Hail to all

GSB has become an open, popular and very populated community - we are approaching 3500 members - with a lot of content provided and hosted. But above all, as you will surely have seen over time - we are approaching our second birthday - GSB is a community in constant evolution. Evolution and change for communities like GSB is normal, and immobility would be even wrong. Changing means keeping up with the times, adapting to the needs of the community, meeting security requirements and solving problems that cannot be ignored. No one is perfect and no community is perfect, and at GSB we have been self-critical since day one to be able to identify the structural weaknesses of the website and the community and, every now and then, try to intervene where necessary. And then maybe correct the shot, again and again, chasing the changes and the passing of time in an attempt to always be a functioning, functional, secure, attractive and useful website.

There are five very important issues that GSB must address soon, five issues that are different in origin, scope and method of approach, but that deserve to be addressed together with a structural change of many aspects that today in GSB are taken for granted.

A) By unilateral decision of the provider, in the next few months the functionality of the Forum will be deactivated and then deleted, with mandatory conversion of all content into group posts. This decrees the deactivation of the GSB Forum, in a global perspective of interaction between users that now sees the Forum tool as outdated.

B) The GSB Staff has observed very carefully the groups as restructured a few months ago, and we have come to the decision that we are not satisfied. We have received a lot of criticism from those who wanted to keep the groups internal to GSB, from those who do not use or do not approve of MeWe and from those who accuse an inappropriate fragmentation of the relationships between GSB members.

C) Likewise, the GSB Staff recognizes that the creation of groups reserved for members of the GSB Temple was a mistake. The creation of these MeWe groups had a completely unexpected effect: it gave many users the impression that there were places on GSB other than the ones they see, where they could talk to GSB members other than those they interact with on the main site, on topics not covered on the main website. And this is not the case. The members who eventually populate the private groups on MeWe are THE SAME members with whom it is possible to interact in the other GSB groups and channels, and this (naive) discovery was a disappointment for many. We admit that the creation of these contexts was misleading, useless, divisive and contrary to the spirit of aggregation of GSB, which sees ONE ONLY community of users, perhaps differentiated on some aspects but certainly NOT differentiated based on the places where they can interact.

D) The risks that GSB runs into by leaving free loading and writing to its members are high and put the entire website and the entire community at risk. Warnings, reports and common sense are useless: at any hour of the day there is always a moron wanker - and always different - ready to dirty GSB with contents that violate the Terms of Service, to the detriment of the community and its members, who often show the intention to delete the account for self-protection - and GSB has lost some valid members precisely because of this problem. The restructuring of the groups a few months ago, despite its results so little appreciated, started from the intent, absolutely in good faith, to move communications between users elsewhere so as not to have to face this continuous risk.

E) Most of the contents that violate the Terms of Service have been repeatedly on the Members profile main page, and this is due to the "silent" nature of this page that often escapes a timely check by the admins.

Below are the decisions we have made for a new structural review of GSB, the goal of which is to address and resolve all of the above, imposing limits to meet the needs of security and self-protection without impeding the interaction between users, which is the soul of GSB and its main goal:

1) The About section of each member's profile page will be deactivated. There will no longer be a section in the member profile where you can write freely.

2) The Overview section of each member's profile page will be deleted and re-proposed in a new guise, leaving a very limited number of fields that we regret removing (e.g. telegram contact).

3) Almost all MeWe Groups will be deleted, with probably only the GSB Official group remaining as an alternative communication channel on a par with the Telegram group.

4) The GSB Forum will cease to exist (by decision imposed by the provider)

4) Let's take a step back on GSB Groups (which the provider forces us to use), which will return to being used and active, but with some restrictions:

4.1) All groups will be under the control of GSB admins, except for a very few groups managed by trusted members who are already in close collaboration with GSB

4.2) The Groups feature provided by the provider does not currently have pre-moderation/pre-approval, but this will be implemented when it is available. Until then, all groups will be heavily monitored and moderated without the possibility of appeal.

4.3) It will not be possible for GSB members to create groups (this restriction already exists)

5) No group, neither on GSB nor on any other external platform, will ever be reserved for members distinct from other members based on criteria such as access to the GSB Temple (groups with access on moderation will still be foreseen and permitted, but on the basis of completely different criteria).

The changes will become effective within 10-15 days from today, to give time to the entire GSB community to intervene with further comments and proposals, and possibly save the contents of their main profile page.