I tend to agree with you on this one actually, I used to think we had made a pretty good place here with the fairly open nature of the forum and what we did and didn't allow, but i'm not sure anymore.
We used to mock Steeltalk for being an absolutely terrible place to be, but after some of the posts the last few years on here I think the people laughing at us might be pretty spot on.
I'm going to refer to the website and the forum as different things, because i've always held that they were. People didn't like the forum and that's fine, but MNL used to be very well viewed and the interviews we used to run with the players coming in, or already with the team had thousands of views and generally got good feedback both on here and social media... But the website lost access to
anyone from the staff of the team or currently employed players last season, the reason we received was because of the nature of posts being made and the club not wanting to bring them to the players attention, or risk the players having to answer questions as to why they were doing Q&As with us when people on the forum were posting in the manner that they were.
Unfortunately that loss of access came just as we were about to run an interview with Ben Bowns where we asked him about the nature of twitter, posts on here and the fans approaching him in the car park. It was brutally honest and I genuinely believe it might have helped to control the situation, but alas that opportunity was lost.
The only other time we've lost access to the team (and not even for as long as it is currently going on) was when Brent Pope and Paul Ragan were running the team; at that point they said that we were damaging to the club by running interviews with the team, a similar statement to what has been levelled at the club this time.
If i'm honest, I half wonder if we should actually break our original promise to the forum about allowing almost anything to be posted because it seems to be getting worse. But if we do that, there's nothing to say we'll get access back to speak to the players, staff or owners, or that we won't end up getting called out on every other post on Twitter and a sizable clique joining in because they've had their posts moderated or deleted.
It used to be fun being involved in the forum, especially when I now live and work on different sides of the countries. The end of MNL didn't help that, but the forum feels like a massive chore to run more than at any other time in the past 10 years.
TLDR: The forum used to be good, now it's bad and I don't know how to change that