Behaviour issues

The Marble Blast Staff have been, for years, trying to create a friendly environment for all users to enjoy. As we grew from the older leaderboards to the newer ones, and later added an online Webchat, we realised that previous rules set on the forums needed to be brought to the new Webchat, as well as refined to account for today's community.

We have introduced several measurements so that all members can enjoy their time on Webchat; these include filters such as spam, politics, caps lock, and swearing (all of which are present in many other online gaming sites and communities). We know that the community's main userbase is mostly made up of adolescents, which is why it is important for us to provide a friendly environment to chat and play.

Unfortunately, a few members have decided to spam Webchat, much to the dismay of the moderating team. As a response, HiGuy had created an 'Adult Chat', where these users could spam without hitting the main chat. An additional chat, named 'coolchat', was created as a separate entity (it is inactive today) but was later dropped in favor of the Adult Chat.

As time progressed, the contents in the Adult Chat became worse and even included talking down other members. At the same time, new rules and filters were introduced to the main Webchat as some contents of Adult Chat had actually leaked. Eventually as more time passed, we realised that Adult Chat was no longer serving its original purpose, and instead it has divided part of the community by giving a few members a special treatment, while the rest had to follow Webchat rules. Even when Adult Chat was not in use, these members were given a treatment by the staff not taking serious action whenever they broke the rules.

Eventual discussions that followed had the whole staff agree that Adult Chat should be axed. We noticed its users had other ways of contacting each other (namely, Skype), and that the contents of the Adult Chat should not exist any further on Webchat. We saw it fitting to unify Webchat completely with a proper set of rules to maintain the original goal that we wanted: to have a friendly community environment.

What happened next was uncalled for. The members who had the special privileges complained about the loss of their Adult Chat quite heavily, and some of them started to make several of arguments for talking down the staff. A few of those arguments include:
- They told us we were lazy for not moderating at all, and when we did moderate, they got pissed at us for moderating.
- They spammed Webchat even when told to stop. This was done on a daily basis, several times a day.
- They said they knew better than everyone else what the community wanted.
- They called every single staff member a plethora of different degrading names, and kept noting how useless the staff are.
- They say the staff are a "hivemind", and that they should be on the staff in order to give actual opinions that differ.
- Threatening to leave the community, and saying that the community will die when they leave.
- Continuously stated that they would be better moderators, and named a few of the current moderators and administrators who should be removed from this site.

Whenever we responded or argued against any of the above points, they then repeated said points, and made no further useful arguments. These arguments repeated themselves for weeks, and with each and every decision we made (after having discussed them for hours in staff chat) they questioned us in a way that implied that we don't have the best interest in mind for the community.

After weeks of this harassment, the staff has had enough, calling for extreme action to be taken. That was handed this morning, where Kurt, nobody and hPerks were all banned from Webchat, and the forums.

Nobody has been the main spammer on Webchat for weeks (just the last five days have dozens of examples, including staff asking him to stop), and has been given a three day ban. He spent a lot of energy trying to come up with ways to get around the staff telling him to stop spamming, as well as the various filters that were set up. It got to the point where he counted characters before Webchat auto-muted him.

Kurt has been the driving force behind this whole ordeal. He has been banned twice in the past, even on InstantAction, on similar grounds. He has not learned from the past and when we gave him special treatment and privileges he abused them. When we took them away, he started complaining, making the previously said arguments and repeating those for the next weeks to come. The majority of staff agreed to ban him until further notice and discussion.

hPerks, although he was not directly involved in most of the above, was given a warning after continuing the tiring jokes of 'Kurt for Staff' and requesting the same privileges that were removed (as well as the joke for removing all filters from the chat). After continuing despite the warning, he was punished with a one day ban. This has expired as of now.

After this whole ordeal, the staff agreed that we could take a few lessons. For example we need to communicate better when a person is warned so that the next one who deals with the problem already knows the member was verbally warned. Likewise, we understand that what constitutes as 'spam' is different for everyone. We do try and remain around the same grounds, regardless. Additionally, we will give a verbal warning if we find you breaking the rules before starting to punish (in the form of a lengthy mute to start with).
It is most unfortunate that we do not have a Warning System as with the old ProBoards days, but we do hope in the future to implement a better system.

We hope that you will understand the difficulties that come with running a website and an online Webchat. Our staff have had experience with other communities as well and noted that we game more chances than most others would have. Plenty of other communities would have banned these members much easier.

If you have any further suggestions or would like to discuss the rules with us in a civil manner, we would be happy to talk.

We wish everyone happy Marble Blasting,
- The Marble Blast Community Staff