Good morning. You've awoken Spam. And this time, he's not playing nice. If you don't want a rude shock to the shammies, I suggest you leave.

The reason the admins in control are in control is because, frankly, they've done a spiffy job of keeping the place running all this time. They've dealt patiently with about five or six servers that have kicked 'em off, they've dealt with countless trolls trying to disrupt our fun, and most of all, they've done this without being jerks. There was no 'forcing' on their part; we listen to 'em because they know what they're doing and they do it well. If we didn't like it, we would have stopped whining about it and started our own community and see if anyone joins. And if nobody joins or we can't keep track of it, we'd realize that, hey, maybe these people know what they're doing.

But, getting back on track here, I'm going to tell you something that may shock you. It may make you run around like a bloody lunatic, screaming your head off that we're so unfair and so evil and wrong and unamerican and hate evil hate bad wrong evil wrong whine whine whine. Ready for this?

THIS BOARD IS A DICTATORSHIP.

Control of this board is solely in the hands of the owners of the board. THEY paid for the board with THEIR money, THEY paid for the webhosting with THEIR money, THEY worked their arses off fixing parts of the code of the board so it works right, THEY keep the place in top order, why should THEY give control to someone else? This is THEIR board. If they wanted to, they could just shut the whole thing down tomorrow and frankly, no amount of election is going to stop that. The board and webspace are their property, NOT the community's. The community and this specific board are two different entities. To summarize:

This board is NOT a democracy, there are no plans to MAKE it a democracy, and IT WILL NOT BE A DEMOCRACY.

This board is a DICTATORSHIP.

But it is a PROPERLY-RUN DICTATORSHIP.

Frankly, if you think you can do a better job, start your own board. You can hold as many elections as you want and let beuracracy clog up how it runs. But just remember, the VAST majority of the actual functional internet communities are all run in some dictatorship fashion. In the internet world, you need the speed and decisiveness of a dictatorship to make anything work on time. Can you imagine how long it'd take if every user had to vote on banning someone? Or if we needed to fix something? Things on this board need to happen on a NOW basis, not whenever the committee decides to hold the restructuring meeting to vote on when to plan to deal with the decision process.

We've dealt with this argument OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER in this community and in many others I visit, including many I have ultimately no administration over, and frankly, it's getting boring. Almost invariably, it's started by newbies whining because something happened to them or people simply out to cause trouble.

Bottom line?

If you don't like it, TOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BAD! If you think you can do better, stop your whining and start your own board.