You have all raised good points, for me we are a victim of our own success.
As sarg pointed out in the old days we could post off topic and get away with it (lord knows myself and Orlego used to all the time) but times have shanged and we no longer have that option, if we go off topic these days then it just goes nuts.
EB has grown so quickly and it seems that were getting bigger each day so maintaing the friendly atmosphere is something that we have found harder over the last few weeks, but i feel that we are along way off of becoming like certain other sites out there.
Now i see that many people are worried about the banning thats been going on, well it should be noted that in the last 6 months we have only banned 3 members.
Dark1 who we tried to talk too but just wouldnt listen so we sent him to the chamber to try and educate him, we thought that we had made some progress but once let out he started to spam all over again. So a second trip to the chamber was his punishment. Once let out again he just returned to spamming so we really didnt have much choice but to ban him.
Then their was a guy who registered and told us all aload of rubbish before telling us to go to hell, so banning him was what i believe to be justified.
And lastly their was legokid whom i believe was dark1, after spamming we sent him to the chamber and asked him to please stop and his response was to tell us we were idiots and dared us to ban him.
Overall i dont feel that weve banned anyone who didnt deserve it, we created the chamber as a way to try and talk to people. Its hoped that in the chamber we can explain to members why they are their and why not to misbehave here.
We could just ban memebers who misbehave here straight away, but we dont like doing that and i hope that we will be able to teach members who enter the chamber how to behave here.