Folks -

There have been a lot of inappropriate posts attacking or insulting other users tonight. I want to remind everyone that attacking or insulting other users under any circumstance is against the forum rules and will result in your posting privileges being suspended or even in a permanent ban from the site.

Please make sure to read the forum rules again and obey them at all times. If you have an issue with someone, you can use the report abuse button to let us know and we will be happy to investigate. That is the only appropriate action to take.

Thanks in advance for your cooperation.

Daniel - do you connect through AOL dial-up?

If anyone else is having this problem, can you also tell me if you connect through AOL dial-up?

Sorry, we had an issue with our email server that's now clearing up. The emails should stop in just a second, we're just clearing out the old backlog.

Sorry again,
Mike

Whisper - what happens when you try to log in on IE? Can you give me details on what happens, i.e. do you get a message saying the password doesn't match, does the site just hang, does the page just refresh as if nothing happens, etc.? If you can give me some details, we'll definitely look into it.

ike66 - if there's no mail when you check your mailbox, it's most likely because the user who sent you the message has either deactivated or been banned. You can see if the user is active by going to:

http://www.justsayhi.com/username

...but replace username with the username of the user who sent you a message. For example, to see my profile, you'd go to:

http://www.justsayhi.com/mike

UK, different, and gypsy - what's not working? If you're talking about the voting system, sometimes people will incorrectly nominate a topic for deletion, but that should get corrected as people vote. This topic, for example, was saved because people voted that it should not get deleted (which was the correct decision in my opinion).

Yeah we did some more testing and realized there was a bug that could cause that in IE. It's been fixed now so everything should be working correctly. If you see any more issues like that, definitely let us know.

Sorry about that. Thanks for pointing out the error.

Hope you'll still give us a chance Lex, we're getting more and more new people every day...

Do you know what operating system and browser are you using? Is it Windows XP and Internet Explorer?

OK I moved that topic, thanks for the heads up Whisper

I do know what you mean. We may add an option for "Move topic" instead of just deleting it. But for now, deleting is the only option.

Either way, definitely do not mail Vanchau or myself if you want a topic moved. That's what the new system is for, so until we have something better in place, please use the new tools to help teach users that topics should be posted in the appropriate forum.

Not to pick on you Daniel, but actually, the point of this system is so that people don't have to ask us to move threads. Our goal is to have the forums still running smoothly without having to have users contact us any time an issue arises. By having their thread deleted, hopefully people will learn to post their topic in the correct forum in the first place.

It definitely might be a little bumpy at first, but hopefully people will eventually get comfortable with it.

Yup, that's one idea we're considering. Hopefully you'll see some improvements in that area shortly...

Also, please do not get upset if one of your topics gets nominated for deletion. I have a feeling that will happen quite a bit, especially in the beginning as people want to try out the new tools. But you absolutely shouldn't take it personally - everyone has their own opinion, but the bar has been deliberately set high so that hopefully only topics that really should get deleted will get removed.

All you need is four "Don't delete" votes and your topic can't be deleted. So my guess is this topic will live. The goal of the new system is that the bar for deleting a topic should be fairly high. We may even increase it if too many topics get deleted.

You definitely shouldn't take it personally though if one of your topics gets nominated for deletion. I think that may happen quite a bit, especially in the beginning, as people just want to play around with the new tools.

Knoxman - I didn't think your first post was that bad, but your second one certainly was. Make sure to tone it down and keep the discussion civil. There's no need to resort to insults.

We can't claim credit for this idea, by the way. We saw a similar system on another site and liked it. Hopefully it will work well, but we're also definitely willing to change it if it's not achieving what we had hoped.

I agree that you need to have a somewhat thick skin in general when you're interacting with people on the internet. But I also definitely see how it could be frustrating to write messages to a ton of people and have very few or even no people respond. We're just trying to find ways to encourage people to respond without being overly coercive.

S1owhand - I hear what you are saying. That is definitely the tradeoff. But there are some things we could do to address that. We already allow you to set a lot of filters so that only people you really want to talk to can email you. We also could set the bar fairly low on the percent of emails you need to respond to, i.e. maybe anything over 50% is green, anything over 10% is yellow, and only less than 10% is red.

Anyways, it might be something that we try and if people hate it, we'll pull it out. Just trying to get a sense of people's initial reaction to it.

All votes do remain private - no one knows who voted for what except for Vanchau and myself.

Only topics that have been recently created can be nominated for deletion. The controls will be very obvious on those topics that are eligible. After a short period of time, the topic can no longer be deleted.

Really, at this point, we only want topics that clearly violate the rules to be deleted. You should be able to assess that immediately which is why we only allow them to be deletable for a short period.

Sometimes, though, a topic will start off on a good note, but then a few posts in someone flames another person and it degrades into personal attacks, etc. This system currently isn't designed to handle that, but we're brainstorming other ideas that might help address that like being able to report bad posts, etc.

Hopefully you'll see some improvements in that area shortly, but we'd like to first see how this initial set of improvements work.

Yup - when you nominate a topic for deletion, you have to state the reason why you think it should be deleted. This reason will be shown as everyone casts their votes. Once you see a topic that has been nominated for deletion, I think you'll be able to see how this works.