Whoa. Talk about opening a can of worms 😮
As one of the two people who essentially initiated this whole debate, I just felt the need to pipe up and attempt the defuse the situation a bit.
Despite what has been said and done over the past 24 hours, I want to say that Parkz is a bloody awesome forum.
Yes, sometimes things are said in the heat of the moment, and sometimes things are a lot more than that. Heck, I've needed to take time out in the past occasionally to have a 'breather' when things have annoyed or frustrated me on here too much, but I've always come back. Essentially @Richardand the Parkz team here are doing a fantastic job overall of running this place, and when stuff like this blows up its easy to forget that they are voluntarily taking time out of their own days to run this site free of charge for us all to benefit from.
Its a bloody fine line to walk between over and under moderating a forum... you want to allow people free speech, but you also don't want to allow it to turn into a mud slinging match, either. I once ran on online discussion forum for parents myself for many years (you can imagine what that was like as well, given a large percentage of that member case was pregnant, hormonal women - all with an opinion or two to share 😮) so yes, I know what it's like to be on their end as well as ours.
Yes, there are members here that don't get along, heaven knows most of those grudges have since become public knowledge. Being someone who has participated on here for over 10 years, and since admittedly built up a bit of an online persona on social media, I've also managed to make a swell job out of building an audience of people who like and dislike me - and as demonstrated yesterday, some of the latter clearly don't like making a secret of it. Personally I choose not to correspond in any way with members I find less favourable or have had off-board issues with, and that generally keeps me out of trouble... at least when they choose to do the same, anyway.
I wholeheartedly agree with what Richard has stated earlier at drawing the line at personal attacks. There's simply no need to swear at people, call them names or ridicule them for having a difference in opinion. If you find yourself having to edit your own post later to remove content that you've since realised is inappropriate for the forum, or your posts are regularly being deleted in response to complaints by fellow users, then you're definitely doing it wrong.
I privately contacted Richard directly not long ago regarding this exact issue, and I really think it all comes down to showing respect toward one another. If we can stay respectful, then there really shouldn't be any real issues.
Anyways, I really love this forum and I hate to see everyone bickering like this. Leading to this outcome certainly wasn't my intention with any of my posts yesterday and hopefully everyone can try and move on from it. It's been good to air some bottled up issues out into the open and obviously admin have taken them on board, so lets leave it at that and go back to being a normal, disfunctional theme park enthusiast family again, eh? ☺️👍
(and yes, sorry but I don't care what people think of my smilies. I'm continuing to use them the way I want to 😁)
PS. As a side note, I don't want to dive into any of the issues of yesterday as I do really want to move on from it, but I do want to address to all those who have spoken up in my behalf or defence: thank you. I was feeling really down yesterday, so the reminder that my content contributions to Parkz are appreciated really means a lot to me. Rest assured, I'm not going anywhere. Cheers 👍