How to Exterminate Members
Guaranteed 100% Effective On all Member Types!

INTRODUCTION
Every administrator knows that the main problem they face today is ‘Members.’ These pesky members invade their roleplays, infest their forums, and generally annoy the heck out of the admin. Seeing as administrators are a higher species than members, I have dedicated this thread to exterminating members from your site. I guarantee that if you use part or all of these tricks, your site will be flushed clean of the pests. I have designed it to be useful for all administrators, whether you have a serious member infestation issue or if you just like hunting them for sport. I have left out no trick, so whether you want to attack members physically or psychologically, you’ll find something useful in here. Let the dismemberment begin!

PART ONE: Make it Fugly

• Choose/Create a Horrific Skin: The most effective skin for driving away members is typically in neon colors; try something in red or yellow first, or if you really want to screw with their visual aesthetics, go for a color combination like pink on orange. If this doesn’t work, you can try dark grey on black, maroon on black, grey on white, Mary Sue Pink on Easter Bunny purple, or any other eye watering color combination.
  
• Leave Your Skin Half-Finished: Don’t replace the default forum icons. Don’t create a custom header or welcome box. And whatever you do, DO NOT attempt to fix your sidebar! Leave it screwed up! Members hate it when they have to scroll down past the sidebar to reach the forums, so it is essential that you do not fix your coding.
  
• Add too many graphics: This is a subtler form of attack. If you want to try a more psychological route for driving away members, make a pretty skin. Then add an image for every section on the sidebar, a header image proclaiming what sort of characters are “accepted” and “not accepted," an image for each forum, and at least a dozen icons of various characters, mostly admin, throughout the sidebar. This means certain death for the rare and elusive dial-up member (if you kill one of these, we suggest you hang them on your wall for posterity. They'll be worth a lot in the future). For the more common high speed internet member, it is merely a visually cluttering annoyance that will eventually drive them COMPLETELY INSANE. Which is pretty awesome, right?
  
• And always remember...: Members should not, under any circumstances, be able to read the text. Make the text tiny, preferably in an extremely ornate or artsy font, and in colors which are very close to the background colors of the skin. Illegibility is key!
  

PART TWO: Not Surviving the Registration Process

• Make it hard to navigate: You want to make your site almost impossible to maneuver. Create one category with one forum and sixty subforums which are not linked in the main forum. Or, conversely, create fifty categories with fifty forums each and no subforums. The member will eventually tire of scrolling and be forced to leave your site. Victory!
  
• Restrict where they can go: Before they register, you can make all of the actual roleplay forums invisible to guests so that they have no idea that they’re walking into a trap. Then, when they register, you can make the forums visible, but locked, so that they still can’t see what’s going on in all the forums. Or you can force them to ask for your permission to post in forums, restrict their permissions through ACP without telling them, and taunt them with several visible and locked administrative forums.
  
• Rules. Lots and lots of rules.: Make the rules long, detailed, verbose, and incoherent. Be sure to throw in multiple phrases such as 'my word is final,' 'if you don't like it you should just leave,' 'I own everything you post here,' ‘Write something weird and I’ll ban you,’ and 'I can do what I want, suckers!’ Rules like these agitate members, so it's important you add them. It is the equivalent of holding a gun to their head and telling them they have a choice between immediate death and later, but still certain, death. Fun, right?
  
• Unreasonable Requirements: Think Communist, think school uniform, think 'Join or Die.' Make everyone join with part or all of their name in lower case or upper case; make them have a title, first, middle, and last name so that it takes a half an hour to type the name and log in. Also tell them what jobs they can have, what sort of characters they can create, how much income they can earn, and how many friends they can have.
  
• Extreme Standards: If you’re looking for some easy member fodder to play with, you can always make your rules extremely lax, have almost no documentation, and ask for absolutely nothing from your members, not even complete sentences or correct grammar. This will attract the roleplaying newbie member; enjoy picking them off one by one with the techniques described in Parts Three and Four. Or, conversely, have standards that are impossible to accomplish; 5,000 words per post, perfect grammar and sentence structure every time, and no mistakes allowed. Be forewarned, however; the members who are willing to write 5,000 words per post are also the hardest to kill.
  

PART THREE: Hellish Applications and Member Permissions

• Hide and Seek Games: Hide the application form. Make them search through your long-winded rules for key words like 'hot dawg' which they must add to a special section of the app. If they do not succeed in finding these key words, automatically reject their app and leave it in a special rejection graveyard forum on your board which guests and accepted members can point and laugh at.
  
• Image is all that matters: Members have the silly idea in their head that it’s the content of a roleplay that matters. This is a lie. The real point is to drive members away with a pointy stick. So add lots and lots of coding to your apps which the members are not allowed to change, even if all the tags aren’t closed. Force them to add an image to their application of a certain size and prettiness. If their graphics aren’t good enough for your site, tell them so in the cbox, and make sure to mock them at great length if they use—pfffft—GIMP or any standard image editor. Then offer them ‘real graphics’ so that your site ‘doesn’t look bad.’
  
• Length is all that matters: Members may still have the idea in their head that it’s the content of a roleplay that matters. That is a nasty lie. Force them to write copious amounts of useless drivel as punishment for this thought. A minimum of ten paragraphs for appearance, for example, ought to teach those quality over quantity rebels a lesson.
  
