Feedback No pms?

How are we becoming less and less honest as this exchange takes place when we specifically said:

If anything, we admitted that we should have been clearer to our entire member base and apologized for it. We've been clearer to our Founding Members and Web of Trust members and we clearly did not extend that clarity to our regular members. For that, we apologize. But this isn't us wanting to be intentionally misleading to keep members from using the PM and Signature feature. We don't gain anything from members not using the PM and Signature feature.

We did, however, wish to correct the implication of your previous post that this was a sudden new bait-and-switch to extract more from our newly-active members when the criteria has actually existed from the start, we just weren't very clear about it with our regular members. The reason for this oversight on our part is because we had already discussed this criteria in the Founding Members and Web of Trust sections of the site, so we knew we had already clarified these matters previously, we simply forgot that that clarity had happened behind closed doors before we opened up our site to the public and that the regular members were not privy to it. Again, this wasn't intentional to keep regular members from using the Signature and PM features.

You are correct. There is supposed to be a second splash screen that mentions the Invites. The Founding Members have it, the Web of Trust members have it, but we forgot to add it for regular members after we opened up our Forums to the public. For this, we apologize.

These 3 points are really just one point, that we should have been clearer that the invited members have to sign up in order for the criteria to be fulfilled. As per above, we agree that we should have made that clearer with our regular members. Keep in mind that if the criteria was just to send an invite, then anyone could simply send an invite to a fake e-mail address and fulfill that criteria, so it would be useless. We were clear about the invitee having to sign up with the Founding Members, but not with the regular members. Again, that was our oversight and we apologize. We recalled having made this point clear, but made the mistake of not having made it clear to our regular members. Here is a post from the Founding Member private section that we made in February 2015 where we made this clear to all our members at the time (when our entire member base was comprised solely of Founding Members):

So this is why we forgot to clarify it to our regular members. In our minds, we had already clarified this point. When we opened up our Forum to regular members and created the Announcement with the criteria, we only copied & pasted our original post from the original thread in the Fouding Members section, and not the subsequent replies which clarified the criteria. Again, that's on us, it's our mistake, and we apologize for that. But it was an honest mistake, not us being intentionally misleading to keep our regular members from using the Signature and PM feature. Considering we did not realize this oversight until now, there are probably other aspects of this site that we aren't realizing are not clear to our regular members because we previously clarified them behind closed doors to our original members, so if/when those doubts arise, we will clarify them as we are doing here. We apologize in advance for that. In fairness to us, last month we did offer to explain all the features of our site in depth, but no one took us up on that offer.

It is very different, but we're talking about unlocking features that aren't necessary to be a part of this community. They are bonus features, one of which (the Signature) actually allows members to indirectly promote themselves to the community. If a member wants those extra (and unnecessary) features, then they must help us grow by inviting a new member and having that new member sign up. If a member believes our community is not worthy of inviting someone to join us, then we honestly don't understand their need for the PM and Signature features.

It's also worth mentioning that we're offering $2,500 in cash prizes to members who invite other members. That's in addition to unlocking the Signature and PM features. So we don't feel we are being unreasonable with our criteria, we just need to be much clearer about the specifics of the criteria.

We see it differently and it certainly isn't our intention to insult anyone. Quite the contrary, we are rewarding active users who help us bring new members with bonus features that aren't required in order to participate on our site. That's been our intention from the start, we just did not communicate it clearly to our regular members.

We're going to add the splash screen about the Invites that was missing for regular members now so that they match the ones the Founding Members and Web of Trust members see.

What else do you suggest to make the criteria clearer to regular members?

 

That is correct. If a member wants to benefit from the PM and Signature features of our site, then the least we would expect is for them to have no problem endorsing the site whose features they wish to use free of charge.

Then please start a new thread in the Feedback section suggesting that we enforce our Rule #1:

We never intended for the uncensored nature of this site to extend to personal attacks, only to gambling-related topics. But when we enforced the no-attacks rule in our early days, we lost valuable expert members who weren't happy we were temp-banning them for repeated personal attacks. So we stopped enforcing it.

