This is on behalf of the whole AusLancer Team, and has been reviewed and revised by the Admins and Moderators.
The point of this, is to remind everyone that we are a community. We are a dysfunctional family, where we all don't show the same views, opinions, etc, but we all have the one thing in common that we love lancers.
The Admins/Mods have been dealing with scuffs and issues between members in AusLancer for a while now. It started with the old regulars being rude, short and unhelpful to new members, then jump forward to the Rice Vs Non-Rice issue (which we feel was successfully resolved) and now we have issues with user's trash-talking sponsors and promoting their competitors.
It Needs To Stop Now Please! This goes for everyone from the Newest of new members, to the Premiums, to the Sponsors to the Admins and Moderators.
It was brought to our attention several weeks back that a competitor of one of our sponsors was accessing the site under an alias and using the account to solicit his goods and services to other members over PM. Upon being confronted with this accusation the user instead chose to carry on like a fool, still pretend to be someone else and also threaten legal action against us. It was then by the decision of the Admins and Moderators that the user was to be banned permanently from the forum. It is our duty to our sponsors that we protect the right that they have to sell and advertise on AusLancer and selling via PM on AusLancer, blatantly plugging and talking up competition who is not a paying Sponsor of course is going to attract our attention.
Everyone is entitled to Opinion (something that has been said quite a bit now) and this includes everyone including Mods and Admins which according to some users they can't have, and that people shouldn't get all up in arms over it. If you are that defensive over your build, your opinion, whatever, don't share it then if you're just going to start abusing people, and go off ya nut.
We aren't going to be tolerant any more on users who play up. We have banned users for less in the past, and recently we have been extremely lenient over several issues.
Finally, in the end it is the Admins who run this forum and as much as we try to listen to the feedback of members when making decisions, we end up making the final decision on matters. What I think many also fail to see is amount of work that the admins and moderators put in behind the scenes to keep the forum up and running in the interest of helping out the community as a whole and none of which we are paid for doing. After all this forum has always and will always only aim to raise enough funds (through the support from our sponsors and premium members) to cover the running costs, not to make a profit and also not through forcing people to pay in order to access information on the site.
As a community we do not want these issues to continue as it is not only affecting the internal quality of AusLancer but affects our reputation to external parties and benefits nobody.
Skippy: I'd just like to add, in the new year we will hopefully be changing from the current phpbb format to hopefully a vBulletin (once they finally officially release version 5 from Beta phase) format. It will allow better mods, mobile format support, more features and all current topics and users data are easily transferred. Just a headsup.
The point of this, is to remind everyone that we are a community. We are a dysfunctional family, where we all don't show the same views, opinions, etc, but we all have the one thing in common that we love lancers.
The Admins/Mods have been dealing with scuffs and issues between members in AusLancer for a while now. It started with the old regulars being rude, short and unhelpful to new members, then jump forward to the Rice Vs Non-Rice issue (which we feel was successfully resolved) and now we have issues with user's trash-talking sponsors and promoting their competitors.
It Needs To Stop Now Please! This goes for everyone from the Newest of new members, to the Premiums, to the Sponsors to the Admins and Moderators.
It was brought to our attention several weeks back that a competitor of one of our sponsors was accessing the site under an alias and using the account to solicit his goods and services to other members over PM. Upon being confronted with this accusation the user instead chose to carry on like a fool, still pretend to be someone else and also threaten legal action against us. It was then by the decision of the Admins and Moderators that the user was to be banned permanently from the forum. It is our duty to our sponsors that we protect the right that they have to sell and advertise on AusLancer and selling via PM on AusLancer, blatantly plugging and talking up competition who is not a paying Sponsor of course is going to attract our attention.
Everyone is entitled to Opinion (something that has been said quite a bit now) and this includes everyone including Mods and Admins which according to some users they can't have, and that people shouldn't get all up in arms over it. If you are that defensive over your build, your opinion, whatever, don't share it then if you're just going to start abusing people, and go off ya nut.
We aren't going to be tolerant any more on users who play up. We have banned users for less in the past, and recently we have been extremely lenient over several issues.
Finally, in the end it is the Admins who run this forum and as much as we try to listen to the feedback of members when making decisions, we end up making the final decision on matters. What I think many also fail to see is amount of work that the admins and moderators put in behind the scenes to keep the forum up and running in the interest of helping out the community as a whole and none of which we are paid for doing. After all this forum has always and will always only aim to raise enough funds (through the support from our sponsors and premium members) to cover the running costs, not to make a profit and also not through forcing people to pay in order to access information on the site.
As a community we do not want these issues to continue as it is not only affecting the internal quality of AusLancer but affects our reputation to external parties and benefits nobody.
Skippy: I'd just like to add, in the new year we will hopefully be changing from the current phpbb format to hopefully a vBulletin (once they finally officially release version 5 from Beta phase) format. It will allow better mods, mobile format support, more features and all current topics and users data are easily transferred. Just a headsup.