CB Admins Announce End of Pins at CB

From ClayNation:

Dear Clayboard Members,

After much discussion among the moderator and administrative staff, we've come to the decision that it is best for the CB community as a whole to bring the pins activities to a close on our board, including the Street discussions of C&D letters from Clay's legal rep(s) to fans.

We've allowed discussion to take place regarding the pins and letters over the past week to allow the membership to get through this together. It's possible there have been lines crossed in terms of some members going beyond the rules of the board and being disrespectful of others. The staff cannot continuously babysit threads and members have to take their own responsibility to moderate themselves. We will be looking into the threads again and may issue warnings despite the time that has elapsed between the posts and the warnings. This has been a high-maintenance issue on the board and we hope members who have suffered from denigrating comments towards them will understand and believe that the staff has been doing its best and will continue to do so.

We ask those members who were highly involved in the pins activities to try to understand our decision to bring it to a close. We consider this decision to be following the lead of Clay's team. One thing we have learned over this past week, is that the law in this area is complex and its interpretation is best left to experts (which we are not). Any "middle ground" of allowing some pin activity would involve such interpretation and would be difficult to manage from an administrative standpoint. So we feel the best thing to do would be to close all pin activity on our board.

We ask those members who don't care for the pins to please respect those who do and have been confused and hurt by this situation. Although there very well may be individuals who took advantage of the pins activities for their own interests, there are many who just enjoyed getting to know each other through it and a community was built around it. Those who enjoyed this as a new hobby for fun should be respectfully allowed to process this together and move on from it together.

Effective Sunday, November 20th at noon ET, we'll be closing both of the pins threads on the board which have been living on the Street (the pin selling thread, formerly Pins, Pins, Pins, and the pin trading thread). We welcome the community of pin folks who have become friends to create a thread in the Calling All Clayfans forum here at the Clayboard so they can continue supporting, chatting, and getting to know one another. They are a part of our Clayboard family and we hope very much that they can create a place for themselves in the Calling All Clayfans forum.

The offering of pins in the "Need Clay Stuff or Have Extras" thread will not be allowed. The only merchandise that can be offered or asked for in that thread is OFFICIALLY LICENSED merchandise or things like magazines at face value plus reasonable shipping. Face value does not mean an inflated price paid for an item, say, through ebay. Face value is the amount the item sells for at the magazine stand, the merch stand at a concert, the CD store, etc.

Thank you for your understanding of our decision on this and for bearing with us as we've gone through trying to manage it. The moderators have truly done their best to both provide a place to discuss, process, and vent and tried to keep the bashing out. Of course, we're not perfect and can't watch every single post, but we do our best to maintain the TOU and work things out with members both within threads and off the board.

If anyone has any questions or concerns about our decision on this, please feel free to contact a CB Administrator.

Sincerely,

ClayNation, on behalf of the CB Admin/Mod Team