StoryTeller and I met in person here in Vegas last summer and we went to see some summer league games together. He agreed to send over his Salary Data so we could host a copy. MikeDC has enhanced it quite a bit and has been keeping it up to date. Available here: http://sportstwo.com/NBASalaries.php S2 has more than a message board for you to make use of. The front page of the site is a content management system/publishing system called Drupal and from there you can blog or write stories or even form organic groups. You can read more about Drupal in general at http://drupal.org. If you have questions, PM me or AIM me at S2DennyCrane or contact cpawfan via PM or AIM at cpawfans2. It's ideally suited for running things like a GM draft, making player fan pages and that kind of thing. It also has a nifty RSS feed reader so we can add feeds from your favorite Blazers' blogs and news sources. S2 is more than a basketball site, so feel free to browse our other forums and participate in discussion of your favorite teams in those other sports.
About staff positions. We're structured a bit different than sites you may be used to, especially since we're not a single sport or team site. Admins (names in blue) have access to admincp, and we basically set up the site and configure the software. Commissioners (orange) are roughly what you probably know as admins on other sites. We have a commissioner of Baseball and a Commissioner of Football (Soccer) and so on. Mods (red) have access to the moderator functions of vB3 in specific forums only. Those forums they're assigned to. Global Mods (green) are moderators, but have access to the mod functions of vB3 everywhere on the site. We have a lot of forums and we want to have plenty of people who can quickly remove spam posts or resolve other issues everywhere. Producers (purple) are Global Mods but with the added responsibility of developing smaller areas of the site than whole sports. We have Producers for NBA East, NBA West, and so on.
We allow everyone to have/upload their own custom avatars, and animated gifs are allowed as well. We also allow images in your signature. We have a GFX (graphics) forum where you can ask for our posters who are talented graphic artists to create a custom avatar or signature image. Just go there and post a thread asking for what you want.
I want to say something about our Forum Rules (see the link at the top). We've been around for 18 months or so and never posted any rules. The rules you see are pretty much what we had posted in our mods-only forum to give them some guidance. We posted them for the first time for everyone to see about 2 weeks ago, because one of our posters wanted to know our official rules/guidelines. The first rule covers spammers, basically. They're not here to join the community, make friends, and post about sports. We've occasionally had a poster come to the site to do nothing but stir up shit, had a reputation for making the exact same kind of thread everywhere else he posted, etc. To date, we've banned ONE person for this latter reason, and we gave him multiple chances to come back and try to be honorable. We've banned every spammer who's come along and posted shoe ads or viagra ads and that kind of thing. The second rule is our most important rule, IMO. It simply states that we try to get along, even if we don't agree with one another or even dislike one another. This is simply a sports forum and is supposed to be fun. We have no issue with taunting, baiting, and that kind of thing, as long as it's not of a personal nature. Public figures are fair game; teams, players, owners, managers, writers, and so on. Other posters are not. It is a part of sports for SF Giants fans to hate the Dodgers and vice versa, we're not going to squash that kind of speech. To date, we've banned ZERO people for violating this rule. The third rule is strongly related to rule #2. Our staff is unpaid, and they contribute a lot of time and energy toward making the site good. Their interest is S2's best interest, which is absolutely making this place fun for everyone. Nobody on our staff is to have a god complex or otherwise abuse their powers; they're here to facilitate everyone else using the software we provide for the greatest enjoyment of everyone. So we ask that you show them respect. To date, we've banned ZERO people for violating this rule. The fourth and fifth rules are also related to rule #2. As you can see, we are about respect. We realize there are a lot of people who know one another and because of this familiarity, you may tease one another or taunt one another in a friendly way. We don't frown on this at all, as long as nobody is truly disrespected. It's something of a judgment call on our part, admittedly, but we're going to side with you, the posters over our own judgment almost all the time. To date we've banned ZERO people for violating these rules. The sixth rule is provided so we can try and keep people from getting in trouble at work or school (or anywhere else) for simply