In my time on ArchMC, I have lurked and wandered around the forums at times. Now that I am becoming more active, I have started to notice a big issue on the forums:

There is a distinct lack of moderation and rule-following on the ArchMC forums.

In the past couple of weeks and months, I have noticed way too many threads and posts that are ragebait, toxic, and lots of times even scams. 

Here are a couple of great examples:

• The most recent, Bloodstar_9's scams and manipulations, which Voxel's post goes over in great detail and extras' post exposes him - I recommend checking those posts out.
      

• The DupeRam123 fraud situation, which Zarif summed up very well here - Go look at this too.    
   

• Countless posts meant to diss and ragebait specific players, including but not exclusive to: almost every unranked beggar, plus thatonesweat, extras, and even me. Even if the original posters of these threads say it was intended as a joke, if the target of the post feels disrespected and unhappy, the fact that it was a ‘joke’ doesn't justify what was said.    

   

A big reason I think there is so much controversy on these forums is because of the lack of rules and rule enforcement. I looked over the biggest forums sections, General Discussion, Off Topic, Giveaways, and Survival for rules. The only mention of rules in these sections are for Giveaways and Off Topic. I couldn't even find rules for the forums as a whole.

I'll give credit where credit is due, the Giveaway Guidelines are pretty straightforward and easy to understand, and they outline everything you should need to know to host a giveaway. However, people don't always follow these guidelines, so there are still quite a few scams that occasionally happen in these forums, the most recent being Bloodstar_9's controversy.

The Off Topic rules are good as well, telling you what you can and can't do… but it's not a very detailed list. Something that stood out to me in these rules was the rule "don't make dumb posts like "who here likes tacos" or anything like that which users could just spam." This doesn't fall into my list of scams, toxicity, and ragebait, but I still see lots of posts that break this rule, such as this post, which the original poster literally reposted, creating spam. 

Here's what I think could help to stop these issues. 

The only general rules I could find in the entire multiverse of ArchMC were the rules posted in the Discord, which many users only glance at one time anyway. The vast majority of forums users aren't on the ArchMC discord, which is why they use the forums to communicate. These rules are clearly only intended for the actual server, and have nothing to do with the forums. 

What's my point? There aren't a lot of general rules for us on the forums to follow, other than our intuition. I would recommend at the very least, putting the rules shown in the discord here, on the ArchMC website, for everyone to access easily. Another step I would take, which is definitely a lot better, would be to post rules specifically for the forums, to the forums. This would make it a lot easier for the average forums user to know what they can and can't post.

Of course, this would all go to hell if it weren't for moderation. Oh boy, moderation. I have noticed a severe lack of moderation during a few of these controversies. Staff never jumped in to help sort out the Bloodstar situation. From what I've seen, staff haven't done anything to punish users that are being overly toxic, ragebaiting, and using slurs on the forums.

The solution to this? Crack down on moderation, and be more strict. If users don't see punishments for their actions, they won't stop breaking rules and ruining other's experiences.

In short, the forums lack in moderation, with too many controversies, and two simple ways to stop it are to establish general forums rules for users to follow, and for staff to be more strict with forums moderation.

Edit: 
Voxel pointed out in a reply that there are ingame rules posted here, although the only way to access them is directly through the link. Voxel also sent a link to the official ArchMC forum rules, but they haven't even been started, which shows that there aren't any general rules for the forums. The only thing there is “qwertyuiop.” No joke.
 

Thank you for reading,

W4TER

If I missed anything in this post, please feel free to correct me, KINDLY. If you feel the need to DM me on Discord, my username is fourxiv. (including the period)

oh ok Voxel tysm

Thats crazy i get the point. but really? navy should be allowed to.

Guys my attention span is so ahh that I couldn't read this whole post

I am allowed to pin things, just not this because Zarif made me remove it. Someone doesn't like my opinions.

navy do u like my forum posts :D

Your statement is entirely accurate. I had anticipated that others might react negatively, (cuz they tend to exist) primarily due to their consistent presence and predictable behavior.

I want to acknowledge and respect the fact that you had the initiative to speak candidly about the forum environment and the general inaction from staff. It's not often that someone takes a stand—especially against their own team—and your willingness to do so is commendable.

~ 2NY11187

I feel out of place with everyone that Is taking the small Minecraft server forum post beef seriously  - no hate on y'all but ts is js not my thing

I mean /ignore exists

Zeo, this is forums. If you read my post at all, you would notice that I'm talking about the forums, and the forums only. /ignore only exists on the actual server. 

-W4TER

yeah fr respect for writing that whole thing though I could never

(unless I get paid)

Lol I only spent a little over half an hour writing it