A marvellous one indeed. Now we just have to use it!

The wook needs to be a place where all sorts of fans can get together and talk about Star Wars. However, for this to work, there needs to be certain attitudes taken and rules put in place.

1. There needs to be an effective mod team, made up of longstanding and newer users, who are in regular contact with Fandom. Breakdowns in communication on either end cannot be tolerated. Fandom must trust the judgment and good will of the mod team, and recognise that some decisions are not taken out of a desire to 'gatekeep' as has been stated before, but out of a genuine desire to keep a civil forum that works for everyone.

2. Replies which are toxic in nature need to be deleted. This means replies which are negligently or deliberately worded in order to start a fight over something.

3. The idea of the "Acceptable Loss" needs to go. No fan should ever be made to feel that unwelcome, especially by site admins. Any genuine fan choosing to leave out of a sense of alienation represents a failure of the leadership to do their job.

4. Different types of content should not be heavily mixed. In depth users should not have to trawl through hundreds of memes to find a thread they are looking for, and more casual fans should be able to simply click onto a category and see nothing but memes if they choose. Limits to numbers of categories be damned, if it works it works.

5. This thread must exist as a record of the community's general will.

6. Fandom must commit to putting the effort into maintaining the more high-maintainance categories such as in-depth discussions and community projects. They were successful when there was effort put into them, and they helped to create a strong community.

7. Fandom and the community together must recognise that both numbers of posts and the retention rate of mature contributors are metrics of Wookieepedia's success. While some rules may be eased to facilitate a more welcoming atmosphere for new fans, it must be generally accepted that keeping a tidy and easy to navigate forum is essential to success in both areas.

8. Community questions on moderation must be answered in a timely manner by appropriate mods, staff or users in this thread and the Ask-A-Mod thread. These should be kept as orderly as possible to assist in navigation of these administrative threads.

I just wanted to give my concern over the apparent inconsistency on how the discussions are handled.

I just had a bit of a misunderstanding with AAD, caused by the differing ways of moderator and community attitudes towards different kinds of topics that were heavily moderated before, but not so much now.

Posts that were not really allowed just a few weeks ago are now accepted, which makes it easy for people to get an inconsistent idea about how to go around behaving on the forum, myself namely..

I'd like for there to be updated and clear guidelines that indicate exactly which kind of topics are encouraged and which are forbidden. The current guidelines are a bit too vague and only give a basic picture on how things work on Wookieepedia.

The "maturity" part of the topics is the biggest inconsistency I've noticed. From the old moderator team and many of the older users here, mature topics and posts were encouraged, and posts that didn't incite much discussion, intelligent ones at least, were disapproved of.

Obviously, things have changed now, but I'd like for there to be clear and clarifying "rules" that dictate just which kind of posts and which level of "maturity" is to be expected from the forum users.

And I have noticed that topics that are in ways similar to each other are treated quite differently from time to time. Others are left alone while others are deleted in an instant.

I really would just like for there to be more consistency, so that misunderstandings could be avoided. At the end of the day you can just deem me to be a retard that doesn't understand how things work around here, but I just wanted to make my point..

Otherwise I agree with AAD's post above, and would like that at least some of those things were to be implemented in the near future.

While I agreed with some of the changes Brandon made a few days ago, I do think that in order to make this place as thriving and functional as possible, a working compromise between all parties should be reached.

That's all I wanted to say.

Kiitos.

For the record Joup, I didn't mean any offense in the other thread. I'm just obviously quite frustrated with the toll the last few months have taken on the Forum.

There will definitely be clear policies, and we'll all work together to develop those. I do have to caution you, though, that it won't be right away. I mentioned in the PSA that there are some big updates coming to Discussions.

Those updates are going to necessitate changes to how we develop what those policies are. So I don't want to create a situation where we create policies now only to have to relitigate them later. We'll be better off for it in the long-term if we wait a little bit, figure things out once the changes to Discussions are understood, and create the policies that fit within the context of those Discussions updates.

There will be an announcement on FANDOM's Community Central about the changes to Discussions in, hopefully, about a week or so. We're almost ready to announce it.

So for now, I'd recommend patience as we work through the next week or two, then once those changes are announced we can start talking about policy updates.

Thank you, Brandon. I'll be waiting for that announcement, like I'm sure the rest of us are too.

And none taken, ADD. I'm on the edge and under a lot of stress at the moment too, for having a really important matriculation exam on Friday, and another one not too long after it.. so I can definitely resonate with feelings of frustration and distraught.

Can fandom provide any update on whether 'relaxing' the rules has made any significant increase in usage- by either active users or readers of the forums?

Or has the change lead to the old being merely replaced with the new?

Also is there any data on whether any changes have lead to new users staying active or do they 'lose interest' quickly?

Also does fandom collect any data on whether the number of meaningful posts has changed? For example more posts but less reads, upvotes and comments compared to less posts but and more reads, upvotes and comments?

***Edit: nevermind I have found the PSA answering most of my questions. Looks like this place is finished for me***

Someone banned all of these forum Gods by falsely stating that they were trolls.

-1106starwars

-An Absolut Desperado

-AV-6R7

-Brutally Honest K-2SO

-Ismavolt

-Kamino Groove

-Shayn Mikel

They are most absolutely NOT trolls. These guys have protected the forums from toxicity for years. In recent days some admitted to some frustrations but none are trolls. Whoever reported them clearly had some type of vendetta against them and used harsh methods including lying to get them banned. Help them Brandon, you are the forums last hope. They’re practically the face of this entire website, and the Star Wars community.

The accusations were not false, and since I didn't block them I'm not going to get into it here. Like Bert said, if you have any questions you can ask over community@fandom.com. Further conversation about it here will be considered off-topic and removed.