Well I've had a hell of a time catching up, as I've been gone for some time, only to seemingly jump feet-first into a charlie foxtrox with no idea of what was going on.
I guess when I was first invited here, I was under a different impression of what this place was, and that impression was that unlike all the over various forums I've been a member of, I wasn't going to have to walk on eggshells when it came to expressing any political thoughts I might have, because the staff was made up of people who believed in free speech, and any moderation that had to be done would be done with an even hand and fairly, unlike those other boards I talked about, which have basically become SJW strongholds, where you get banned for being anything to the right of Marx, or if they do keep you around, it's basically to have a whipping boy/punching bag. So my first impressions were that, in spite of having to deal with all those annoying fundies/trads again, it was still preferable to the leftist echo-chambers basically every other SF/Fantasy board has turned into because "sCi-fI hAs ALwaYs BeeN pROgreSiVe."
Now, having read through some of what went down, I'm going to say that I'm only a little less alarmed, largely because all this talk of "sedition" being illegal and thus banned from discussion. So what if I've seen all this evidence of the election being stolen, government officials ignoring their duty or abusing their power, and think it might be a hard fight to get these commies out of our government so we can have our Republic back, and kind of want to discuss that? Am I going to get banned for suggesting that the government we're lining up to get might be working against the American people and might in fact be agents of the Chinese government? Or reminding people how the United States gained its independence and was founded to begin with? Or that I'm pretty convinced that this country is pretty fucked and am desperately in search of a solution that doesn't involve "a rifle behind every blade of grass?" Am I going to have to start walking on eggshells again? And here I was checking out the SFDebris forum again, because I've been out of sci-fi nerd spaces for a while, and wouldn't you know it, but it's still a cesspool of identity politics in everything, and no one is interested in discussing anything that has to do with anything else, but, oh, hey, remember that Sietch place? So I wander back here only to find this crap? Keep in mind, I've actually recommended this place to a few people myself even during my absence from it, and now I'm kind of wondering if they even bothered or not.
/rant
Okay, if you want something constructive as to the actual administration of this place, as someone who does run their own pitiful little BBS, I have to ask - what are the controls for usergroups like? My forum has really simple, convenient controls that allow one to create and maintain the groups separately, or on a user-to-user basis, with a nice little checklist of all the usergroups listed that you can check or uncheck for each user. You can create forums with only certain usergroups being able to view and/or access it. You can adjust settings within usergroups to automatically include users in them based on just being registered, or having a specific post count, or to require manual inclusion by an admin or mod. Does XF have these abilities?
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