Zelaron needs dramatic changes!

3) Kill the flame forum, it is useless because people post flame all over the place anyway, you might as well kill the flame forum and be lenient to flames, that would get rid of your so called "petty" problems.

This is the only suggestion of yours that I'll even bother addressing.

A Flame Forum is absolutely necessary to the productivity of a forum. "Why," you ask? Because it's a tool for encouragement.

Let's take a look at a hypothetical situation, okay? Let's say we have a forum in which flaming other members is 100% prohibited, in order to prevent unnecessary clashing in the community. Under that situation, members are not allowed to act like bumbling morons, not allowed to post shit like "yuo are teh ghey" and argue over who has the gayer login. Under those circumstances, poor behavior is outlawed, enforcing a strict code of conduct that smothers idiotic behavior.

Now, while that may sound just fine on paper, in practice it fails miserably. Without a true flame forum, activity stagnates. Because of the fact that kids can't act like morons, they can't be verbally abused for acting like morons, and as such, are given no incentive to rise above their poor behavior. The best that you can expect from those kids is mediocrity, and mediocrity breeds stagnation. Mediocrity begets poor activity.

A flame forum is absolutely necessary to the survival of a forum because it allows the more intelligent members of a forum to punish the childish whiners without having to use the Mod CP. The staff has the freedom to openly and publicly admonish a problem member without having to threaten them with warnings and future banishment. By using a flame forum correctly, the staff can utilize flames to coerce a problem member into bettering his behavior, whether by leading by example, or by forcing the idiot member into the realization that if they have any hope of saving face in community or humiliating their attacker in the future, they had better shape up, pronto.

A flame forum does nothing but benefit an online community. It allows control to be maintained on a forum while simultaneously making the staff look a lot more relaxed and open-minded because they're not resorting to the Mod CP every time they encounter a problem.

Removing the flame forum will hurt the community, I guarantee it. I would resign before having to watch Zelaron walk down the path of stagnation and demise that I've watched countless other forums tread down because of a lack of a true flame forum. The day that flame forum leaves is the day I leave.