IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS FROM THE MAKERS OF CHILI!

AS you may have noticed by using your eyes to look at an internet-enabled electronic device that connected to this forum, the last couple weeks have been full of exciting, explosive drama that rocked the foundation of the entire internet to its very core! Well technically that's not true, a few dorks from another forum decided to declare internet war on various forum members by using google to search for their names and mocking anything they found. You know, because doing that is a fun thing that normal people spend their day doing and isn't at all sad.

As for INTERNET FORUM DRAMA EXTRAVAGANZA PART 2, you may have noticed that I've returned to the forums once again. I didn't really keep up with them much for the last couple years, because I got burnt out and apathetic. But I began lurking again a month or two ago, and I was not very happy with what I saw. Members were afraid to post jokes. Members got banned for what seemed like having an opinion contrary to the moderation hivemind. As a whole, the forums seemed drained of energy and enthusiasm, and that motivated me to come back and attempt to right the wrongs I perceived.

Now before I continue, I'd like to make it clear that I truly appreciate all the hard work, time, and effort the mods and admins put into this forum while I was absent. I'm sorry I rubbed you the wrong way, and you deserve respect for your volunteerism. Everybody on the mod team had their hearts in the right place and was doing what they thought was best for the forums and its users.

However, since I had been detached from the forums for so long, I was able to view them from an outsider's perspective. I saw far too many people punished for "wrongthink" or contesting a mod's opinion. Freedom of speech seemed to be clamped between vice grips, and folks were living in fear of accidentally posting an opinion or word a mod may not agree with, causing them to be banned. These are not good things, and I believe they led to the decline of quality content from you all, like Photoshops or stories or whatever, because it's difficult to be funny when you're worried it might arbitrarily be labeled offensive or racist and bam, you're out ten bux.

So now that I'm back and have no plans of leaving, it will be my mission to change the overall attitude mods have towards the users. I want this to be a fun place where people can joke and create shit without worrying about getting banned or punished.

HOWEVER, with that in mind, my position on racism and hate speech is still the same; keep it out of the forums. And yes, I'm sure that sounds hypocritical from somebody who made a subforum dedicated to black people / black people issues, but I did that just so the irate race warriors would stop posting in D&D and it would be easier to avoid that annoying group of folks who won't hesitate to claim anybody who has a different opinion is racist, and they believe black people on this forum should have the right to tell white people to get out of their thread. Sorry, I originally phrased that sentence wrong, I was referring to the group of annoying race people, not black people, I apologize.

I plan on doing shit like running Photoshop contests, rewarding posters who contribute, setting up cross-forum activities, and many other things that I hope will help bring the community together again. I want to encourage effort posting, which is what the SA Forums were originally known for. On a related note, I want to crack down on white noise posts that serve no purpose other than making it more difficult for people to find the good threads. And let's additionally start trying to go back to posting with actual human English words and punctuation, since I've seen a lot of posts here that appear to have been written by a fifth grade schoolgirl on her iPhone.

If you have any comments or suggestions or ideas or feedback or tapeworms, I invite you to share them in this thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3806601.

Thank you and god bless your mess.

- Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka
President of Internet