27 April, 2007
- ArtWanted.com Staff
- 5,162 Views
- 115 Comments
Message Board Changes
In the last 6 months we have seen a huge increase in the number of member fights and personal attacks that are launched from within the message boards. These posts have resulted in wars between many members, members leaving the site and lost revenue for ArtWanted.com. We created the message boards to build a stronger art community and encourage friendships between members and it looks like the opposite is happening.
The boards are filled with posts that break our rules. When we warn a member about breaking a rule, we are usually mocked by them the next day for our comments. For every post we delete, two more pop-up that are just as bad. For every member we ban from the boards, two more join that cause problems. The situation has escalated to a point where the message boards have become a negative aspect of the website instead of a positive one and it's time for us to make a change to correct this.
For the last few months we have been considering removing all message boards from the site to restore peace again to ArtWanted.com. It's not something that we wanted to do, but the message boards have pushed many more members away from our site than they ever brought in.
While we thought about the pros and cons of removing all message boards, we had a second idea. This idea was to remove just the section where 99% of all the problems start...the General Discussion area. Due to the nature of this section, many topics have been posted that have caused high debate and arguments between many members. A ton of people have left our site due to what they have read or what others have said about them in this section.
This option sounded like a much better alternative than shutting down all of the boards. For this reason, we have put this plan into action and as of today we have removed the General Discussion area of the ArtWanted.com message boards. Topics that are not art & poetry related will now be removed from the message boards.
This is an ART site and we no longer want to moderate the fights between members and the disputes over politics, religion and the other random topics that have been seen in the past. Let's all get back to why we joined ArtWanted.com...because of our love for the arts.
This decision may come as a shock to some and others may have been expecting it. We understand that the 'General Discussion' area has been the most popular area of the message boards and there will be some that are upset over this decision. For those that are, all we can say is that it's much better than the alternative we were considering. It's unfortunate that a few dozen members that can't control what they type have lead us to make this decision, we wish we didn't have to do this and that everyone could just get along on the boards.
At this point, we don't know if this is a temporary change or a long term decision, we will just have to see how things go over the next few months. We hope that peace can be restored to ArtWanted.com through this change and we don't have to close any more areas of the message boards.
Another small change we have done to the message boards is to require at least 3 images in a members portfolio, before they can post on the boards. We hope that this will cut down on the spam posts and reduce the number of members that join just to cause problems.
On a positive note, we have also added a new 'Photography Discussion' area where our members can talk about traditional and digital photography topics. We wanted to separate photography from the 'Art Discussion' area in order to build up a larger photography community for ArtWanted.com.
We hope that everyone understands why we have made these changes and that by doing so, it will bring a positive feeling back to ArtWanted.com
