However beyond that some posters feel that the way the forum is handled is variously not democratic, too bureaucratic and rule-based, inconsistant and subjective, lacking humour, too British, overly censoring, not censoring enough, out of touch with the posters, etc.. It should be clear by this list that no decision will ever please everyone. The two recent current off-topic threads, which were as an exception allowed to stand, demonstrates this better than anything else. A forum based on consensus is a very improbable if not impossible goal.

And who would take on such a herculean task of moderating such a forum even if it were possible? Not the current moderators. We do our best to squeeze in the time to make this forum happen, but are certainly not willing to dedicate our life to running it. Therefore we decided that the fairest, most democratic, unbureaucratic and time-effective way of moderating the forum would be to make a clear set of rules to guide us and the posters. Ideally, the posters themselves would abide by these rules and we would only have to spend our time with trolls.

The question remains who gets to make up the rules? There are two basic kinds of moderated forums. Private ones for which the mods are paid by the owners and voluntary ones, where the mods do their job for free. In the first case the owner decides how the forum is run. In the second case, people theoretically are only going to volunteer enthusiastically for something that they fully support.

That is the case with forum 8. The mods are only willing to moderate a forum that they can ideologically support. If this kind of forum is not wanted by the posters, then we can close it down, but we are not willing to spend our time running a forum we don't like or believe in. That is why we have so often said, that if people don't like this forum then they should try out their own. This forum - the way it is run - is the only one you are going to get from us.

Every volunteer forum has their own style based distinctly on the people running it. Even AAA under Kerde was different than it was under the previous mod. When it became something that Kerde could no longer support, he closed it.

The same is true of Dave's forum. Even in his rough and tumble free-for-all, the forum has a style which is a reflection of his management. While Dave is not willing to take a very active role in moderating, for which he also receives his share of criticism, he has threatened to close it down if the posters don't cooperate with him.

We believe that the forum, as it is, provides an important service to both ex-premies, premies and others interested in knowing the truth about Rawat. To this end we are willing to dedicate our free time to maintaining it. We are not willing to work as volunteers to run someone else's idea of a forum. It is for each poster to decide whether this forum is "good enough" for them, with the understanding that it can never be all things to all people, or alternatively to invest their time in creating and maintaining their own.

We hope that this post will help to clarify some of the recent controversy that has occurred. We also once again ask posters to follow the rules of the forum and to direct their complaints and suggestions to us directly. We are aware that the forum is not perfect and are genuinely open to suggestions. We also spend alot of time discussing issues to at least attempt to achieve our own internal consensus and a greater level of democracy and fairness.

One change that has been implemented is that earlier an off-topic or premie troll thread would be deleted. This sometimes upset people who innocently responded to it within guidelines. Now we will often leave a thread, for example one of the recent spams by nadasss, because posters had already responded to it. The negative side to this is that the troll in this case has achieved their goal, but it seems to be the lesser of two evils. Now we try to either delete a thread before it gets responded to and/or only individual posts within a thread.

Finally, exactly two non-premie posters have been banned so far. In both cases they were banned because they were honestly driving us crazy. We are not willing to be babysitters on this forum and do have lives to live. We hope that the rest of the posters can appreciate this.

Sincerely,