seebs

About as long as CF, give or take. I registered back when it was a UBB board. They switched to vB quite a while ago.

There are a lot of differences in how things are approached. I think the comparative lack of dogmatic tests for staff members makes a huge difference, though...

Annabel Lee

Just checking! :thumbs:

Gunnaheave

Annabel dear, we really need to work on finding you a new church, so to speak. Perhaps, a little missionary work is in order?

TheBear

Yet, membership here is at 17,400, while membership at CF is over 101,000. I'm not making this a pissing contest between CF & IIDB. I am merely pointing out that of all the horror stories, complaints and gripes about how CF is run and how poorly the staff members conduct themselves over there, one would think the numbers at CF would pale in comparrison to a site like IIDB. Not the other way around.

The way I see it, there is a tiny fraction of CF staff that are probably not qualified to be there, but somehow they slipped through the cracks. And it seems that the majority of the complaints against CF are from a tiny fraction of members.

That leaves the rest of us, the majority of regular members, who really have no complaints or issues. We post, exchange, debate and discuss on the same variety of topics, and rarely run into any problems. And if we do, the problems are usually of a technical nature.

So, with a majority of members having no complaints or issues with staff, and with membership at 100,000+ and growing, I guess these complaints really don't amount to a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. Wouldn't you say?

Kassiana

--That's because CF tends to kick out more non-Christians than Christians. And because IIDB isn't as user-friendly to theists in general. But we have a few good Christians here. I think I'm the lone Pagan in this thread at present.

Annabel Lee

Okay Mr. Missionary...What do you have in mind?

Cynical-Chick

Brim, you dog. Annabel, look out! :devil3:


And 85% of the Republicans in the politics forums are REALLY starting to piss me off.

The mods gave a warning (in that "Boy is aborted 3 times and lives" thread) not to turn it into an abortion debate. It's there; us pro-choicers are keeping quiet because you just *know* we'll get in trouble. Can you say "bias"?

seebs

I'd have to disagree, on several counts.

First off, a majority of English-speaking internet users are Christian. Secondly, ChristianForums is full of games, shinies, and other things. Thirdly, ChristianForums is dominated, statistically, by people who are not likely to run afoul of bad moderation. Finally, it's worth pointing out that CF has a fairly large number of accounts (perhaps 30,000?) that don't really exist; there was some bot spam attack once, that left large holes in the database. I think it's something like user #'s 40,000-70,000.

Here's another thing: If you take the IIDB member list, sort by number of posts, and jump to the middle, everyone on that page has two posts. If you do it with CF, it's one. Which is a subtle way of saying that IIDB members are more likely to stick around for at least a second post. In both cases, a majority of members are inactive.

I think the fraction of members who have grounds for complaints is slightly larger... Many people don't really have any reason to expect otherwise.

Well, I don't know anyone here who can fit into that "we" category. You and I have certainly both had run-ins with staff.

Well, hey, a majority of people in the US had no complaints or problems with slavery. It's just that the majority having no problems with it were directly benefitting from it, and most were carefully not thinking about it.

Furthermore, I think you greatly underestimate the number of people having problems of one sort or another. A very large number of CF users have threads in their denominational forums talking about how they're afraid to poke their heads into other forums for fear of being attacked.

The problem isn't just with what the staff do; it's with what they don't do. While they're busy tracking down people who probably had sex once, the people who are right there openly attacking other users are being ignored.

I have spent many hours trying to console people who were taking their rejection by CF badly. You see a Christian site, with a big thing saying "uniting all Christians", and you find out that, in fact, the closest they'll come is giving lip service to the notion that, I suppose, technically, we have to consider you a Christian for purposes of the site rules. That could make someone a little unhappy.

Statistically, about one person in a million, if that, has the crap beaten out of him by the police on camera. Less, really. But that doesn't mean we can look at the Rodney King thing and say "hey, there's no problem here". The staff who are doing something wrong have done serious long-term damage to the credibility of the Christian faith in the eyes of a very large number of observers, not all of whom are members either here or there... If the site is a ministry, that should matter.

TheBear

Okay seebs.

I guess we could discect this thing a few levels deeper, but it's just not worth it for me. You seem to think it's worth all the aggrivation and frustration. That's your choosing. I choose to look at it as just another message board on the web. Simple as that. If I don't like the site, I don't go back. Simple as that.

Here's something to ponder. Did you ever stop to think that there's another clutch of whiners and complainers, people who have been banned from here, sitting around trashing the IIDB staff and bemoaning how poorly IIDB is run?

seebs

Yup. But I think it's got the potential to be a real ministry, and I think that would be worth fighting for.

I hang out with, so far as I can tell, the bulk of the people who have complaints about IIDB. There's maybe five of them that I have ever found. Their complaints are for the most part at least partially justified, but then, staff here are doing a pretty good job of trying to clean things up.

I will say, having seen both sites work... IIDB tends to take criticism as grounds for serious consideration of whether there's a problem. CF tends to dismiss it and assert that things are already good. Ironically, IIDB's response is the one I would associate with the word "Christian"...