Are you serious?

[robynec]

Don't let it get you down TSmom. I have been corrected myself. Changes are always gonna happen. We just don't like change as humans but need to just work around them. I do use facebook and twitter. Love them all

[KristenB]

I can appreciate a forum that is run smoothly and the moderater does her job well. I used to have a board back in 2002-2004 and I know it is work. The problem here is from what i personally see is that the rules apply to some but not all. If you look back at the jewelry forum today, how many ads do you still see and even freshly posted?

That is one of the reasons I don't come by as often is that there are always people who can break the rules and others get reprimanded. Like I said I don't mind rules, but they are not consistent and certainly not fair to everyone.

And for goodness sake if someone wants to use punctuation because they are excited about their product etc...who cares? That is over doing it a bit...

This is all just my opinion.

[lindastacy]

What I react to is not so much change, but that, as it often seems in life, the group gets "punished" for the actions of a few bad apples. More and more restrictive rules are being put into place because of spammers and a few people who go to extremes with their posts. Then those of us who have been active, contributing, responsible members feel like we're being restricted and perhaps even disrespected.

I've been a member of this community for probably close to 10 years. For me, it feels less personal now and that's why I spend less time here. But I assume the forum continues to be profitable for the company or they'd be making different decisions.

[starbirdy66]

For the most part the rules have not been changed. They have been centralized to one area and rules that were mostly applied in certain forums were either removed or made the standard across the board depending on the rule.

The rule about overuse of punctuation, all caps and symbols to create emphasis on advertising is the only real addition to the rules due to the complaints about the advertise your business area looking spammy and thread titles taking up to two or more lines in some cases. To simplify, it is board wide. That is rule #4, the only new rule added. Other rules have changed only in nomenclature to clarify meaning of a rule.

As far as the perception of rules applying to one and not all, it is due merely to the fact that sometimes a post doesn't get reported or is missed when a volunteer mod has an opportunity to review a forum. We do our best to review every forum but we also have to rely on community support to report posts that break the rules.

We are currently working on the misconception that the rep forums are for advertising. We try to emphasize in the rules what they are for. In the next week we will be implementing a monthly specials forum in the Promote your business forums to hopefully give a more prominent area to advertise specials and clean up the rep forums. It will be a party plan mall of sorts

[jammintj]

I'm a Facebook junkie so I like to connect with WAHM's on there. I'm still trying to get my "twitta" on and I text some of the friends I've met on here. ::shrugs::