We've spoken quite a bit privately about the underground forum in the past and you had always stated that you were happy with how the forum was going. I've been absent from the forum for a long time so perhaps a change in member behavior has led to these changes.
There was a time when most members used certain tactics in a very targeted manner to expose problematic sources. The issues were inevitably explicitly identified in order to hold the sources accountable. These tactics were largely limited to sources, reps, and shameless shills in the underground subforum.
Over time, it seemed the forum attracted more and more new members for who saw an opportunity to
indiscriminately, both publicly and
privately, attack, insult, harass, disparage, stalk, etc
anyone who disagreed with them. This was not limited to sources and their sycophants. The overriding objective of harm minimization by holding sources accountable was lost to many. The goal of suppressing dissenting speech in every subforum via harassment and intimidation seemed to take priority.
I don't know but I'm sure you can appreciate my concern with what appears to be a very heavy handed approach to the implementation of permanent bans.
Of course. Unfortunately, it is very difficult if not impossible run a forum without compliance to the basic rules of conduct. There are few options other than permanent bans to deal with intentional, repeated, and blatant violations of the guidelines. If repeated warnings and explanations are unheeded, then such action is necessary.
Is there a thread containing a list of what isn't permissible? If so, perhaps it would be helpful to pin it here. Simply stating in the header that the forum is uncensored isn't entirely accurate and the rules appear somewhat ambiguous and arbitrarily enforced/implemented, particularly when you announce the addition of new ones in other forums as shown below:
Right now, there is just the boilerplate, e.g. no spam, no violence, no hateful conduct, etc. You may recall we had a list of about 7 or 8 simple rules that provided a little more specific guidance. But even that was insufficient since members/sources creatively try to violate the spirit of rules. I am working on a document with more specific guidance while avoiding the oppressive, legal-like policies of twitter, etc.
With regard to this thread in particular, it is obvious that Naps' intent was to troll. He baited those banned members into reacting emotionally and they did. It was a garbage thread thread that provided nothing beneficial to Meso, and certainly not worthy of throwing away members who have contributed to Meso for years. I'd rather have seen the thread deleted than bans handed out.
Agreed. Regarding this thread in particular, I had always encouraged ALL feedback regarding sources, both positive and negative. Additionally, photos of products have always been encouraged. I had even expressed support for the posting of 3rd party reviews - mainly to allow members to share bad reviews that briefly appeared on well-known source forums before they were deleted as well as reviews from websites like trustpilot, scamalert, etc. So, there were no violations at the time.
While this guidance was well-intended, it was clearly being exploited and abused.
In this thread, the third-party reviews posted by the source were all taken from the source's website (which hosted over 20k reviews collected over numerous years) where customers were incentivized with promises of up to $25 or even up to 40% discounts depending on the quality and thoroughness of the reviews.
Some members expressed their concern and respectfully worked with me to stop this. Other members took a different approach.
Ultimately, we decided to prohibit all sources from reposting any third-party reviews. There were some that suggested just banning fake reviews by sources but this would place the burden of proof on MESO. Others thought the ban should be only on reposting incentivized third-party reviews. But the easiest and probably best was just to stop sources from reposting any reviews at all.
