[Brad]

When things like this happen the staff is seen as uncaring towards the membership, please understand that this is not our intention and we do care a great bit about this site and the people that visit it. These decisions are tough ones to make but at some point someone has to make a call one way or the other.

I will clarify exactly how this was dealt with:

On the 20th of this month a PM was forwarded to an admin from one of our member's, the PM in question has been sent to this user by MrZeropage. An admin sent a private message to MrZeropage, this PM explained that sending messages to other user's requesting they vote for a modification was considered spam.

After a discussion that included multiple moderators, and two admins (one begin me) it was decided that the modification would be removed from the poll. This was done because even with a list of users that received the PM, we have no way of telling who the author's friends or beta testers are. In addition to that other hacks were not allowed in past HOTM threads due to PM spamming asking users to click the install button on certain hacks (so they would be in the poll).

At that time an admin gave the go ahead for the modification to be removed from the poll, and a moderator followed these instructions. This action was taken about 24 hours after the initial report was sent to us.

Shortly after much feedback was posted in this thread related to the issue, and some things have been tossed around that are simply not true (partly thanks to a bad word choice on my part). We listen to all feedback and do our best to resolve problems like this, but you must realize that things do take time and we can't make everyone happy. I think the response to this thread has been so great because many people use the arcade add-on's, when you combine their user base together we are talking about a nice chunk of users keeping an eye on this thread. When a large modification is removed fans of it are going to post questions asking why it was removed, this is just natural.

"The unwritten rule" was again a bad word choice on my part. The rule in question is this one:

From the site rules

1.3 No "Spamming": Please do not double post or cross-post the same message in multiple forums. You will not mass-PM or mass-email multiple members of this site the same message. You will not post for the sake of increasing your post count or hack count.

This rule covers the entire site, including HOTM threads. What the users were not aware of is the action the staff would take if someone was caught spamming others in an attempt to win HOTM or have a hack included in the poll.

In response to the user feedback we are making a few changes to the site to make our policies more clear. The first step is the new guidelines for HOTM polls, these will be listed on the rules page, in hotm threads, and will also be PM'ed to hack authors in the current months poll. These guidelines will state exactly is allowed and not allowed when asking users to vote for your modification, it will also outline the actions that will be taken if you are caught and how the issue will be handled by the staff. We will also re-write our site rules soon to make them more clear and understandable.

The current staff position on this poll is it will continue as is. We do not feel ipb pro arcade should be allowed back in the poll because that would not be fair other hack author's that have been removed from HOTM polls in the past. We can not bend the rules for one user while enforcing them upon others.

You are of course free to send in more feedback, this is an on-going issue and I think it will be some time before it's fully resolved. I encourage you guys to employ some people skills while posting in this thread (and elsewhere). You will find that I am much easier to work with when we discuss things like adults. I know a lot of lost in text, but try to remember to be kind to each other.

Gotti: I have been visiting family the past week and was sick for awhile after doing that. Thus I have not sent any replies to anyone that PM'ed in the last few days. You'll find my reply in your PM inbox.