Karma Schmarma LOL

NTM, if I could at this moment, I absolutely would show who was giving what karma to whom. I absolutely, 100% believe in transparency and honesty, and people being held accountable for their actions, especially if they aren't acting with integrity - I don't hold anyone to any standard of behavior that I don't also hold myself to, and I have really damn high standards for myself, despite what you may hear from others. Plus, as I was explaining to someone else who emailed me about this issue, I was noticing (my own rough observations, not hard numbers from the "back end") that overall we were all getting more negative than positive karma and sadly, I think a lot of people either don't think to reward good behavior because we're trained to criticize and complain online, not boost up and praise, or they don't think to do it unless they are publicly acknowledged for giving bonus points (notice all the Thank You's - those are written right on the post who gave it, so everyone sees what a good person you are for saying something nice, whereas the karma was anonymous - no "reward" for being nice).

For the time being, karma is on hold until I can get an extended statistics package installed that will show who gave what to whom, or we get more people actively participating on the forums who don't know each other from years together online and have pre-conceived biases. And no, I don't think it's because of the karma that activity is slower right now - it's summer, we've Thank Goddess had no fires, and we're still having issues with the tight security settings blocking posts/members.

Speaking of the latter, when you are about to hit Submit, please copy your post just in case. If you get the "Forbidden" error message when you try to post it, please hit the Back button on your browser and don't try to post it again (trying to do so 5 times within a minute will get your IP address blocked as a hacker and you won't be able to see the forums anymore) instead please email the post to ContactUs@mymountaintown.com so we can see what text or link tripped the security sensors and get an exception written for it. If you don't copy the post before you hit Submit, you will lose the post and we won't be able to get a copy of what you tried to Submit in order to analyze it and fix the block.

I'm sorry for the extra work, trust me this is frustrating for me too (I've been trying to post a reply to Arlen in the Evolution thread for 4 days now - I think the software is anti-science LOL), but it will make our forums more secure and easy to use once we work out the kinks. Our site hit a record with my developer this past week - over 250 hacker attacks in a single day, and not from an automated system - those were individual attacks.

Thanks everyone! You da best!