So as you all may have noticed, a few people have raised their issues with how things are here and to be frank a few of their concerns are more than valid. There are no rule changes as of yet; only the responses to those rule breakings are being augmented.

One of the guidelines issued to the mods back in October was overall neglected, which dealt with repeat offenders (http://sep7agon.net/index.php?topic=9003.0). Tough love was necessary back then, and it's looking like it's necessary again now. That being said, to suddenly have everyone on edge fearing a ban for screwing around a bit isn't right either, so to keep things workable, repeat offenders who will be subject to this system will be those who have either:

1. A cumulative total of warning points exceeding 200%
or
2. A total of warning points exceeding 100% in the last 30 days

Users who fit either of these criteria will receive a One Week ban, minimum, for each serious rule violation.

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The permaban process, streamlined
If a user decides that they aren't going to stop misbehaving, they are going to get themselves on an extended vacation much sooner than before. The rough plan is as follows:

1 week ban >> 2 week ban >> 1 month >> Perma

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Harsher punishments
Serious offences will be being upped in percentage, stuff that might have only got you a 20% will now probably earn you a lite-ban. This is in response to the generally lax moderation style not working as well as it would seem; we won't be suddenly turning into nazis, but it's becoming clear that certain users aren't getting the message.

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What to Expect
As of now, you can expect to see a drastic decline in "watched" status and an increase in "lite-banned" as we work toward beating the bad behavior out of you. Hopefully, after a time, we can get the community to behave a bit more and the need for bans will decrease.

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The Goal
I don't want to turn this place into a hug box or an echo chamber by banning anyone who happens to disagree with the mod squad (we're already apparently circlejerk central) but I also don't want us to continue to alienate members by being too lax with moderation.

We're not a large site in comparison to B.lind by any means, so we need to find a happy medium between objective rule enforcement and subjective understanding of context. I can't help but feel part of the issue was a few members skirting the rules and being immune to any sort of moderation. I think we need to take a look at those kinds of things as well, but that might be a discussion for another time.

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One of the reasons that Bnet fell out of favour was the staff not listening to the userbase, they ignored them and gave non-answers and told people to mute the ones who were harassing them etc. We'd like to avoid this, so this part of the announcement is to promote people airing their grievances. You can do so either in a PM to a moderator or in a thread in Septagon.

The second part is an appeal for people to report things that break the rules more. If you see some users flaming away at each other and shitting up a thread - report them so it gets seen by the mods.