The new powers that be at IGTF recently posted this under our letter:
Quote:
While we were willing to work with the moderators to come up with solutions to the mentioned issues, they, unfortunately felt that it was the best course of action to:
1. Issue an ultimatum.
2. Start using their power as moderators to lock threads that shouldn't be locked, edit posts that shouldn't be edited and just generally abuse their moderator power.
All we needed was time to resolve the issues as the individual in charge of this site is on vacation and changes need to be completed by a technical team in the US, but rather that work together, they felt that an ultimatum (do it our way within 24 hours) and abuse of privileges was the only route. We deeply regret that this happened as it doesn't concern most of the forum users and we remain committed to having the best irish translation site online for many years to come.
I think we owe it to all people who remain at IGTF to tell you the facts of the matter:
We have, in fact, been trying to work with the new owners on the ad situation since they took control of the forum last year. As we said in our letter to them, we've gotten nothing from them but smoke and mirrors, promises to "look into things," etc.
We have been trying to work with them on the pop-up banner since it first appeared on February 28. At first our contact insisted that it was closeable, and refused to believe that it wasn't, despite my sending him a screen shot to the contrary. My last email to them was on February 29, and included a lot of useful information about how the banner appears in various browsers, as well as my concern about the premise of the banner (culling translations from IGTF to send to people via email). Since then we have had not a single word from them until today. In fact, our contact didn't even bother to tell us he was going on vacation...he just dropped out of the whole thing mid-discussion.
BTW, we even offered to help work with them on advertising that would help preserve their marketing goals while keeping the site attractive to visitors. In fact, we've done so a couple of times since they took over the site last year. They are clearly NOT interested in working with us on anything, and never have been.
We felt we had to take the action we did because we were all pretty sure that they planned to fob off our complaints until we either got tired of complaining and left on our own accord or did something to get ourselves banned. When we sent the letter, we knew that the latter was the most likely outcome, but given complete silence on the matter for so long, no indication that our contact was out of town (he didn't even give us the courtesy of a "we'll talk about this when I get back"), and that banner making people angrier day by day, we really felt we had no choice but to get their attention by issuing an ultimatum.
None of the former moderation team (myself, Breandán, Bríd or Tim) "locked or edited posts inappropriately." That is an out-and-out lie. The only posts I edited were the ones in the complaint thread that were entirely in Irish...as I mentioned in that thread, the owners don't speak Irish, and we wanted to be sure that they could understand the nature of the complaints. The only posts any of us locked were announcement posts, which are locked as a matter of course. None of us have ever abused our powers as moderators, and I personally greatly resent that the accusation has been made in a place where we have no ability to counter it.
So now you have both sides...you can decide who you want to believe: an English profit-making company or the people who have moderated IGTF for years.
Redwolf
P.S. Just to add...the person who DID work some mischief over there after the banning is someone who was NOT a member of the moderation team. He was a moderator some years ago, but hasn't been for quite some time (not because of misbehavior, though...I have to stress that! He resigned, as moderators often do, because the job was eating up a lot of time). Apparently, when the administrators removed our moderating privileges, they (presumably inadvertently) restored his. I'm not going to say that what he did was right or wrong, but I do resent "admin" saying that the moderators used their "moderator powers" (makes me feel like a former superhero!) "to lock threads that shouldn't be locked, edit posts that shouldn't be edited and just generally abuse their moderator power," when the moderators had, in fact, all been banned and had their privileges stripped before any of that happened!
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