04-23-2025, 10:14 PMsköldpaddor Wrote: Those last couple of paragraphs, I absolutely agree with that. I think that a LOT of the time, people develop these grudges and ideas about people and teams and groups and they never once bother to verify those ideas or determine whether any of those things are true. Like, in the past couple of months, I've been told that people "hate" me and...I don't even remember the last time I talked to these people! I don't have any CLUE what I could have done to make them hate me, but somehow, I'm just on some list due to...I guess something that's being passed around behind closed doors, and because it's all secluded back there, no one bothers to confront the issues, no one bothers to talk things out, they just spread things around in the shadows.

I do hate to see us lose our ability to joke around and move on. And I definitely don't think it has to be positive all the time. This is something where I absolutely sanitize a lot of my own responses, because I think that leadership should try not to actively provoke people or fire back with the first aggressive thing that comes to mind in the moment.

It's definitely hard. Because like, as you said, when there are a few bad actors, and it appears as if no one is calling them out or making any effort to stop them from causing harm, it feels like well...it can't bother them that much, or they'd say something.

I think that one thing we tried to make clear this week as Head Office, at any rate, is that our locker rooms and affiliated spaces absolutely do impact our broader community. Locker rooms should be a place where people can join and be welcomed in without immediately having to be initiated into a circle of drama and petty beef that they have no connection to, and that is not directed at Hamilton or any one room in particular, that's just my own opinion of locker rooms as a whole. And that's a hard thing to navigate when a community is as well-established as this one. There's over a decade of history here, and there's bad blood that's just as old, and I think that we should all do our best to just let go of that and not pass it on to future "generations" of users as soon as they walk in the door.

Closing threads because something that crosses the line might be said in them in the future sure doesn't give any chance to confront these issues or have any sort of constructive discussion about anything. The forums are a place that everyone regardless of what team they're on, or what discord they're in, have access to and all that's being done by restricting conversation on here is pushing people even further behind those closed doors.