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[ottopottomouse]

At the risk of sounding like i'm a toilet counter, wonder where will it lead? Getting the feeling from this they are scared all the forums will be the next target.

It has been several weeks since we made a public announcement, and needless to say that many things happened meanwhile. The world has gone mad as intellectual property regulations all around the world are evolving towards a combination of coercive tools, harmful to freedom and guided from obscure ambitions. In parallel, the pirate world was also shocked at the methods employed to take down the people from Megaupload, while most profoundly, also raised some ethical questions as to how "big" file-sharing and the money involved had become.

It is in such environment that Warez-BB also evolved over the past months. We were literary hit by a massive increase of link sharing. And following feedback we received from sources within and outside Warez-BB, we took notice of the growing issues that the increasing flow of incoming links was posing. We thus decided to engineer solutions to mitigate those problems. That is why, starting from now and during the next weeks, we will begin implementing restrictions on the posting function, mainly to reduce the flow of link-sharing. These restrictions will be highly heuristic, and will remain confidential. However, they may take the form, for instance, of limiting post addition of content that includes URLs to certain websites, to one or a fixed amount of instances per day. The criteria for implementing these limits will be based on the nature of the websites in question, their accessibility and whether or not they promote money-rewarding features. We believe sharing is better when it's done free. And to that extent, although it was not technically possible since its very beginning, it has been several months now that this community is entirely operated for non-profits, where every dime is re-invested into infrastructures, hardware and solutions needs thanks to a third party undisclosed financial agent.

Two other things that we have decided to immediately implement and that were planned behind the scene for a long time are, namely, the case guidelines and the forum restructuring. The case guidelines consist of decisions made by the staff that will act permanently as site rules, and that will be held over a specific issue in a defined situation. These guidelines are or will, for most of them, be made publicly available in a section entitled Case Guidelines that you can find parented to the Important Announcements forum. Members are not expected to know each of them before they post, but the staff members will consider that you should no longer infringe them after you get called via private message for a first infringement. In parallel, our pre-existing forum rules remain binding and this, before you post. Finally, the forum restructuring consists of re-organizing the way our forums are integrated between each others, as you can see at our homepage, and this for both legal & user experience purposes (although not fully reflected until version 3).

We have also been able just a week ago to organize an administration council and set grand strategies for year 2012. This announcement is a part of the council's outcome, but many things still remain to be organized during this year in order to ensure our sustainability. Some of them will happen and be announced shortly after this announcement, some others will be made at a later stage of the year.

In conclusion, we also wanted to re-ensure our members that the administration is well active and constantly assessing the community features. It's been a couple of months now that the administration style has changed. We have seriously lowered both public communication and coercive leadership to enable our members do the brainstorm thanks to a fantastically active Forum Comments section. We pick up the best of it, improve it, make it fit to standards and ensure a smooth integration. It's our way of maximizing resilience in a social-pushing model a contrario with a social-pulling one, which was perfect in times of construction but no longer suitable in times of huge needs for resilience. And in a period such as the one of year 2012, this is exactly what the Warez-BB community expects from its administration: resilience.

Note about WBB3: The recent decisions we have taken have been coupled as a delay addition to the upgrade with the growing technical challenge that the conversion represents for our development team. As you have been able to notice, it is taking us a lot of time to upgrade but we have recently made a lot of progress and we are now able to state that a month from now we will be running on version 3, though with limited features at the very beginning. We thank you again for your patience, as we know many of you have been looking forward to this upgrade for a while now.