I feel like making a topic addressing the current issue on the forum. As most of you probably know there was some debate about banning people from the forum, which resulted in people getting info about having their ips logged. Most people here seem to have a problem with that. Personally, I don't care either way since I am behind a proxy.
The issue among people right now, from what I understand, is that Luna didn't say anything about logging ips when it started. Having said that, I don't have a problem with ip logging either. People might feel betrayed over what has happened. Again, I personally don't feel betrayed. What's done is done; there's nothing that can be done to go back in time and fix it. I'm not even saying whether I think it was right or wrong -- I just don't care. Honestly.
To focus on the actual issue at hand, the forum seems to be in a state of change. Spatial Mind will be given moderator status and the forum will most likely start to follow more conventional guidelines. I personally don't mind, if it has to be done. Change isn't always necessarily bad. New people can start having more fun and the older members can find other forums to enjoy.
From what I understand most of the community seems to be against the change. A lot of petty insults have been thrown both ways and nobody seems able to take a few steps back to consider the opposing opinion. I'm not going to point the finger at anyone here. I can somewhat relate to both sides.
I'm not sure which side to address first so I'll flip a coin and...Luna. Luna created this forum and is hosting it. As such, she has every right to do whatever she wants with the forum. Unless someone else is willing to create and host a forum it will stay like that. I believe Luna's voiced her issue with the current situation: spamming and hacking.
I'm not a big fan of hackers. I can completely understand why hackers and spammers shouldn't be here. The other issue I believe was respect. Despite helping the people here out by creating and hosting this forum she's not given any credit for it. I can relate. I've had some projects where I was expected to be a working horse despite doing it all out of my own good will, so I ended shutting the projects down eventually.
Community. I believe the community's problem is control. The community hates control, to be more precise.The community consists of a lot of stubborn people for whom it is important to be on top of whatever situation they are in. Introducing admins/ip logging/control will make the people feel threatened or subdued. To further my point, one of the characteristic traits of a sociopath is: "Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest;"
Given the personality traits of the people visiting this forum, the community will always try to oppose authorities. On a forum like this it will most likely result in the one thing they can do to oppose: hacking and/or spamming. The community also seems to want complete anonymity. This is in order to be able to talk about themselves honestly without the fear of being exposed. The fear might range from complete paranoia to someone other than Luna getting access to the forum logs.
Now that I'm done explaining the point of views as I understand them, I'd like to hear what you think about all this.