.
• Persons under the age of 18 speaking about legal sexual relations with other persons under the age of 18.

My suggestions:

1. When you get kicked from the AJAX chat client by an admin/mod, the error message that you get when logging in is "Your IP or Username is BANNED". This leads to people being kicked for making first offences (posting a porn link). Then it leads to them thinking they have been banned, or something is wrong with their internet. Furthermore, the user is not notified that they have been kicked by an admin, or the reason. This creates unnecessary frustration and confusion for the end-user.

I will list a potential solution and the benefits:

Method 1: • Notifies the user that they have broken a rule.
• Notifies a user where the rules are located.
• Appropriate courteous response to a new user that has unintentionally broken a rule.

Method 2: • The same as above, but a more stern and negative response.

Clearly you can see the benefit of implementing this new amendment to the chat rules.

I believe that Method 1 should be the appropriate response to someone breaking any of these rules. It is the most courteous and informative method.

Of course admins/mods should still be able to use their judgement to circumvent these procedures, but it does provide a good outline.

Hi no-name.

I thought I would drop you a quick reply to these suggestions and clarify why these rules are here.

Porn in chat / on the forum. Ultimately, we have to be quite tough on this on the forum as many people do assume they can just link pictures / vids. To put it bluntly, there are plenty of places to find porn online so why do we need it here? The forum is meant to be a cool place that people can feel comfortable in and learn and share experience rather than somewhere that has a "dirty" feel. It also has a lot to do with the forum image, some new people who are maybe more shy may not want to be around in an environment that is just filled with loads of porn rather than actual discussion / help. It isn't that we are against porn or anything, it just isn't what this website is for.

With regards to marijuana / controlled substances, although legal in some places there are still a lot of places they are not legal. We keep things black and white because it means that moderators have clear guidelines to operate within and ultimately having less opinion in moderation makes it more consistent.

With regard to the under 18 stuff - again, it is a blanket rule because it does make some people uncomfortable and there are MANY grey area's in laws internationally so due to that we just say no.

With regard to the chat kick message - this is a technical limitation. Due to the size and scale of the forum we are very limited in the type of chat client we can use. The old client was a lot better, but unfortunately had security issues

Understood.

Thanks for taking the time to read through what I said.

What are your thoughts on muting people for 1 minute instead of kicking them (first offences of any rules only).

Unfortunately the mute function was a function of our old chat client and is regrettably not available in the current client we're using.

As a result, the moderators are to use discretion based on the severity of the offence; to give the offending party a "verbal" warning or to go straight to kicking the offending member out of the chatroom.

Thank you for your concern we will address the old rule posting as soon as administratively possible.

Cheers

- Vit-J

_________________
"J, I guess yer so amazing in bed you send the girls into a transcendent state where they realize their own mortality and are shaken by the realization that their presence bears little impact on the universe, or they just realized they hate you"
-DJ_Z