What do you want Eagle Time to be?

I reckon that as a general rule, exceptions to the rules will be permissible - in the event the people who would enforce them find it sufficiently amusing. Which is arbitrary, but eh. While the forums are small enough for me to have a grip on who people are and how they interact, it shouldn't be a biggie. The rules we have for a bigger forum are mostly laziness, so they won't be due for a rewrite. We'll basically police them lightly for a good while, until we've gotta follow 'em harder.

In terms of being allowed to tell people to go fuck themselves, that's tough for me to make a call on. As an admin, I'm kinda reneging my rights to tell people to not do stuff that's a personal bugbear which doesn't step into "socially unacceptable" territory (seeing as I'm forever speaking out of my Admin-branded megaphone).

Which pretty much brings it down to the community. If the community's generally ok with the one guy who bitches about everything, I'm ultimately not going to enforce it even if reading every post of theirs is like pulling teeth. What's socially acceptable's decided by the society, not the society's attack dog/modmin. You guys have to tell me, through reactions and interactions (and PMs if you're like me and don't like airing laundry in public), what's cool and what ain't. That doesn't mean you have to (or even would be applauded for) chipping in whenever you see someone doing something you find annoying, but I guess I'd be looking for things like people dodging unpleasant conversations. Once I know what most people think, I can tell people to suck it up or tell the whiner to quit his bitching. For example.

That system's only gonna work while I've got the energy/resources/mana to be able to keep tabs on most of the community, but if the logical conclusion of that is public pillory-fests as to whether haters should stay or whether haters should go now, I guess that's a possibility.


Hopefully that made sense, but I think typing that out helped me cement more of my thoughts on the matter in my own head. I might tweak the rules after this to try and reflect my preference for community enforcement.