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I do agree that chat wasn't helping the community as of late. But, this was due to about 3-5 members, intentional or not, had done things to degrade chat's quality. They started the drama, bickered pointlessly with other members, harming the chat in it's own, and many other things. Then this caused the problem of people trying to get each other banned, once again with more problems. As for spamming questionable content, I haven't been too familiar with it, and haven't seen it within the past week or so.
As for acting kindly towards members. I don't think this was a major problem, but some people might have taken innocent jokes, and placed them as personal attacks. Most of the people I saw in chat were very kind, once again, some people had to ruin it. As for saving the chat, I thought over the past few days, people were acting positive in chat. We even had some discussions for games for once, and nothing seemed negative. While I think everyone contributed to chat's harm a little bit, I think most of the damage was made by a few specific people. I do understand that chat rooms are difficult to moderate because of their nature, but once again, many problems requiring mod/admin assistance stemmed from specific people.
I wish the mods/admins could have taken a look at what chat's stance was like this week. No trolling, flaming, or anything else. Due to the banning of trouble makers. I'm fine with people joining another chat room from a different site, as they might see it as superior. But I really wish chat could have been given another chance.
Feldo and I did go over the chat logs every so often. I skimmed over them this week, but there were still issues of spamming and etc. Just because one or two users were gone, it guaranteed nothing, if I learned anything from being on this site and watching chat, it was that certain members were always targeted. Remember that before your recent "troublemakers", you were a "troublemaker" yourself and were chatbanned. Since then, there have been several members who were targeted or were troublemakers.
From the logs, there was a pattern of behavior that didn't just stop when one user was warned or punished. Even with their absence, the "peace" of chat didn't last. We aren't just removing this because of specific members, but because it became incredibly difficult and impractical to maintain the quality of the chat.
1. Inspecting the chat logs after seeing that members who had apparently ruined the chat had been removed.
Inspecting the chat logs is incredibly difficult, the logs update every so often and the search function is rather limited. Even with a logging system, I saw behavior from all users which was, to be honest, pretty sickening.
Another issue was that the users in chat never reported others, but when users were warned, they genuinely didn't understand what was wrong or felt it unfair, making the chat standards somehow different from the Forums themselves. Implementing new rules did little to affect that, it was just a mentality that grew over time.
2. Allowing a larger access gate to enter chat. More posts, apply for entry, IP Check, etc.
Although a high post count would prevent some bots, trolls and spammers could still easily make it in when moderators aren't active (and in most cases, their only target was chat). As for applying for entry or IP checking, it would do little to nothing to change what already happened.
I think Poison's comment " Peace has returned to the land!" is very hypocritical. Especially when some of his actions actually lead to chat's demise.
This is just a false accusation, Poison had nothing to do with questioning whether we should keep chat or not. Feld0 suggested the idea of removing the chat before Poison even joined the forums, mainly from his experiences with it from his other site. Not only that, but the fate of chat was uncertain since before December 2012, before any of your issues with Poison.
Feld0, I, and the other mods discussed shutting down the chat for over a month and came to the consensus of removing it. Only because the chat license expired today, did Feldo and I have a final discussion and really decide.
