Shutting down the Fighting Street forum

[PCEngineFX]

So I'm going to be closing down the Fighting Street forum for good on Sept. 1st....just one less area to worry about for all of us, and maybe will cause some peace around here.

[nat]

No arguments here....

[Keranu]

I think the problem with "Fighting Street" was centering the idea around forum flaming rather than just be a miscellaneous forum for anything non-related and spam-related.

[PCEngineFX]

BTW, I wont be deleting the forum, just making it read only.

[Joe Redifer]

Keranu, that's what the Chit-Chat forum is for, though we'd rather not have spam. It's not even fun to make fun of spam bots because they don't care, just as long as people see their links, they win.

[Keranu]

By spam I mean anything that generally isn't appropriate for even the chit-chat area. Silly, nonsensical stuff. It's hip these days.

[Joe Redifer]

If you say so. 

[Joe Redifer]

The community here sure is a spiteful one, full of much hate and anger.  Same goes with the Neo Geo forums.  The more niche a system, the angrier people are?  I am taking a lot of flack for all of this because somehow everything is my fault.   

[PCEngineFX]

What would you like to do?  Would you like to take a break from moderating?  How do you like it?

[Joe Redifer]

Well to be honest, I'm the only moderator who is here on a regular basis.  That said, I don't really do too much because it is rare that something needs to be done.  When something is done for pretty much any reason, some members go nuts.  I am fine with any decision you make.  Though I think any moderator who does more than move an occasional thread will get backlash.  Comes with the territory.

[nat]

I do as much as possible when I'm around, but Joe is right, he's here more than I am and as such he usually gets to the "problems" before me. Because of that, he's often targeted as the "bad guy."

That said, he's right-- it comes with the territory. If he wants to take a step back for a while I'll happily play "bad guy" in the interim.

[nat]

Although, I will add this, on the topic of Fighting Street: it seems there's been quite the backlash against closing it. I realize it's not part of the image we want of the site, and I know it's not visible except to registered users, but what if instead of closing it we just went a step further and made it visible by-request only or something along those lines.

Enough people seem to get enjoyment out of goofing around in there that I think it might be worth keeping. Of course, these are just my two cents and I'm only speaking up because of the sheer volume of protest that's appeared in the past few days.

[Joe Redifer]

One thing this has helped is for me to grow some thicker skin. 

If you choose to keep Fighting Street open, perhaps you should remove the moderators from it.  I only ever did one thing in there because someone wished death on another member and man, people just couldn't handle it.

[PCEngineFX]

Well................since there has been such an uproar over closing it, perhaps it is better to keep it open rather than piss people off...and to make it truly "free", I can remove moderation from it.