Mick Wenlock
Admin Emeritus (retired)
Dear all,
As you will have noticed things have been changing on ESMB. Not, I hope in the board itself but in the administration of it.
Emma wanted to move on and devote much more time to her real life and her family and eventually Ethercat and I volunteered to take on the administration roles for ESMB.
Both Ethercat and myself have been around for a long while and, I hope most everyone is familiar with us in one way or another. In order to make the transition we decided to split the administration into two broad areas; Social and Technical, as these reflect our mutual best areas of endeavor.
Ethercat has agreed (thankfully) to be the lead on the technical side of running the site and I will back her up as the Sorcerer's Apprentice. I will take the main role for dealing with the message boards, the interaction between Users and Moderators and Admins. Anyone is free to PM or email either of us on any issue of course.
I have been asked by the Moderators to explain how I look at moderating the message boards and my expectations on “where we go from here”.
One of the main reasons I volunteered to step and help with the Administration of the board is that one of the alternatives was to archive the site and for several trusted people to host copies of the archive for future people to refer to. And, while that is a noble endeavor and will, I hope be done I did not think it was time for such a valuable resource for the “Ex” community to go into a passive state.
Here is a link to emma's post about her hopes for ESMB:
http://www.forum.exscn.net/showthread.php?264-My-hope-for-this-board
ESMB is valuable, IMHO, because it provides an interactive, living community for exes to come to. It provides a unique place to talk about things within a community of people that understand the broad strokes and background of what another ex-Scientologist may be going through.
I also like to think that it provides a resource for family members going through their own kind of angst on how to deal with relatives who might be in.
There are many other aspects of value – the chance to find an old friend, to get resources on how to deal with issues regarding having been in Scientology and how to get out of the mindset, all of them are incredibly valuable.
And I consider the preservation of all this to be the primary mission.
I also believe that such a site as this needs to provide a place for long term members to come to and to interact with others who, while not looking for support, want to message and post with old friends about things that may have little to do with Scientology per se, or provide support to others.
So that is how I see things going forward.
Now to moderating and “rules”.
My own personal take on both rules and moderating is that the simpler the better. I worked for AOL in the 90's when the interminable arguing and nitpicking over Terms of service brought many message boards to a standstill. So rather than dealing with specific content I tend to the idea of speaking to the behavior.
I believe that behavior on sites such as this is best described as “behave as you would were you talking personally to the other people in a pub or club or coffee shop” . All of us on here are adults and I expect all posters on here to post as adults – with respect to other posters, even in disagreement, and avoiding personal attacks and invective.
This is also not a site for the consistent pushing of personal agendas. There are a couple of topics in the Members only area for those who want to discuss subjects not related to the board's overall purpose and in those topic areas one can post away... but while we may be more tolerant of heated arguments in the Members only area, we will still not tolerate blatant abuse of other people.
But back to my main point. Please be aware of your words and behavior and, if you make a slip and the Mod asks you to cool it, please pay attention. People who continue to provoke and ignore the requests to calm down will, alas, be banned by the Moderator for a fixed period of time. If it goes on then the ban will be made permanent.
Abusive PMs to moderators will not EVER be tolerated – if you find yourself in disagreement with what the moderator did or said you are free to PM myself or Ethercat to look into it. But if the PM to the Moderator contains abuse, the person sending it will be banned. The mods and the admins all do this job for free because we sincerely believe in what this board can be.
If you have ideas for topics or for better organization please feel free to PM the Mods or Ethercat or myself. We are actively looking at ways to make this place more fun – a better place for new exes to find a friendly place and a better place for the dusty old timers among us to laugh with friends.
Thanks for listening – if you have any questions – ask away.
As you will have noticed things have been changing on ESMB. Not, I hope in the board itself but in the administration of it.
Emma wanted to move on and devote much more time to her real life and her family and eventually Ethercat and I volunteered to take on the administration roles for ESMB.
Both Ethercat and myself have been around for a long while and, I hope most everyone is familiar with us in one way or another. In order to make the transition we decided to split the administration into two broad areas; Social and Technical, as these reflect our mutual best areas of endeavor.
Ethercat has agreed (thankfully) to be the lead on the technical side of running the site and I will back her up as the Sorcerer's Apprentice. I will take the main role for dealing with the message boards, the interaction between Users and Moderators and Admins. Anyone is free to PM or email either of us on any issue of course.
I have been asked by the Moderators to explain how I look at moderating the message boards and my expectations on “where we go from here”.
One of the main reasons I volunteered to step and help with the Administration of the board is that one of the alternatives was to archive the site and for several trusted people to host copies of the archive for future people to refer to. And, while that is a noble endeavor and will, I hope be done I did not think it was time for such a valuable resource for the “Ex” community to go into a passive state.
Here is a link to emma's post about her hopes for ESMB:
http://www.forum.exscn.net/showthread.php?264-My-hope-for-this-board
ESMB is valuable, IMHO, because it provides an interactive, living community for exes to come to. It provides a unique place to talk about things within a community of people that understand the broad strokes and background of what another ex-Scientologist may be going through.
I also like to think that it provides a resource for family members going through their own kind of angst on how to deal with relatives who might be in.
There are many other aspects of value – the chance to find an old friend, to get resources on how to deal with issues regarding having been in Scientology and how to get out of the mindset, all of them are incredibly valuable.
And I consider the preservation of all this to be the primary mission.
I also believe that such a site as this needs to provide a place for long term members to come to and to interact with others who, while not looking for support, want to message and post with old friends about things that may have little to do with Scientology per se, or provide support to others.
So that is how I see things going forward.
Now to moderating and “rules”.
My own personal take on both rules and moderating is that the simpler the better. I worked for AOL in the 90's when the interminable arguing and nitpicking over Terms of service brought many message boards to a standstill. So rather than dealing with specific content I tend to the idea of speaking to the behavior.
I believe that behavior on sites such as this is best described as “behave as you would were you talking personally to the other people in a pub or club or coffee shop” . All of us on here are adults and I expect all posters on here to post as adults – with respect to other posters, even in disagreement, and avoiding personal attacks and invective.
This is also not a site for the consistent pushing of personal agendas. There are a couple of topics in the Members only area for those who want to discuss subjects not related to the board's overall purpose and in those topic areas one can post away... but while we may be more tolerant of heated arguments in the Members only area, we will still not tolerate blatant abuse of other people.
But back to my main point. Please be aware of your words and behavior and, if you make a slip and the Mod asks you to cool it, please pay attention. People who continue to provoke and ignore the requests to calm down will, alas, be banned by the Moderator for a fixed period of time. If it goes on then the ban will be made permanent.
Abusive PMs to moderators will not EVER be tolerated – if you find yourself in disagreement with what the moderator did or said you are free to PM myself or Ethercat to look into it. But if the PM to the Moderator contains abuse, the person sending it will be banned. The mods and the admins all do this job for free because we sincerely believe in what this board can be.
If you have ideas for topics or for better organization please feel free to PM the Mods or Ethercat or myself. We are actively looking at ways to make this place more fun – a better place for new exes to find a friendly place and a better place for the dusty old timers among us to laugh with friends.
Thanks for listening – if you have any questions – ask away.
Last edited by a moderator:
