Why impose rules and bans on people for being silly and random?
We never ban people for those reasons. I cannot publicly discuss the reason for any particular ban, but they have all been due to clear-cut rule-breaking, and not borderline cases.
Why censor and block right and left?
Technically censorship only refers to government actions. But, if you are asking, why do we block some content? Largely, to make sure that people can have productive conversations on this forum.
A forum that strictly disallows only illegal actions will therefore allow: Personal attacks, overt racism, borderline harassment and embarrassment of individuals, and also creates a culture that encourages users to post illegal content to see how long it will last before it is removed.
If restricting this is "censorship", then bring on the censorship. Very, very few Internet forums restrict only what is strictly illegal.
I think that the admins are being petty tyrants and like having power to much. They have power here, so they will use it (maybe because they don't have control over anything else and it makes them feel good?). They've put THEIR joy in tyrany over the joy of congoers who want a fun, silly, random forum. Now its are rules, seriousness, and anger.
This is a rather silly accusation. Our job is to run an anime convention, not create a free-for-all discussion forum. Addressing moderation issues has taken up a growing amount of our time, which distracts from the other jobs we have to do for the convention (all of the moderators also have other staff positions). Over the last several months I have performed a remarkably low number of restrictive actions, such as thread-locking, post removal, and bans (not counting the changes yesterday in which I locked many threads). If anything, I suspect other staff would say that overall I am too lenient. The changes to this forum were a result of complaints over time, increased drama, and the wall that was growing between this forum area and the rest of the forum areas.
Very little has changed. Basically, the name and description of the forum were changed to emphasize that all the rules still apply, and you are not allowed to start chat threads unless they are dedicated to a topic. Take note that I have allowed to stand (as of this writing)
all the long-standing chat threads which are devoted to a topic. I'm sorry if your primary enjoyment of the forums is not all the discussion that goes on, but just this flood of chat threads, but I don't believe that represents the view of the vast majority of the forum members.
I remain a big fan of keeping our forums going, year-round. I don't want this to ever become a convention that shuts down its forums for long breaks, like Dawn pointed out many cons do. Changes like this are not in the works. On the contrary, yesterday's changes to the rules are keeping the forum going strong.
As for the title "off-topic": No negative connotation was intended. Many Internet forums have an "off-topic" area where users who initially knew each other from discussion of the primary subject would like to meet to discuss just about anything, and it's often called "off-topic". But, I will consider other names that describe it equally well. I was never comfortable with the "Spam" title because (1) It's simply wrong. "Spam" is unsolicited, bulk messages, and that's not what this forum ever was, and (2) Since we actually disallow true spam everywhere, it contributed to the perception that the rules were different in this forum area.
