Cold, cold, cold!

I have a new heater for my office. I hope that it helps, but so far I'm still cold. This is unpleasant. It's supposed to get down to -15f tonight, too. We don't often get long stretches of cold like this, but it's supposed to stay this way through most of the next week. And this is just January. We have months ahead.

In a couple different emails in the last two days people have eluded to my banning of people from the site for disagreeing with me. I don't know where they got the idea that I'm about to ban someone, but I haven't had any such idea. I don't know why I would. Yes, people are worried about the changes in the site and some people don't like the changes. That's no reason to be banned.

If you are one of those people who believe that's how FM is run, I think you should take a look at the site and count the number of people banned in the year and a half since I took over. You will find one person, and that came right after I took the position and was part of the larger problem that landed FM in my hands.

One person was also kicked out of chat for a few weeks for posting things from chat in his journal. I did that, in fact, both to reinforce that it was no more acceptable to copy material from the boards and post it (and he argued that point) and also to give a few people a chance to calm down because they found his actions and his attitude very annoying. He was not banned from the boards at all.

Now go and look at the people who disagreed with me on various subjects on the boards. Odd, but it seems to me that most of them are still there. People have disagreed and left the site of their on free will. That is not the same as being banned and please do not confuse the two. People will leave the site because it does not suit them, and that may be directly related to my decisions or it might be for something else, but it is still their choice.

I don't expect people to always agree with me. I do, however, expect them to look at the choices I make in light of the entire site, and not just what works best for them. There are a lot of active people at FM, and many of them really do hope to make professional sales. I would be doing a bad job if I didn't do my best to make certain that nothing at the site is going to be a detriment to their future sales.

If I were running FM just for me I would do things differently so that there is a lot less work, but that would also limit the options people have. The site exists to help as many people as possible reach their writing dreams of publication. I try to do that in the ways that give people many options and possibilities for connecting with people who have the answers they need.

So those of you who are getting all riled up about how people are gong to be kicked out of FM... just take a few deep breaths and calm down. It's not going to happen over anything as silly as just disagreeing with me.