You make it sound so shady. It just came up casually in a conversation I had with Mr Khan on his wall around the time the new mods were selected. He said 'mods have different opinions on lots of stuff e.g. Another mod wanted to ban you for *the post I linked*, but I found it quite funny and not bannable." then I assumed that the mod who wanted to ban me for it was tads12, as he is the only mod who posted in the thread which I posted in and he locked the thread. Mr khan didn't actually tell me it was tads12

*kanye shrug*

It doesn't just matter to me. It matters to the community. If there is a mod favoriting certain users, and giving those favored members private information and insight, I would very much like to know who that mod is so I can make a proper report to the head mod. I think it's very unfair and biased for several reasons.

That said, I'm not going after mods, I just think that if that stuff is really going on it needs to stop.  It's a source of paranoia among the moderation team and will only lead to problems and tension.

We want to make this community better, not worse.

then my apologies for the misunderstanding. I was honestly starting to think we had a secret PM society complete with double agent moderators and users.

Hatz, why be paranoid because he was talking to a mod? Didn't both tads and Monty just say it was important for mods to talk to users to help if needed, rather than ban or warn unnecessarily.

Favoritism and mod/user comm is not one and the same. Don't worry so much >.>

i had some fun in this evil thread yesterday and not because i increased my post count. no clue why some people might have problems with a thread like that with all users in this thread having fun with each other. that's all i can say about it

HD, can you explain to me this thing you keep saying about old users vs new users?

Carl, it's really hard to put into simple words. At first it was through a few talks of the forums getting worse, then it was the idea that things weren't the same, that the people weren't the same, in somewhere in 2011 around when Seece left it came to this point where the forums were dying because some users were killing the place. You had cases of me and Rol butting heads, the mafia meltdown I had, MBP's streak of bans, MDJ ragequitting after being harassed by Seece, Machina kicking the bucket and Spurge and Monty going full Monty against one another.

Then there are cases of moments where there is talk of users ruining the experience for others through vaccuous posting, and Khuutra advocating for more ruthless banning by eliminating imperfection by some way I'm yet not perfectly clear about, and you just get this sense that the old clashed with the new.

But then in other places you see harmony with older posters, like cases where I got along well with Archbrix, me making friends with Sal, the new mod team carrying the flame nicely, other cases of older users and newer users coming together like Amp mentioned he was able to do. In the past it felt like alot was flowing upstream, it would be nice to see more of a time where things flowed a little downstream, where the new guys were ushered into the forums more galantly.

I'm not sure I'm making sense Carl, and I'm not even sure my view is right or even representative of what's going on, but that's mostly how I feel and how it seems to me.

Old users vs. new users is a false dichotomy. There is no old guard, and there is no new guard. I, myself, have not been around long enough to be part of the former, and too long to be part of the latter; but there is no such thing, so there's no point ruminating there.

The point is that content is king, and in order to attract the highest number of posters possible, content has to be the primary focus as often as possible.

I've outlined the ways I think that would work best many times before; I won't do it again. That would be beating a dead horse pretty hard.

I have nothing against the "new" members (as much as that qualification counts anymore). It's important not to draw false correlations between general posting trends which I find off-putting and the most active people of the time, who would behave differently in different circumstances.

I'm not sure what people have against elimination/list/game/user above you/spam threads.

They were quite abundant back in the day. Just look at the most popular threads of all time. A large portion of them are "spam" threads. While I do agree that they can be shallow, I don't see the harm. They were fine then, what's wrong now?

I think people have just developed deep hatred for spammers in general and I think the problem is Spurgeoryan. Before you flip out, just let me explain.

Sometime last year, when Spurge was becoming active, he started to become unbearable. I think he's been much better this year, but last year, his presence was getting way to out of hand. Spamming wasn't frowned upon, but when people saw Spurge so much, I think they felt overwhelmed (I felt the same way). Eventually, people associated spam with Spurge. And so their hatred of Spurge passed over to spam as well. So, users were beginning to hate spam.

Then users like Pezus, NintendoPie, and several other new members of late 2011 started coming in and the spam was ridiculous! I would estimate that 80% of the post back then were from the same 6 users. I too believe that the spam was crazy back then. But, I don't see a problem now. For about the past eight months or so, spam has been kept under control. The thing is: when someone grows to hate someone, it's hard to eventually forgive them, even when they change. That's why people continue to hate Spurge, and so they continue to hate spam.

Again, spam threads aren't really the problem. That's made obvious by looking at past years. It's what Spurge and others did in late 2011. Even though his presence in the forums is not anywhere near as large as last year. The damage seems to be irreversible. I don't know exactly what Spurge must do to help his image, but I have one idea. Stop posting on everyone's wall! Seriously dude, I see you on 97% of forum users. Even for users who haven't posted in years! Even for users who haven't even posted! That's one thing that Spurge does that no other spammer has ever done in VGChartz history.

Hopefully, users will cool down and this underlying war on spam can cease.

I do agree, though. Too much spam is annoying. But that hasn't been the case for quite a long time imo.

EDIT: I could probably elaborate more on this at a later date. Some of my points don't appear to be fully explained.