Fool's Gold hasn't felt like itself for several years. A few years ago some people from another board started posting there, which, okay, fine. Unfortunately, they tended to be way more abrasive than the rest of the member base, to the point where it slowly but completely changed the atmosphere of the place. However, it was a slow process. Know the adage how if you gradually turn the water temperature up to boiling the frog won't jump out? That's what happened. However, gradually the older members felt less inclined to post there, and most of them stopped posting. The ones who stayed stopped posting anything of particular substance, mostly throwing out half-assed one-liners and hiding in the metaphorical shadows. Activity crawled to a standstill. Furthermore, whenever one of the staff would do anything to attempt to counteract the constant stream of negativity it would unleash a gigantic shit storm, which basically resulted in staff being extremely averse to banning anyone.
A couple of weeks ago one of the veterans unleashed a pretty big rant about the state of the place and it made me realise that I'm not even remotely proud of its current state. I haven't invited anyone there for a long time because I've subconsciously known it's not the sort of place anyone I would want to invite somewhere would want to post. I'm not surprised people from FCF and ACF couldn't integrate there; by the time they were likely to have any motivation to want a new forum, it was in a dismal state. So I brought up the idea of starting to clean the place up, and most of the staff were on board.
The member who is probably the most frequently inflammatory (who stated he was glad people were blaming him for the reduced activity and "Fuck this site" to boot) recently posted an insult about a person's appearance in a member's welcome back thread. He swears his insult was directed at another member with whom he's on good terms, but the problem is that it made no sense as a response to that member's post, he has a history of dishonesty, and he has a history of demeaning women's appearance. So he was banned. Predictably, a shit storm erupted. I simply do not have the patience to deal with this crap right now; I am far too stressed out. If I were to address every complaint at length as is my usual tendency in dealing with message board drama I would end up insulting half the board, which would undermine the atmosphere of civility we want to restore. So that's not an option. Moreover, if I were to address every complaint at length I would get tired of it really quickly, and it would reinforce my aversion to banning people who deserve it because I would associate the huge amount of trouble it brought about with the banning. This simply isn't an acceptable option.
So I've had to do something I haven't done in years, which is to close down discussion. I have simply indicated that I will delete any further argument about it. I hate doing this, because it feels unnecessarily dictatorial and I'm not even sure it's going to work. But the old approach certainly wasn't working either. Like I said, I wouldn't want to invite anyone there in its current state. If I'm not proud of my own message board then a dire shift in methodology is needed.
I am actually halfway tempted just to permaban the troublemakers and leave it at that, but I'm not quite that desperate yet.
I don't know why anyone who isn't a masochist would want to staff a message board, much less own one. No matter what you do you end up alienating too many people, and you're usually personally blamed for everything that goes wrong.