A note to all of our friends from the Admin Team

In recent days, you will almost certainly have noticed that there has been some disruption here on Gardeners Corner, and whilst we cannot disclose the finer details, we think that it is very important to try and offer you some sort of explanation, and reassurance as to what our stance is now.

Events like this are very rare, but when they do arise they are extremely stressful for everyone, including the staff team. We think it is fair to say that nobody likes conflict, however sometimes it does happen and when it does we need to meet it head on and make decisions that we feel are best for the long term future of Gardeners Corner. Arriving at these decisions is not an easy process, and invariably (except extreme circumstances) there has to be a minimum of three staff members in agreement on whatever course of action we take. Sometimes, our chosen action does not make us very popular, but that is something we cannot avoid.

For clarity, we do not intervene in threads unless we feel we have no other choice, or there has been reports to us reporting a problem. We do not give warnings or bans for no reason, or just because we don’t like someone – if we did, rest assured that @Webmaster would have us removed from staff duties with immediate effect. Gardeners Corner is all about the members – without you, without us, there would be no Gardeners Corner. The more members we have, the better the forum is – we as staff have absolutely nothing to gain from issuing warnings or bans, and we really would rather we never had to do any of them.

Whenever things like this happen on any web forum, the rumour mill tends to go into overdrive with people making their own minds up what they think has happened, or perhaps even getting one side of a story and believing that to be completely true; the trouble is, that it rarely is wholly true and you will never actually know exactly what happened.

In the recent days, we have had a number of things happen including people creating multiple accounts (known as sock accounts, including deliberately altering location information to hide these accounts), others disrupting the peace and harmony of the board, ad hominin attacks, abusive communications to the staff team and unauthorised deletion of members accounts. Clearly, we cannot allow this sort of behaviour to happen, and therefore we have had to take suitable action. It always saddens us when that action means that people leave us, and we genuinely wish anyone who will no longer be sharing our company all the best for their future.

We have done a lot of work behind the scenes in the past few days to stabilise things somewhat, and hope that you will see things now settle down. Please remember, if you do see a problem or have a problem with another member, please use the report button and we will deal with it as swiftly as we can. Please also remember that the Admin Team are not above this either - if you have a problem with any of us, please report it using the report button and we will deal with it accordingly; under these circumstances, the member of Admin who is the subject of the report will step back from the discussion and the remaining staff will arrive at a conclusion.

Finally, whilst we cannot disclose specific details for reasons of confidentiality, and we generally do not discuss any admin actions for that very same reason, we can discuss some things in broader terms with you via private message if you desire.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

The Admin Team