OK so what is your idea of a haven for Christians? Honestly,the only way it could truly be a any type of haven is to elevate certain forums like the off topic areas and chat. and avoid theological discussions as much as possible.
I did not come up with the name but I do believe that there are people expecting more of this place than any human could ever possibly make it. This site is a Christian message board. We come here for fellowship, discussion, prayer, etc. It is the members who can make or break it.
So far we have been doing very well. Yes, there are members who are rude. I have a feeling they are reading this and thinking I'm referring to someone else. Yet, every single one of us has room for improvement.
There are tons of other Christian message boards out there as Josiah pointed out. We are trying to make this one a nice place to be. The members are key in providing that. Moderating, no moderating, over-moderating, none of that is as important as the members.
I've heard people suggesting banning members. I personally have not seen any member here yet who is worthy of a ban. There is the potential for thread bans and the site leaders are now discussing that as an option for some members who cannot calm themselves down, step away from the computer and then return to discuss without having to throw out an insult.
We are also working on something new that I haven't found on any other site. I don't think Romanos would mind my announcing what's in our plan now that we are at this juncture.
What we have in plan is to have something added to a member's post-bit (the area where your information can be seen within a thread) where if that member steps WAY out of line, another member can anonymously "flag" the post. The offending member will receive a notification and have a specific amount of time to review his/her post and then make an appropriate edit. If within that time frame, nothing is done, the flag then will return into a report and staff will review it to see if an action will take place.
There are more details to the plan but the basic gist is someone getting "nudged" as if to say, "hey that wasn't cool, take another look and make it right." It's like members training other members to show them what they don't want on the site.
