★★★ ALL MEMBERS PLEASE READ: Establishing a sense of community in Car Chat ★★★

[DaveGS4]

A Request and Message to ALL Forum Members:

Over the last few months the moderator team has noticed an issue with the Car Chat forum.... while this forum has had a high volume of post activity, it is not experiencing a similar growth in community. What makes Club Lexus a special place is that our members nearly always are mature, we help each other out and work through our differences like adults. We forge friendships with those we've never met and those that we connect with at local CL meets.

We welcome all well-reasoned, factual discussion and comments that reflect your individual opinion. Lately, however there has been an increase in unprovoked personal attacks, rude comments and a general lack of respect for one another in the Car Chat forum. I will remind all members that Club Lexus is first and foremost a LEXUS forum and if your primary purpose here on CL is to constantly disparage the brand that draws our membership together we will ask you to leave our forum.

The attacks and insults will not continue. We will regain our sense of community in the Car Chat forum, starting now. If you want to post in order to simply flame, troll or bait other members into arguing, it's time for you to find another forum.

HOW? We're going to accomplish this by:

1) informing members of this request, asking for their help
2) increased moderator presence and attention in the Car Chat forum
3) better education about our forum rules including personal attacks and response to comments (click here to review them) and stricter enforcement via recorded 'infractions' for members who break them
4) use of temporary 24 hour or 1 week ban from the forum as cool off periods after ignoring warnings
5) permanent bans for continued offenses against our community rules where appropriate


WE NEED YOUR HELP

Help grow the sense of community by:

• Before you hit the 'post reply' button, consider if your reply is adding to the community or detracting from it. If it's purely negative, don't post.
• Thicken your skin, be 'better than that'. Don't respond angrily to a rude post. Rise above it, don't respond or use the 'report a post' button to notify moderators of an issue
• Recognize that your viewpoints may not be and may never be the same as other members. Learn to agree to disagree politely.
• Pitch in to welcome new contributors to this forum

If you get an infraction or a temporary 24 hour or one week ban, please take the warning seriously. Don't come back angry and complaining and don't pick up in the same thread doing the same thing. We're using this method to try and provide 'cooling off' time when needed. Warnings sent in private and public just don't seem to be doing enough to discourage some of the recent behaviour here... we will show some folks the door if they can't participate in a mature manner that enhances our community instead of destroying it.
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Thank you for taking the time to read this message.