Observant visitors of our site will notice that we have removed the possibility to react from our site. It turned out that we were too optimistic about the behaviour of some fans. Even a list of guidelines did not really help to stop people from misbehaving. Therefore we decided to add a new feature to our site: the membership.
The Pros
This membership is completely free. The main goal is to prevent people from contributing to the site anonymously. We will not expose the member-details on the site, unless people give explicit permission to do so. After registering and confirming your membership you will be able to contribute to the site like in the past.
If people do break our guidelines, we will give them a warning. After three warnings we will expel them. When members go way too far we will not wait for the third warning.
Our special features, like petitions, quizzes and classifieds, will become “members only” too.
A member can customise the membership details completely: change of email, another (screen )name, update notifications, password and in the future even more.
Removed contributions will remain “visible”, at least the author and date will, next to the reason for deletion.
Disregarding the fact that we “guide” the contributions almost continuously, we can miss some bad contributions. So we decided to add an “alert button” that can be used to bring such a post under our attention. Be careful using this option and give a good reason why you think it is appalling (so not just ‘I disagree with it’).
The Cons
We regret that we have to “force” the good guys (and gals of course) to take extra effort to contribute to our Elvis-community. They have to log on first, before they can contribute.
Another disadvantage is that we have to restructure things and therefore we have to remove all present contributions, also the good ones.
Of course this system is not waterproof too. When somebody wants to screw up things, it still is possible, but at least we will be able to track (and block) and it will take much more effort.
Schedule
You can now apply for your membership now. The sooner the better, since you will have more freedom to choose a screen name. In the meantime we will restructure the site and replace our current update-system with the new one. In a couple of days you will see the new features work.
Again, it is important to know that nothing else will change. ElvisNews.com is, and will remain a free official internet based fanclub, recognized bij EPE, run by fans for fans. As with any fan club, you need to subscribe (as you probably already did to our update list), the main difference is that you have to log in first to add your reaction to the news or articles.