hello to all my friends in depression -

i know there's been alot of chaos on this board today, and i wanted to chime in with a few thoughts. i apologize for not jumping in earlier, but i was busy working on exciting new features which i believe will assist in some of the difficulties that you all have been experiencing.

i'm still digging through the messages and talking with our member care folks, but i wanted to lay out a few clear facts:

1) DailyStrength isn't going away. I saw some posts that we were somehow shutting down or doing drastic things. It's just not true. Things are going quite well across the site, notwithstanding the issues here.

2) Understand that our recent intervention in this forum was done at YOUR request. We received a rash of messages from members attacking other members, and pleading messages from wonderful, caring members saying that they were leaving because they couldn't stand being continually insulted and abused. We only stepped in when we felt it was getting out of hand. We DO NOT plan to continue removing content this aggressively. We were simply trying to bring the boards back to a good place, which, to be honest, seems not to have worked thus far.

3) Understand that, as the moderators of this forum, we're caught between and rock and a hard place. If we do nothing, we're accused of not caring, and we let the boards descend into chaos. If we do something, we're accused of censorship and favoritism. Generally, we like to err on the side of doing less rather than more, because we're all adults, no one likes others deciding what can/cannot be posted, and because the team members of DS have other important things to do besides moderating one specific community.

4) I know earlier in the day there was some discussion about members being upset because there was a thread about raising money / soliciting money on DS. This is a very tough area for us. We have found, through hard experience with other online forums, that members soliciting each other for money is generally a REALLY bad idea, and it usually ends poorly. There is the possibility of fraud, the risky exchange of personal information and the real possibility that members can take advantage of each other. We don't tell you what to do outside of DS, but we feel that, on balance, the risks of solicitation within our borders is not ok.

5) We're not perfect, and we are willing to both listen and change as long as you provide CONSTRUCTIVE feedback. As I've previously stated, there's a few important things that I'm already working on: 1) I'm working on a more detailed version of a Terms Of Service, trying to more clearly spell out what's OK and what's not OK on our site, so you'll have more clarity. 2) We're going to post those rules in more prominent places. 3) We're working on an IGNORE feature. 4) We're investigating ways to provide more guidance around the disciplinary actions we take.

6) I beg of everyone to remember that there are real people behind all of these screens. DS's member care team is made up of wonderful, warm people who spend their days trying to make your lives better, not aggravate you. I trust them to do the right thing, just as I prefer to give all of you the benefit of the doubt before taking any form of action.

I am more than willing to continue talking about ways to improve DS, and maybe instead of complaining, we can focus, together, on ways to improve the site. I'd love help from all of you with coming up with our "RULES OF THE ROAD" - what do you think is OK/not OK on the site? What experiences have you had on other websites which we should implement here? I'm all ears.

One thing I'm going to do - I'd like to move the conversations about how to improve this community to a separate CATEGORY. I'm not trying to undermine the importance of this issue, and I'm excited to get your feedback, but let's remember that our primary mission is to help people, and I want new visitors to DS to get that help, not see our discussions about rules and policies. I hope you understand.

I care about you. Deeply. I've devoted almost 3 years to my life to this project, and I spend about 18 hours a day on it. All of us at DS spend our days trying to improve yours, and I apologize if we've done anything to not meet that goal.

doug