• Take away their power: Take away as much power as possible from the member by forcing them to get your permission for everything. A good, subtle way of doing this is making lots of cool supplemental forums which have sign-up sheets. Don’t let them do anything interesting without getting your permission, including what sort of characters they can play and what sort of face they can use.
  
• Abuse member permissions through the ACP: You can also go into the Admin Control Panel and take away the member’s ability to edit or delete their posts, or change their login name, avatar, signature, and email without telling them. You can even use the ACP to monitor their threads before they’re posted! This is one of the ultimate inventions of Member abuse, and I suggest you use it heavily.
  
• Repeated Edits and Closed Threads: These are two lesser known, but still effective, tools to drive members away. When members submit an application, make them edit it multiple times in a row. If they fix something, tell them they still have it wrong or that they need to put it back the way it was. Then, when you have accepted the application, close the thread so that they can never change their character application again.
  

PART FOUR: Administrative Conduct

• Encourage drama and elitism: There’s nothing like a good dose of drama to kill a member. Mix it with a little elitism and the effects are even more deadly. Make sure that you only plot and roleplay with fellow administrators; never sink so low as to roleplay with a new member, or God forbid, a new roleplayer in general. Reserve the best characters and subplots for yourself (it’s a good idea if you don’t give members the chance to contribute to the plot at all). Spread lies about one member to another. Give special permissions to a member, tell the others about those special permissions, and watch them tear themselves apart like the animals they are.
  
• Claim their creativity: Make it clear that copyright laws do not apply on your site. If the member writes something, you are free to hide it, delete it, or display it however you like. If they ask for something to be taken down, don’t, under ANY circumstance, comply with their wishes.
  
• Break your own rules: This is especially effective when paired with drama and elitism. Since you are a higher species than a member, you are allowed to god mode as you wish, roleplay threads of whatever rating you like, and make a character that is as shallow as a puddle. Members don’t like it because they think it is “unfair.” Which is exactly the point. You matter, they don’t.
  
• Power trips galore: Remember, the entire purpose of your site is to make the little man suffer. If the member asks for something, tell them no. Change rules on a whim, open and close the forum at random, ban people for making a funny comment in the cbox, and complain constantly but don’t let the members complain. These are just a few of the ways you can psychologically and emotionally damage your members.
  
• Blame the members: It is always the members fault. Inactivity? The member’s fault. Applications haven’t been accepted? The member’s fault. Not as many new people registering? The member’s fault. That spot on your chin? The member’s fault. Keep blaming the members and they will eventually become so demoralized that they abandon your site.
  
• Take all the credit: Six new people joined your site today? All because of you and your hard work. Booming activity? All you. The gorgeous new skin your mod created? Yup. You guessed it. All because of you. This is an effective technique when you want to emphasize just how useless and unnecessary members are to your site.
  
• Don’t do any work: This drives members absolutely batty. Leave applications sitting for long periods of time, don’t update threads, don’t clean the forums, don’t enforce your rules, and always leave these responsibilities on the shoulders of your overworked moderators and lesser admin. You can also try leaving your site for long periods of time without any explanation. Watch the members slowly lose hope and fade away with glee.
  
• Make up excuses for not working: Always have a handy excuse ready. These can be real issues, such as being tired or needing something to eat or having a big project. But go right ahead and lie if you have to. Tell them your grandmother was raped and your pet goldfish was run over by a car. Just so long as you have an excuse, you have another weapon to bludgeon your members over the head with.
  
  
• Act petty and petulant at all times: The admin’s attitude tends to rub off on all the other members. If you’re having a serious problem getting rid of members, ditch that friendly, helpful, and understanding attitude this minute! You need to whine, moan and groan, exaggerate personal problems, and make it painfully clear to your members that your life is definitely worse than theirs. Throw hissy fits over minor incidents, send nasty PM’s to members who make small mistakes, and be impossible to please. Members will run away screaming from such an admin.
  
• Complain complain complain: I really can’t emphasize this enough. The more you complain, the faster the members leave. It’s a neat trick, like the fast forward button on your television remote. Throw in lots of complaining with whatever you do to ensure that your member problem is resolved quickly and effectively.
  

PART FIVE: Sudden Death
If, in the event that you are not able to drive away members with the above methods, there is one more trick that you can try. I like to call it Sudden Death. Without any warning at all, close the site. Leave a lame explanation in the Board Offline box which blames the members. This usually drives away even the most pesky of members. It’s especially effective if you don’t offer to give members threads, applications, posts, or any of the things they had written. And if they ask for them? Deny their requests, of course! You can go even further and delete your board entirely. This extreme method is also the most deadly. Members have enough brain power to realize that they won’t get their posts back, and there’s probably no contact with the admin, so they will never bother you again.


IN CONCLUSION… *
I would like to congratulate you, administrator. You have made all the mistakes, used all the dirty tricks, and you have now successfully dismembered your site! I sincerely hope that this document has helped you enjoy a lonely elitist existence which isn’t plagued by members. Long Live the Administrator!

*In case you can’t read sarcasm, this thread was a satire designed to show as many of the administrative errors as I have encountered/could think of. Some of them are only errors if used in the wrong way. If you think of something that I skipped, I would love it if you let me know so that I can throw it in. Don’t worry! You’re not an awful admin if you do some of the things mentioned in this thread. You are probably attracting certain types of members instead. But I hope that by reading this, it’s given you a new perspective on how administrators should use their power.

This thread was written by AshBeanNun of RPG-D. If you’d like the code, send a PM my way.

-> Point of test ; seeing how hard it is to transfer IF code to vF