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Alright, so, until now I've pretty much abstained from commenting here, but now I feel the need to spread my whore bile on this topic.
I'll get this out right now. We're all going to have different ideas on how a forum is supposed to be run. Some peoples opinions on the matter will be better supported by facts. People like Superbus do have a fair history in this forum business, and thus their opinions should probably be given more weight, then, say, random spamposter #342.
But let's just think about this. We have a group of people (and they're not all Ashtray posters or "Mini-Blackens" as seems to have been implied), who think SF needs to be "fixed" (and they're not even all saying it should be fixed the same way, if you actually read the posts they're all saying different things), and then we have a group of people going "Lolno you guys can just go away if you don't like it", usually followed by posting spam. Then there are a couple more people. I mean really people, is this what you want to be doing?
I'm going to talk about Blacken here, if only because he's fairly vocal and iconic in this situation. Now, I don't always agree with him, in fact, there are a fair number of things we disagree on (although the things I disagree with him on are all rather subjective things), but even though I don't really agree with him fully here, I'm almost forced into agreement with him. Want to know why? Because in your knee jerk attempts to fight back against the press for change, everything has been polarized to fuck. As people said before, essentially, everyone with an opinion past neutral has been lumped into the "OH MY GOD THEY ARE ALL MINI BLACKENS" category. Even though many of them are saying fairly different things.
Now, let's look at SFs history. There have been several points (many of them points that I'm sure a lot of members would rather not remember) when certain sections of the forum where, for lack of a better term, pretty damn shitty. And then some people would come and try to improve them and their would be massive resistance. It wouldn't matter how you tried. I spent several months arguing on the FE boards in an entirely polite and respectful manner. I avoided offending anyone when I could, and I pretty much tried to be as compromising as possible. And all I was arguing for was that people not be attacked for using facts and evidence based arguments. I used to get lockjaw reading the forums there. And yes, eventually things changed, but I don't even know if it was because of the arguing, or because more and more members who agreed with me joined. Now a lot of people who previously were in direct opposition with me are (as far as I can see) enjoying themselves, probably more than before. Then there were other occurrences like the FESS merger and the improvement of general discussion here. The things I learned from all this are pretty much A) SF has a tendency to disagree with new concepts, and then eventually when they're actually implemented, suddenly not only be fine with them, but actually prefer them, and B) respond much better to someone being an asshole, bitching and screaming at them, breaking rules, and doing similar shit than they are to someone being very polite and gracious and patient.