looking at the site. Generally this means no pornography or links to porn sites that someone might click on not knowing. We have no issue with people swearing; we have a very few words in our profanity filter (just words considered hate speech). Although some may consider these words to be not work safe, we figure someone has to be right up to your screen to even see the words. We will label threads with "NOT WORK SAFE" so you can judge whether to open them on your own. We'll label videos that have similar words or otherwise content that some might find objectionable so you can decide to play them or not. Beyond that, we're not here to fight with you over things like masked cursing and the like. We're all adults for the most part and know what the words mean and likely use them ourselves. No big deal. To date, we've banned ZERO people for violating these rules. If all someone does is swear, then it may violate rule #1 (being honorable, not stirring up shit). The seventh rule restates our no flame war policy. Specifically, you can say the content of a post is bad, but don't call the poster names. Again, to date ZERO posters banned. The eight rule might be considered our most controversial, since it gives us all the leeway we need to deal with people who claim to be following the rules to the letter, yet are otherwise making the site not fun for everyone else. We simply cannot conceive of all the ways people may seek to annoy everyone else, so we need some sort of blanket policy to cover those situations if they arise. The kinds of things this rule covers is stalking, constantly posting off topic in multiple threads and deemed to be deliberate for the purposes of annoying everyone or a specific poster, posting many one line posts in a thread (another form of spamming) which makes it not fun for people to read those threads, editing over a staff member's edits, and that kind of thing. The enforcement of this rule is generally for our staff/mods to edit the posts or delete the offending posts. To date, we've banned ZERO posters for violating this rule. In total, we've banned one poster and 75 spammers. That's it. I hope this makes it clear to everyone what we're about. We're incredibly lenient, not about mods with god complexes, and trying to avoid banning people. Our philosophy is derived from a Web 2.0 concept called Radical Trust - we are placing radical trust in you, our posters. If you have questions, this thread is open so feel free. If you prefer, PM a staff member. If you have an issue with any staff member, PM an admin. We're here to serve you.
Not reading the rules resulted in a ban from the last place I posted at. Thanks for posting them and I'll refrain as much as I can from calling cpawfan every name in the book.
LOL I just want to reiterate that we are not looking to fight with our posters. If I could sum up our rules in a sentence, it'd be "we treat you like the adults you are, we ask you act like the adults you are." Go have fun, we insist
I'm going to be polite and not name names. I just think that with this whole "lets welcome the Blazer fans and demonstrate that we S2 admins are different than BBF admins" people should be completely accurate.
In the interest of accuracy. I just went over the banned member list with cpawfan and we came up with 7 total people banned for various reasons. I was unaware of all but 2 of these others. 5 banned for rule #1. 2 banned for rule #2. 2 of those before we even had come up with our rules in the mod forum - over 18 months ago. The last outright ban was probably 60 days ago.
I smell someone trying to be a pain in the ass. So be it Out of near 21,000 members, 7 bans (or 76 including spammers) should be an indication of how much we resist banning people.
Same here Denny. No one here at S2 has been banned for giving their own view, arguing with other posters, debating, things of that nature. If you're spamming, of course you'll be banned, otherwise there is nothing to be worried here about. You can even cuss from time to time if you're mad at your team doing bad. lol
Also, can you remove the Russian letter "er" from the word filter? That is going to prevent a bunch of Виктор Криапа fans from joining the site! Edit: Only the uppercase is censored...ВИКТО?* К?*ИАПА
That's Viktor Kriapa right? Or does и mean hy? I can read Serbian cyrillic writing, which is kind of same as Russian. lol
х has a somewhat H sound. A flemmy from the throat H sound though. The H in Viktor Khryapa's name is silent, so it doesn't factor in. и is like the ea sound in eat.
Nothing is censored. The site uses UTF-8 encoding which is designed to show all kinds of langauges, like Chinese, English, Hebrew, Russian, etc. Either the "er" isn't in the displayable character set, or when you copy/pasted into the editor, the text was changed. As for your avatar, vB3 resized it because it's too big (176x176 max) and that stopped it from animating. I posted a link in the GFX section for pegs so he could resize his animated avatar and it worked. Check there.
