Unfortunately, ArcAngel...this is a very serious issue. One that we hope everyone takes away a lesson from...
My message to the members of
www.Camaro5.com:
:( Last night, I was sitting at home...with a blanket wrapped around me and a box of tissues at my side. I feel like crap, and wanted nothing more than to enjoy the tail-end celebrations and excitment of the start of production early this week. Instead...I open my browser, and log on to find a rediculous, nearly 10-page, thread about an issue so trivial and so misunderstood it made my blood boil (and that's not good when you're sick).
It gives me no pleasure to write this. I often hoped that unlike other forums (not just Camaro-oriented), we would be able to skirt the inevitable degradation of maturity that plagues nearly every conversational-website in existance. It's become painfully obvious that we can't...or at least that we're not as perfect as I'd hoped. Though I denied it...I realized that lately, this site has not been as fun as it used to for me. This site is like my second home...and I can't begin to explain how depressing that realization was.
That thread last night, and others like it gives the moderators a bad name, it gives the site and all its members a bad name, and it gives the "Camaro enthusiast" a bad name to anyone who's watching. There are some who would rashly call us "fear mongers", or "doomsayers"; we're 'always' freaking out with the biggest explosions over the most stupid of things. I know they're wrong...but threads like that one don't do the preception any favors.
The good news is that it's not the end. We can turn back. In fact, all it would have taken to prevent that, was a simple review of some posts before people hit "submit". That's IT:
"Would I say this to someone's face?"
"Do I know enough about this topic to attack anybody"?
"Will I start a pseudo-riot"?
"Does this post lend any value to the section I'm posting it in?"
"Have I already been proven wrong?"
"Have I already said this...in this thread...on this page...twice?"
If a few folks did that then the discussion would have never blown up, and perhaps the thread may have never even been started in the first place....
As moderators, all we ask is that the members of this forum try to act as mature as we know they can be. Some of us joined this board just over two years ago, right after it first started....and we know that nearly everyone who posts here is more than capable of having an intelligent conversation devoid of insults; stupid remarks; and half-baked, riot-inciting, side-remarks intended only to get folks riled up.
We are more in-tune with this car than perhaps any other enthusiast group with any other car. As mods, we understand better than most that the passion gets the best of us, and the heat-of-the-moment sometimes makes it hard to take the 30 seconds required to re-read a post before you submit it. But if we take the concious effort to do that, this site can go on without obnoxious threads like the one last night. And what I wouldn't give to take part in that kind of site.