To all the new Blazers fans who are posting here, welcome!
I want to take this opportunity to write about the obviously bad behavior by a few of our staff members recently.
Our objective at S2 is to provide a poster friendly site. We're not about mods with god complexes, instead we view staff as people with good judgment and the willingness to be here to help posters get the most out of S2. Ideally, mods here would only have to sticky threads or merge threads that the posters ask for that kind of thing.
As a poster friendly site, we've tried to institute policies that avoid confrontation between staff and posters. Our profanity filter has but a few words in it because we know posters will masked curse anyway (sh!t), and threatening people with bans/suspensions for doing so (as other sites do) doesn't make for happy posters or staff. By putting our faith in the good members of our community, we've rarely been let down. For example, though we don't edit or filter profanity, I find it's used infrequently and posters often masked curse instead anyway.
There are other things that we've seen are confrontational between posters and staff at other places. One of you was banned at another site for posting "who are the best white players in the game today?" Others for making digs at Kobe for his rape trial.
Our site rules are extremely lax. The gist of them are that we'll treat you like adults, and all we really ask is that you respect other posters whether you like them or not. Staff is here to keep the peace (rarely as possible).
Specifically about the past issues with some of our younger mods. We have a rule against flame wars, but we also specifically allow people to talk trash about teams and players, even posting these things in the other teams' forums. This is not a license to bait or troll, but we also recognize that trash talk is a big part of sports, and words like Jailblazers and Fakers and Queens to refer to teams are part of the lexicon.
What these staff members did was over the line. What's done is done, though. It's 100% true that what our staff does reflects on the site as a whole. It's not good. It will be addressed in a proper manner.
Maybe we've taken things to the opposite extreme of having a moderator read and approve every post before it goes up on the site. I hope you agree that dealing with public speech puts us on a slippery slope of some kind; all we can do is to try not to slip down that slope. In doing so, we choose to err in your favor (the posters!).
As always, I'm open to any feedback you guys have to offer.
Peace!