Misogyny on boards

We, the mods, are aware that there has been an increase in misogynistic posts in very recent times. We had been actively discussing it prior to this thread being started. The thread itself is littered with examples, as are various other current threads through After Hours. I would like to point out at this stage though, that this is not exclusive to After Hours at all, it's just that this is such a busy busy forum that it is naturally going to be more evident here. It is also elsewhere on the site and there has been an ongoing discussion with the wider mod community on how to combat this.

This isn't a new phenomenon. This has been ongoing since the beginning of boards and long before I was a mod of AH, it was in fact getting better. It may be hard to see that when it's so blatant over the course of a couple of weeks, but that's taking those weeks in isolation. We have looked over threads from the past, and compared them to threads of now, and I promise you this is a better place to post now than it was before overall. It's not perfect though, and I'm not going to lie, it will never be perfect. The mods work very very hard to try and stamp this out, we really do. We discuss it continually. We miss things, of course we do, we're unpaid volunteers and we cannot possibly read every post in the forum, it's absolutely never going to be the case. We may even miss reported posts, though we aim not to. I do need to defend us here though, and mention that we can see every post that you report, and there have been some unfair and misleading posts from posters claiming we've ignored reports when in fact none had been made. That's not helping anyone. We do our best because we care about the forum. Purposely painting us in a bad light is very unfair.

We urge posters to report posts which they feel are over the line, the mods may not agree with posts on their own, but allowing us to see patterns is extremely helpful. Again, I must say that we absolutely do not see every post in this forum, we often get RPs saying things like "I can't believe you're letting them away with this" - we're not. We just may not be aware that there is a problem right until the moment we read that RP. We also may not get to action something right away, so please be patient with us.

With regards to what we should action, it's often very difficult for us to find the line between opinion and plain ol' hatred but we try and will continue to try to find this line. As objective as we try to be with all of our modding, subjectivity does naturally come in to play, which is why we discuss things regularly to get a more general consensus on things which aren't clear cut.

I will add though, that a huge huge proportion of the seemingly misogynist posts are by re reg trolls, we try to ban and delete these posts are soon as possible but of course by the time we get to them all hell may have already broken loose and all the usual gender war suspects have kicked off the madness. We ask you to please please report those who you think are trolling (re reg or not), and ignore them completely until we have a chance to get to them. Please help us to make this forum a nicer place for you to post.

We will never stamp out misogyny completely, we will never have a forum where gender isn't an issue, because we don't live in a world where misogyny doesn't exist or where gender isn't an issue. We will however, continue with our endeavours to nip these problems in the bud from as early on as possible. The very last thing we want is for users to feel they are no longer welcome to post here. There is nastiness contained within the forum for sure and it's certainly not all related to the gender wars, we will continue to try to combat this and make this a forum where everyone feels welcome.

We are currently discussing adding new mods as the forum is simply too busy for us to cover effectively right now, please please bear with us while we do this, it's a much lengthier process that you might imagine.

We welcome your feedback always, please always feel free to contact the mods at any time with your concerns. Again, we are busy, and may have a pile of PMs to get through but we will get back to you.

Sincere apologies for the length of this post, but I think it's an important issue that deserve to be addressed appropriately.