Firstly, I wanna explain a little bit about the place the site's been in for the past two years. There's been a lot of community discontent over the past week (or honestly, since day one) over how badly moderated the site is. When I originally made Toyhou.se, I designed it for the friend group I was in on dA and I was expecting the majority of the users to be friends or acquaintances - that made the idea of moderation intimidating and a little awkward to me (no one wants to be in a position where they're moderating friends). This is why from the beginning, the site's rules for conduct have been extremely loose and we expected users to largely self-moderate amongst themselves.
It would be easy to say that the changes happening this week have just been due to the negative feedback & complaints we've been receiving recently, but honestly it's been apparent from the beginning - when the site began to rapidly outgrow what we expected it would be - that the workload and moderation wasn't something that could be handled casually on a friendly level. Instead of addressing the issue I started to avoid it, which is why the site administration and the ticket desk are both in the state it's in currently. So firstly I wanted to sincerely apologise for neglecting my responsibility as site owner & admin - the TH community is precious to me and this is something that should've been sorted out a lot sooner instead of leaving the site to rot.
Here's our plan going forward:
1. The old code of conduct was designed to function without moderator involvement which made it difficult to fairly enforce. It has now been rewritten to include specific rules for what we expect and will be enforcing with regards to user conduct. The new version is not yet strictly in effect as we want to have it reviewed by the community first, so please do have a look at it here and post in this thread if you have any feedback or suggestions for what you'd like to see added. It will be amended according to user feedback over the next few days before being finalised some time next weekend. In the meanwhile we will be conducting some preliminary clean up in accordance with the ideals outlined therein.
2. We'll be taking on additional provisional mods who'll be working anonymously to help us clear the ticket desk. Our aim is to slowly clear the backlog while fielding new tickets as quickly as possible - so if you have an older matter which you'd like to be addressed right away, please feel free to bump the ticket to expediate it. We hope once the backlog's cleared we'll be able to respond to tickets a lot faster.
3. The site recode is currently projected to be ready some time in June. The recode isn't intended to add a bunch of new features, but rather make the site easier for us to maintain as the current codebase is extremely difficult to work with - hopefully once the framework's in we'll be able to push regular feature updates again. We'll have further details on it in a future post once it's closer to completion.
If we find that the workload continues to be too overwhelming, we'll be looking into hiring further moderators so keep an eye out if you feel you might ever be interested in that position.
Thank you again, more than ever, for your continued patience with the site!