[Drew]

Okay guys, without sounding too condescending here, you have no clue what you are talking about.

A) If you delete all the posts on the forums, I guarantee you that we will lose one-third to one-half of the posters here, solely based on the lack of things to discuss. Not to mention the ones who will bounce because they lost their post counts, etc.

B) The deletion of all user accounts is not only impractical, it's suicide. Forum users are inherently lazy. Half the posters won't be bothered to re-register, and so we again are losing a huge chunk of activity. And any loss that large tends to create a situation where the population of the forums slowly dies off from inactivity.

C) Elimination of the ban list. I don't know how long you guys who support this have been around, but anyone that has been here at least as long as me knows that this is insane. We're not talking about the user "revolutionaries" here, we're talking about extremely malicious groups of people intent on trying to leak game hacks. You're right, probably 90% of the bans are proxies, and we obviously can't anticipate every proxy, but I guarantee you that we've made it more difficult and hence not worth the effort.

D) Both A and B are also both very dangerous in terms of forum stability. And aside from wiping the database tables or installing mods, there is no easy way to do it other than delete users one by one. Keep in mind that administrators do not have access to perform database alterations.

So at this point you are asking yourself, "Well, what would you do Noctis?"

That's a difficult question. And without wanting to sound hypocritical, I don't have all the right answers.

Having experience in modding forums (code modifications, not forum moderation), I firmly believe that the answer lies within administrative mods. There are several mods out there which allow you to perform more specific functions such as deletion of all users inactive for a certain period of time or with zero posts. In fact, there are mods to do almost anything you could think of, so what I believe is that we need is an administrator capable of implementing these mods. Which would of course require the appropriate FTP access, etc. So, given recent events, it's hard to say if BadScript would ever even consider something like that. Not that I blame him, of course. However restricting access to a folder in FTP isn't difficult and I know he knows how to do it.

Anyway, good luck to whoever is chosen as the new moderator/administrator. Whoever it is will have their work cut out for them. I just hope whoever it is doesn't go trying to implement anything crazy, lest we all see AA.COM bite the big one once and for all.

EDIT:: I posted this as a new thread in order to address all threads of this type.