Forum restructuring

Welcome to De-Commissioned, a place for former members of the Great Commission movement (aka GCM, GCC, GCAC, GCI, the Blitz) to discuss problems they've experienced in the association's practices and theology.

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Trying a little restructuring to see if we can more evenly distribute the threads among the forums. "Friendship/Discipleship" and "Financial Issues" forums were pretty much never used, so I moved their contents to "General" and deleted them. New forums include "People and places" (people and church specific issues, such as the fairly frequent conversations about ECC and Mark Darling), and "Outside the movement" (for discussions on Catholicism, Sovereign Grace Ministries, and so on -- formerly these types of discusses wound up in Moribund Equine).

We'll try it out and see how it goes. Any feedback or suggestions on how to make the forums/website better are also welcome!

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The "Just for fun" forum has been renamed the "Off topic" forum, and is now described as: A place to discuss anything else (not GC related.)

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I've combined the "Site announcements" and "Feedback & technical support" forums into one.

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• A "home page" has been added to the site, which acts as a sort of blog-like gateway to the rest of the forum. The hope is that it would provide newbies/googling people unfamiliar with forums a more user-friendly interface than just a list of boards and topics. We can flag certain threads as "Best Of" and they will appear on the front page like a blog post, with responses showing up as comments. If someone wanted to post a comment they would post just like they normally would to a blog - even though they're really posting to the forum thread. Meanwhile, the Forum still shows up as normal via the "Forum" tab. This is really an attempt to provide the user-friendliness of a blog (which De-Comm originally was) with the many other benefits a forum offers.
  
  I have an (unproven) hunch that while a forum is superior to the old blog format in so many ways, it does tend to scare some people off who are just casually glancing at the site and are unfamiliar with forums in general. Plus, having "Best Of" threads allows some of the really well thought out starting topics (such as the decomm founder's original blog posts) to be given more attention than they get today - being buried by so many other topics. So... we can try it out and see how it goes. Feedback welcome! If my hunch is wrong and it turns out to be a horrible experiment, I can always turn it off.
   
  
• All of the posts owned by 'archive' have been transferred to their original owners. Archive was a user created many moons ago to house threads converted over from when De-Comm was a blog, and they looked kind of funny because - well - they were all owned by 'archive'. Some people had old posts attributed to their current accounts, while others who either don't have registered accounts or changed their account names, had their posts transferred to Guest accounts - which is what it looks like when somebody posts anonymously with a specified name. If that confuses you look at one of the very old threads to see what I mean. Basically, the old posts should not be weird to look at anymore, and should just look like everything else.
   
  
• The rules have been trimmed a bit, and new users are now asked to read them before they complete registration. The main thing that changed was the rule about naming pastor's names which was removed (this isn't enforced anyway, and if people want to talk about specific pastors go for it as long as you're truthful). There's also some wording changes. The rules are also open for discussion, so if you think we should add/change/remove something, let's discuss it! Link to rules: here