[Heretic]

I think this brings up an important issue concerning human nature and message boards. I have been using/running message boards for well over 10 years now and there are a couple of axioms that are inherent in each of them.

The first axiom is that people will talk, period. No matter how hard you try to prevent people from chatting about mundane things unrelated to your preferred topics, people will still chat. Although it is certain that you will be able to maintain and even gain advantage on the mentality of a forum concerning what and where to post, there will still be new people coming in who will make the mistake and start a new chain reaction of improper posting.

Then there are your saboteurs who come to do this on purpose just for the giggles they get from it. My point here is that despite your wishes, people are going to chat about the issues regardless.

The closing of the Camelot forums channeled all the chatting to the general discussion forum of Avalon. For weeks people have been coming to this forum to do their chatting on general topics that have little to do with the purpose of its creation, because there was nowhere else to go for it, and the people want to exchange ideas with each other no matter what.

The people here will not be able to go elsewhere and find the camaraderie they have built here. This makes me wonder if Avalon should have been shut down first instead of Camelot. I honestly believe you may have to shut down Avalon just to get the people to move over to Camelot to have these discussions "there" by habit. But I digress.

When ever you have a community you will have people in unrelated chit chat and gossip so as to identify with each other. IMHO you must create a place for this or it will infect the places you hold even more sacred.

The second axiom is that there will always be conflict to a certain degree. The last couple of days have been very active concerning the conflicts and I have seen you moderators and C. Falcon doing a lot of work stomping it out. I have also seen it effect you guys and I thought I saw you guys get a little frazzled which is of course expected when you have to deal with negativity so much.

Despite the mentality of love, peace, and joy here there remains the fact that not everyone here is on the same level of enlightenment. Therefore there will be discord because even the smallest gap between mindsets will allow for the damaging effects of misinterpretations across the paradigms people speak from here.

You can see it even in threads that are based on the same love, peace, and joy, because these three things have very different manifestations in the multiplex of paradigms found in the evolution of the spirit which is now quickening even here on these forums.

The moderators and administrators will always be in a constant war against improper posting and resolving conflict. IMHO this is true anywhere and it isn’t because of a lack of proper infrastructure but because of the very nature of people. Even enlightened people.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not preaching that it should be one way or the other. I am no advocate for keeping things going as they are. I am not trying to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. All I am saying is to take into consideration human nature and the propensity to come together over mundane or unrelated issues, as a catalyst for the type of forums I believe you want here at Avalon/Camelot in the first place, and to make a place for this to happen, because it will happen anyway.

peace