Suggestion: Full Member Forum Section

Additionally, we don't really encourage off-site contact info, even for full members. We allow it, but EC is intended primarily as an online support community, so doing things that actively encourage off-site contact would change the nature of the community, and I think most members are pretty happy with things the way they are.

Another point that's been discussed when we've considered creating a full member forum is that it automatically creates a more obvious divide in classes of members, and we have, so far, avoided providing any "benefits" to full members other than the security-related ones (access to PM and chat.) And the staff as so far been pretty strong in its sense that this is a good policy. So it isn't something we'd rule out entirely, but it isn't likely to come about any time soon.

 

This has been suggested numerous times in the past, but I've always been rather hesistant to support it in the past because of the repercussions it could have on the site. For example, the seperation between Regular and Full members is apparent enough in our current set up, but one of the things we can boast is that each usergroup has equal access to our forums. If we introduce a full member forum then it's just another area of the site that a large portion of our member base cannot access, and it would only increase the gap between the two usergroups and make the Full Member group seem exclusive and more clique-accommodated. As Regular Members have not done anything wrong and are instead just going through the security process, I don't think it's necessarily fair to punish them (albeit unintentionally) further by adding more features that they are restricted from.

Furthermore, I think to assume that you can share personal information with any full member on here is to miss the point of what the security is here to do. Although you can share such information with other full members, we should all still be exercising care and appropriate judgement before handing out such details. After all, it wouldn't be wise to stand in the middle of Time Square showing your phone number to anybody who happens to be walking past you at that time, so I think having a forum that could contain such private information that is accessible by so many people could be just as potentially dangerous. One of the things I aim to remind members of is that the ex-member who originally caused these security measures to start with would have likely been approved as a full member before he was caught 'misbehaving', so our security isn't infallible. Being approved as a full member is only the beginning of the security process, as the monitoring that occurs after that is designed to ensure that people are behaving in a manner that does not appear to endanger themselves or others. Thankfully the security we do have does deter undesirables from staying around as there's sadly much easier ways for them to contact people on less secure websites, but it's possible that some could slip through the security net, which is why we strongly encourage members not to just give out information to any full member they chat to. Although we do everything we can to monitor all usergroups and protect them from undesirable characters, it also requires each member to be safety conscious.

You could imagine the problem that could occur if a predator got access to a full member forum loaded with personal information, so for that reason I'd be very hesitant to support the idea.

Edit: Chip beat me to it.