quote:
Originally posted by Memnoch:
Anyone remember a forum called BGDungeon? Some of you may even be refugees from that forum. BGDungeon was massive – about 10,000 members. It crashed and burned about a year ago because of this very problem – abuse and disrespect of authority by a small group of people who destroyed it for everyone else. They started disrespecting the mods and admin. This began to attract trolls. Eventually the mods all gave up and eventually BGDungeon himself gave up and shut down the forum. Ask Groljach, fable, Sephiroth, RudeDawg or kiwidoc about their BGDungeon experiences.
*copy/pastes the thing he posted earlier at the HADB board*
*Nods in agreement*
Even worse, BGDungeon had about 15000 (!) members at the time of the deletion. It completely got out of hand because the webmaster stopped caring about his own site, lost interest in it, not sure what, but he didn't make 1 single post since September 2000 (BGDungeon went down in March 2001, figures...)
There were only 4 mods for a board with 15000 members, at least a couple of hundred regulars posting every day. One of these mods was hardly around due to illnesses, so that leaves only three... Only the admin was able to ban people, and since he was never around in the first place, bans always took several days. In February and March half the forum was nothing more but a playground for hordes of trolls, just imagine the worst troll you've ever had at Ironworks but then 15 of them. And hardly anything the mods were able to do about it aside deleting all of the trolls' posts... As you can see, a lack of rules and respect only spawns more trolls.
There may have been other reasons for closing down aside from all the trolls (mainly on a financial level), but note that BGDungeon was an behemoth completely gotten out of control...
Be glad there are rules and that there are staff members upholding those rules, bending them a little or being fair if the situation asks for it. And you think Ziroc is a little too strict? Ha! You have seen nothing yet... Just trust me when I say that you should be glad to have Ziroc, and not one of those real tirants, admins deleting any reference to other boards because they're afraid of losing traffic, banning members because they disagree (note: not flame, but disagree) with that same admin... It happens. Trust me.