A comment about some of the rules and recent rule enforcement

It is a rare occasion that we have a fiasco such as we had in the DragonVale threads recently. In fact, it's the first one of it's kind here at iPadForums.net and I'm sorry to see it happen. First of all, we try our hardest to run a community that is open, friendly and educational for all of our members. To make this happen we have rules in place. We feel they are very fair rules and we feel that we have an awesome Moderation and Administration team in place to enforce them.

Are the rules perfect? Absolutely not. Is our enforcement of the rules going to be perfect? Absolutely not. Nothing in life, ever is. Especially when there are always two sides to every story. We are always looking for ways to improve both the rules and our enforcement of the rules. But, please keep in mind that this is a private establishment. It is our sole discretion to decide WHAT rules we have on this site, and how they are enforced. You may not always agree with them, and that's fine. All that we ask is that if you wish to participate on this site you follow them.

As a sign of respect to other communities, forums and websites we don't do the following:

1. We don't sign up on competitors forums and paste links to our site on their site. That's disrespectful.
2. We don't sign up on competitors forums and spam their members via private message with links to our site. That's disrespectful.
3. We don't attempt to tell them how to run their site and/or what rules should or shouldn't be enforced/added, etc.
4. We don't make blatantly false accusations with regards to their policies (and specifically, privacy policies)

We don't do any of the above because we realize that each community needs to be its own community. The rules and spirit of the community are at the sole discretion of the community owners. To attempt to "coerce" them in any way into doing something WE want would be disrespectful to the vision THEY are trying to create.

Recently accusations have been thrown in our direction with regards to these rules and the enforcement of them. I won't get into specifics or details, however I will address these recent accusations.

1. Unfortunately a few members who either left or were banned felt it was appropriate to send UNSOLICITED PRIVATE MESSAGES to our membership attempting to get them to leave our site for another, competing site. THIS IS AGAINST THE RULES and moreover, is just in bad taste and disrespectful.

2. Members who received these private messages used the built in "REPORT PM" feature and reported the PM's to the Administration/Moderation team as SPAM. They notified us that they did NOT wish to receive future messages like this, just like we get hundreds of times a week due to other SPAMMER activities as well.

3. We took action and banned the offending members and censored the URL from being displayed on the forum. This is to keep the incentive of spamming our members from happening. We won't stand for spamming, nor for breaking our rules by attempting to use a site that we've created by spending thousands of hours of blood, sweat and tears, from being USED as a springboard for a competing site. Once again, we don't do it to you, so please don't do it to us.

I hope this dispels all the false accusations that people are trying to spread in order to jump-start their site or rally membership against us. We don't read private messages. We don't spam our members (or anyone else's).

This will be my last comment on the subject and all that we ask is that other sites allow us to run our site as we see fit and we will do the same for you.

Thank you for your understanding.