Not just him-- amina, clubs, and a lot of other people who rarely use the forum but come on chat. Not a thought was given to them. No warning, no time for people to set up an alternative, transfer ownership, simply remove the link from CEMB or otherwise come up with a compromise/alternative. Just a big "I'm/we're done with it, fuck you" Arrogant bullshit.
The decision was not to allow any prospect of change of ownership, for the very simple reason that the place was considered a liability and there did not seem to be any prospect of that changing. It was already associated with this forum and the CEMB, so a clean execution was in the interest of both the latter, rather than have it still hanging around our necks like a dead albatross. If it had never been associated with the CEMB or this forum, those factors would not have needed to be considered.
In a few hours, a Palestinian-American teenage ex-muslim girl will likely be coming on to chat to talk with Solara and rora (chat's teenage girl mafia), and won't know what the fuck is up-- hopefully she has their contact info or comes here and sees this announcement thread.
She will, since the old chat's url has been set to redirect to this topic for a while. That was done when the chat was closed down, since Thinkfree knew some people would need some re-orientation.
That's just one example-- we have ex-muslims and questioning muslims show up at chat that never came on the forum. But hey, whatever, the owner of the forum made a decision by administrative fiat in private consultation with the forum staff which was imposed on all chat users without warning-- guess they'll just have to suck it the fuck up, eh?
What actually happened is that the forum staff, as a group, were fed up with the problems emanating from chat and were discussing it among themselves. The consensus was that it would be great if we could kill it. Thinkfree, who has access to the staff boards as chat liason and general server admin, then chimed in and said he'd been wanting to kill it for a while, and thought it was the best thing to do. You know what happened next.
Do note that staff decisions are not a matter of "Os has spoken". I have no idea where people get that notion. The staff work together as a group of equals and I frequently defer to someone else's opinion if I think they have a good point.
There is also no difference in actual status between moderators and admins. The only difference is that moderators only have to worry about the boards, while admins have to keep an eye on some of the back end stuff as well. IOW, if Cheetah thinks I'm being stupid she'll say so.
Topic: Chatroom has been decomissioned