Forum Community

[Hendie]

Dear members,

Over the past few weeks, our little corner of the WWW has been considerably less pleasant than what we prefer. Although we have valiantly tried not enter into lengthy debates and ignore the taunts and jibes that have been directed at the host team, the recent spate of outright lies regarding our administration of your forum has forced us to respond.

Warnings are issued as a last resort to those members that have, despite requests, consistently operated outside the boundaries of our terms and conditions, or alternatively, they are issued immediately if we believe that there has been a serious breach of conduct. This course of action is only taken once it is agreed on by the entire Host team. We purposely keep the warnings private, so that only the warned member is aware of his or her status, so as not to humiliate or embarrass any member unjustly. We have a staggered system, with every member being afforded the opportunity of 3 warnings before further action is taken (again, unless there has been a serious breach of conduct). Sometimes, if we become aware of the misuse of the PM facility after a warning has been issued, we disable this module, although the member is still able to post in the general forum.

In the recent past, we have had the unfortunate task of dealing with a small group of members who do not like the way that we administer SAAustralia. Far from being the Fun Police, we try to make sure that the content here is useful, relevant, interesting, topical and perhaps most importantly, appropriate for everyone that may visit our site. This means that we have to edit language, caution when a subject is straying towards an all-out political or religious debate (or more accurately, argument!) and occasionally close or move posts that have gotten out of control. Some members don't like this approach, and while we would like to please all of the people all of the time, we are happy to simply please most of the people most of the time. Our phenomenal growth and the stream of compliments that we get about our special site is testament to the fact that we are at least achieving this.

The members who were unhappy with our stance set about goading the Host team at almost every opportunity, with taunts posted on many threads along the lines of "let's see how long it takes before the mods take this down". After initially opting to ignore this rather childish behaviour, when some of these members started name-calling and directing personal insults at the Hosts within certain sub-forums, we decided to take action and issue warnings. As we feared, this only served to fuel the fire, and we collectively agreed to not engage in further debate or be drawn into arguments. This remains our position. However, in light of some further recent developments, where these members have now decided to set up a separate immigration forum where they openly 'name and shame' the Hosts that they disapprove of and also demean and belittle our forum community and how we operate, we have decided to issue a public statement and defend ourselves and our forum, and the work that we all do to ensure that there is somewhere on the web for people to find information about what it means to undertake a migration to Australia.

This is our last open letter on this matter, and we hope it puts paid to the conspiracy theory that there is a conspiracy!