[What happened to Unmod?]

This topic deserves a response from yours truly, and I apologize for not making one sooner. I'm a bit sick, and when I'm working in DC I have limited access to the net.

Of everyone in the room that wished UnMod gone, I was probably the most reticent about its deletion, however ironic that may be. I knew that 95% of its usage was indeed disposable, and that it did have a good number of people who didn't even listen to and or care about video game music or OCR in general, but used it as a dumping ground for... whatever.

The 5% is what gave me pause. It's what made me check with Larry to see what he thought, and it's why deleting the forum in the fashion that we did honestly did seem like bad form to me. Did I succumb to peer pressure? In a sense... however, the mods and site staff are more than peers, they're people who spend more time on the site than I do, who contribute above and beyond to it, and when all of them recommend something and none of them object, it's less about peer pressure and more about trusting people you respect.

I knew there were legitimate users of the forum. I knew there were probably proponents, as Dhsu and The Coop have proven, that could articulate its merits, and who would oppose deletion without any warning whatsoever. This probably didn't bother anyone else in the room, but it did bother me. The counterargument against warning was that it would cause a massive backlash and that the other forums would suffer the consequences. That ended up happening to an extent, regardless, as poor Shariq was forced to mass-moderate an influx of inappropriate materials following UnMod's deletion. In a way, this validated the argument that advance warning wasn't such a great notion, but I still apologize to the few & proud legitimate visitors to the forum who wouldn't have reacted inappropriately and who deserved advance warning.

UnMod was originally formed so that those who wanted to bitch and moan about how much of a saucy asshole I was could do so, provided they didn't flood, spam, or troll. Somehow, that notion devolved into a place where people with almost no interest in OCR posted random shit. While a good deal of that random shit occasionally amused me, and there was some real keeper hentai posted, ultimately the more appropriate form of the forum is for discussion of topics not directly related to games, anime, or music, which are the three topics General Discussion focuses on.

As a side note, yes, it's a little goofy to think that anything can be "off-topic" to "general" discussion; we might find a way to semantically clarify this discrepancy further.

We're waiting to create the "Off-topic" forum specifically because we don't want the appearance of simply renaming UnMod. We want to start from a clean slate, encourage threads like "and it made me smile" and similarly popular but also substantive conversation, and discourage using OCR as the forum equivalent of Sanford & Son's backyard.

Is that a feasible goal? Are ANY of the 5% of UnMod's cooler folks that actually do give a damn about OCR going to stick around after their home has been abruptly ripped out from underneath them?

I don't know. I hope so. I do know that it wasn't my goal to make OCR "classier" by deleting the forum, but rather to alleviate stress on the part of the moderators, to eliminate what had largely become a dumping ground for people not remotely interested in OC ReMix, and to create a new forum that would allow for the best of what UnMod had to offer but with moderation in place to prevent anarchy.

Before I leave, I just want to say that this was a pretty classy and well-handled response, and I respect you for that.