Forum Behavior/Sportsmanship...

[Talking Poker]

We all know what happened surrounding last week's forum challenge (for anyone who doesn't, the threads are still here). Regardless of the mostly innocent and good natured motives behind what happened, things ended up getting somewhat ugly.

A lot of people were offended by the behavior of a few TPF regulars - and I don't just mean people from the other forums. Here is a Private Message I received a couple of days ago. Before anyone jumps to any conclusions and says we're better off without this person, etc, let me tell you, you're be wrong. This came from a respected poster who was an asset to this forum:

(I did edit this slightly so as to not give any hints about who posted it)

I will not say who sent me this PM, so don't ask or bother speculating. If this person wants to come forward, so be it, but this exact example isn't the point. The point is, whether you agree with it or not, we lost at least one good poster because of what happened last weekend (there could certainly be more who didn't care enough to PM me).

I'm not going to make up any rules for behavior, nor am I going to start censoring anything (other than Brian's movie spoilers), but I wanted to make everyone aware of this, since it had a direct negative effect on our community.

Again, I'm not assigning blame or even saying anyone did anything terribly wrong, but in the future, please try to be respectful of everyone who posts here and everyone we play against in forum competitions, etc. You might be just kidding around, but if just one person reacts to it negatively, it can snowball, and the next thing you know, this forum has a bad (and inaccurate) reputation and we're losing good posters. And that's not cool.

Thanks guys.