An Update from the Accordance Forums Admin Team

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

Recently, we had a couple of forum discussions “derail” quite far off their original topics into some unhealthy and unproductive discussions by some users. We allowed the discussions to flow freely for a little bit (so we wouldn’t seem overly harsh in our forum moderation) and even attempted to bring a little civility to the discussions. When these efforts failed, we locked the forum threads after a discussion among Accordance employees.

 

One of the users who made the contributions has been removed from the forum system. Please see the paragraph “Corrections” below for further elaboration.

 

We did not ban the forum user (since all forum bans require approval from Accordance’s ownership). We would have likely restricted his forum privileges for a period of time (as we have done with other forum members), but since he requested deletion of his account, we did not have an opportunity to take such action. The forum user is allowed to re-signup for the forums at a future date should he wish, although we would likely start his account off with “new account posting restrictions” should he decide to re-join us in the future. We are also monitoring the situation to see if there are any other users who potentially need any action taken on their accounts. If we find that there are, we will address them shortly.

 

On the forum threads that were “derailed”, since the one user’s entire posting content has been removed from the system, we have blanket-hidden all posts in those threads when he began posting so the posts are not “awkward” by missing his context. This blanket hiding will not affect any of our users ability to post in other threads, nor is it anything personal against the other users who attempted to productively contribute to those threads. We’ve simply hidden the posts so that the threads read well before they became “derailed” by the forum user.

 

A few users have asked us about feedback, so I want to make a few clarifications:

 

• Accordance is not, nor ever will be, a “single theology platform”. We have a wide range of Accordance users across theological traditions, and our goal is to serve all of them. 
• We welcome and log every feature and module request that comes in, and we appreciate such feedback from our users. We take each feature and module request into consideration.
• With that said, Accordance also needs to ensure we’re prioritizing our feature and module development resources to ensure we’re producing modules that will sell across enough users to justify the licensing and development costs for such modules, as well as adding features to Accordance that would benefit the majority of our Accordance users without unnecessarily adding “bloatware” to the app. We cannot promise we will produce every module or add every feature people request, but we will at least take each request into consideration and determine if it fits within our development priorities and is a feasible investment.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

Corrections: The user we removed from the system did not ask to have his account removed from the forums. He originally asked to have his account banned in the system in order to prevent him from posting. Since (with the exception of spam/scam/bot accounts) we do not place complete and permanent bans on Accordance user’s accounts without approval from Accordance’s leadership (and only for continual violation of community guidelines after multiple warnings and after trying other account-restriction measures), when a user requests that they have decided to no longer post on the forums, we will usually remove the forum account from the system. This will prevent them from accessing/posting in the forums unless they decide to re-register for a new account on the forums (at one time my old forum account was removed from the system when I was not actively posting on the forums, and I later returned with a new account). Should the forum user wish to return to the forums at a later time, he is welcome to do so and create another account. The individual is still an Accordance user and can use and purchase Accordance modules without any issues.