The MANN comment sections have been buzzing a lot lately. Unfortunately a lot of this buzz has been the result of many personal attacks and unproductive anger.
We've seen this problem come and go in cycles in the past, but this time it seems to have become especially bad. The administrators of MANN have become concerned about this and feel it's become necessary to take a more proactive stance to try to bring the MANN comment boards out of this rut. We can't simply sit by and watch the site become little more than a place for individuals to flame and entertain each other by trying to write shock-entertainment posts. Mensactivism.org was created to be more than that, and we need to return to a reasonable level of decorum. Read More to continue...
Not only is this trend counter-productive, but it is discouraging genuinely interested parties from taking the site seriously as well as discouraging actual, substantive debate. When debates that are basically about ideas degenerate regularly and quickly into name-calling and over-use of profanity, especially targeted specifically to other posters, the value of any site is damaged.
The 'A' in MANN stands for something that is intended to be our primary goal - Activism. While we are willing to accept a certain amount of venting and frustration, the point of this site is to create a space where people can come to the realization that we can make gains for men's rights and support each other to that end.
Of the solutions we have looked into, we feel that a new policy regarding comment moderation needs to be established. From now on, new users registering with the site will be placed on moderated status, and their comment posts will need to be manually approved by a site administrator. Once a new user has demonstrated with a few posts that they are here to contribute constructively, not destructively, to the community, their account will become unmoderated.
As for existing users, we will start by warning people via email when a specific posting crosses the line in this way. You have the responsibility to check the email account you registered with on a regular basis, and if the situation doesn't improve, your account will be put into moderated status.
To date the administrators of this site have taken a very laissez-faire approach to user comments, whether they're on- or off-topic. This hasn't been working so well lately, so we've been willing to re-evaluate this policy. Likewise, if things cool down and the signal to noise ratio improves, we are willing to re-evaluate the need for this policy.
And please, let's not have any finger-pointing or accusations about "who started what" - in the end it's really irrelevant. With this post, let's start with a clean slate and get back to productive discussion and debate.