We agree, which is why our preference is to enforce our Rule #1.

The problem is that we aren't getting much volume of quality posts. Most threads turn into a hate-fest that turn away new members and dissuade participation. That's the root of the problem, not our policy for unlocking PM's.

True, that had not occurred to us. However, again, the root of the problem is not our criteria to unlock the PM's. The root of the problem is that Advantage Players such as yourself do not feel comfortable endorsing this community. That's what we need to fix so that you are proud of endorsing this community and happy to invite other members to join us.

We already tried that, but it did not work as intended. That's why we had to open the site up to the public.

Be clear. You don't buy that we were clear with the Founding Members about the criteria or that we made an honest mistake with not being clearer about it with the regular members after we changed course and opened the site to the public? If the former, then that can be easily disproved. If the latter, then what possible motive could we have for not wanting to be clear with our regular members about the criteria needed to unlock the Signature and PM feature? Again, please be clear with your answer so that we can address your specific allegation.

Then you fail to understand the history of our site. This site was originally intended to be invite-only. It was never intended to be open to the public. However, for the site to grow without being open to the public, the Founding Members had to do their share of the "heavy lifting" and actively post and invite members. That did not happen at a sufficient rate to sustain our growth, so we course-corrected and opened our site to the public. Your claim that we didn't inform regular members about the criteria is false. We did, we just didn't do it clearly enough for reasons we already described in our previous post. We already accepted blame for it and apologize for it, but you seem to have an agenda that isn't yet clear to us, particularly considering you yourself said you "had no intention of using the PM feature". You went on to say "but if there's one thing I hate, it's parsing information for self-seeking reasons". Again, be clear, what are those self-seeking reasons (e.g. motive) you are accusing us of?

We already have. In fact, here's what we've done so far to fully clarify the original criteria:

1) We added "(they must join via your link)" to the Invite criteria in the Signatures thread to make that clear.

2) We created a "Criteria for Unlocking the Private Messaging feature" thread that clarifies the criteria.

3) We edited the Splash notice to clarify that both 300 posts and inviting a member (who must join) are required to unlock the Signature and PM Features.

4) We created a new Splash notice when a member hits 300 posts but has not yet invited a member to clarify that they must invite a member (who must join) to unlock the features.

5) We created a new Splash notice when a member Invites someone who joins but has not yet reached 300 posts to clarify they must hit the 300 post count to unlock the features.

3), 4), and 5) above now match what we had for the Founding and Web of Trust Members.


If there are any other ways we can clarify this criteria to, then we are all ears.

 

This is a fair perspective, so thank you for sharing it.

We are an honorable business so we will do the honorable thing because it is clear to us that the confusion was across-the-board and that is our fault and we take full responsibility for it.

The regular members who have a post count of at least 300 as of the timestamp of this post will have their PM and Signature privileges granted effective immediately.

Those members are:

• freddy
• KewlJ
• LarryS
• Mickey Crimm
• mr j
• MrV
• OneArmedBandit
• Wizardofnothing

Those members who have not yet fulfilled the unclear criteria will have to fulfill the original and now-clarified criteria.

We will also be creating a new thread about re-enforcing our Rule #1. The fact that Advantage Players do not feel comfortable endorsing this community is a serious red flag for us.

 

Yes.

 

Yes and yes.

Well, it seems that another one of our oversights with regular members is that we never actually set the Invite criteria to unlock the Signatures and Conversations (PM's), we only set the Post Count criteria. That's why you and the others actually already had the Conversations enabled when you hit 300 posts.

Not to say this discussion was for nothing because the Invite criteria should have been set like it was already set with Founding Members and Web of Trust members, so it's now set correctly for all other regular members. This just goes to show how our opening to the public was never planned and was improvised in order to sustain our growth. We didn't do a good job with that improvised transition because not only did we not clearly clarify the criteria for unlocking Signature and PM's for regular members, we didn't even set it correctly in our backend.

This only came up now because you guys are the first regular members to hit the 300 post count. But it's all fixed now and the regular members are now set up like the Founding Members and Web of Trust members. Apologies again about this mix-up, folks.