Important Announcement to all Members of XMTS: Please Read

[Panache]

To our members, the Ladies and Gentlemen of XMTS,

Our forum has been growing both in membership, content, and civility for a number of years.

We are an international and family friendly community focused on traditional and contemporary kilts. Since the inception of this forum we have added Celtic heritage activities such as music, dance, athletics, and most recently Scottish historical garb and food and drink.

Our members come here because they like the good fellowship, the good information, and the fact that this site can be shared with their familes.

The volunteer members of “The Mod Squad” uphold our rules and spirit of those rules to keep XMTS an international and family friendly kilt forum. We try our best to remove spammers and trolls before they can disturb our proceedings here. We also monitor discussions and act to keep the conversations here polite and within the forum rules.

We are just one of the many kilt forums out there on the vast Internet. The different forums offer different perspectives on this very fascinating subject that resonates with all of us and have brought us together here on XMTS.

To be absolutely clear the owner and staff here have absolutely no issue with our members belonging to other kilt forums. We do have one expectation about them though. We expect that when someone joins xmarksthescot.com it is to participate as a member here and...

Not to advertise their goods or their friend's goods
Not to advertise other kilt sites
Not to recruit new members to other kilt sites
Not to thumb their noses at our members, rules, and the moderating staff
Not to cause disruptions on the forum
Not to Insult the members or staff of this forum

These are the actions of trolls.

For a number of years we have had to deal with the members and even the owner and more than a few of the moderating staff from another kilt site who have posted on our forum solely for all the things listed above.

Acting together these people have danced about the forum rules and acted poorly here with no respect for what our forum is about.

It was decided by highlandtide (the owner of XMTS) and the Mod Squad that if these people were going to act like trolls then they would be treated like trolls and banned. So a number have been banned, or realizing that they would no longer be able to continue this behavior have deliberately sought to be banned to claim it as an honor at their own kilt site.

Still they continue to discuss and mock our forum, its rules, and most of all the moderating staff at length on their site. They continue to re-register under new memberships profiles for the opportunity to cause more trouble.

Today we have received a number of communications from our members that they are being contacted by banned members of XMTS by email with invitations to contact them.

This is trolling for new members of their site.

Unfortunately there is little we can do when they take this to the membership by email.

What you can do if you are uncomfortable about this is to report the email to both your provider and their provider as spam, The Mod Squad sincerely apologizes to those that have been troubled by this latest or any of the previous disturbances. We have done our best to deal with this problem quietly and efficiently but it seems that this group of individuals is not going to settle for enjoying their own forum.

There are constant accusations to us of hostilities from this other kilt forum. In fact we do not allow discussion or promotion of other kilt sites here on XMTS for the very reason that we have no interest in promoting any sort of hostilities. Our policy is an “Airlock” that keeps our forums from being riddled with pointless and vitriolic “Us vs. Them” rants.

The truth is that these people need a “THEM” to define their sense of an “US” .

On XMTS we are proud of who we are and what we do here.

Over the years our members have taken real ownership of our forum. It belongs to the Ladies and Gentlemen of XMTS far more than Hank or the Mod Squad.

With this in mind we now feel that it is in the best interests of our forum to let you know what we have been dealing with in the years since the formation of this other kilt site.

We will still do our best to keep this forum true to its values, but it will be up to you the real members of xmarksthescot.com to work with us to report trolls, to not to take the bait they offer to start fights, and to ignore their attempts to fish for members or disrupt our community.

Other places may have hostility.

On XMTS we have rules.

Having alerted our forum to this ongoing problem we close this announcement and request that no new threads on the subject be posted.

This is our forum and each one of us has to do our part to keep it what it is.

And this is a very special place indeed.

Sincerely

Hank, Jamie, Nelson, Glen, Bradley, Mike, Brian, and Bill

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