That's exactly the issue. They ask questions with plainly obvious answers, or questions which can be answered with one minute of searching.

You make a fair point; some of the things Grif and Thor do aren't really necessary, and some of the things Grif an Thor do have likely driven away members in the past. Thing is, the same thing that goes for the newbs goes for Paul'n'Eric: they're members too; whilst this gives them inherent rights, this also means they're not particularly special in any way.I'm going to have to partially refute these points here. Your phrasing makes implies that trolling and scaring people away are the sole actions undertaken by them; they are in fact quite active outside of these activities and hence contribute to the community quite a lot. I must clarify here that at no point should it be implied that your post called for their leaving the forum, as it didn't, and I wish to make that fully clear.
On the second part of the quote however, I refute due to the inference that the presence of people similar to the aforementioned users has an active relation to the presence of rude and/or immature members. Whilst on some level logic may be leveraged to form some sort of causal mechanism to support this, I refute on the simple grounds that 'many other forums' on the scale of a single person's participation would invariably be a minute sample size in relation to internet forums as a whole. If you must make accusatory inferences in relation to the situation of maturity/rudeness levels of the community, at the very least it would be preferable to make them reasonably possible to verifiably support to a reasonable degree.

Apologies for the wall' o' text (or at least tallish fence)

I never said they should leave.
I never said anything about what I thought on that matter.
Now that you bring it up I think they should stop what they are doing and if anyone starts doing the same thing they should be banned for a day.
Please don't try to read into what I say. I mean what I say and I say what I mean. To be clear, what I meant was on other boards where there is no Grif or THOR there are plenty of responsible, mature members. (By which I started participating in the forums and was welcomed and was not flamed away. I didn't see any arguments, everything was peaceful.) This forum, with Grif and THOR, has many Immature and irresponsible members. This system of vigilantes is not working.

Separate FAQ topics should be made in the game support and forum support sections with all the frequently asked questions related to and their own sections and their answers. A link to each support topic should be put into the rules announcement so everyone can easily see. More or less solved.

That would work... if they actually bothered reading the rules. When they're right there on the first page when they first sign in and they are ignored, you can't expect a FAQ to do better.

Just saying, without them or with them not acting as they do, we'd likely have more immature and less irresponsible members. Is that a tradeoff you'd prefer? I prefer slacking and joking to more idiots any day. And as far as the word "Many" goes, give me a list of more than 15 immature or irresponsible members that post regularly and i'll buy it.

This forum barely has 15 regular, daily posters.
Many could be one or two in such a case.

It should also be up to the administration whether or not someone is acting idiotically or not, it isn't your call. People who act stupid will likely be banned anyway. Why alienate good along with the bad?
You have nothing to support that without THOR and Grif flaming everyone we'd have many more idiotic and immature members anyway.

We dont. We dont alienate anyone who doesnt alienate themselves.
And if anyone does, then they find themselves at the mercy of the moderators anyway.Works in every direction.

But hey, its not up to me to write the rules. I just think "Dont be a dickhead" holds bars on trolls, flamers, flamebaiters and everyone else like that, but not on members rebuking other members (new or not) who made a silly error.

'hallo!! lol! im really excited to be a part of this community!'
That hypothetical person is not alienating themselves from the community.
You know how THOR or Grif would react.
'Use all capitalization, you little foot.'
Put it politely.
'Hello, Welcome to the forums!
I hope you enjoy your time here!

But, by the way,
I'm sure everyone here would like it if you would capitalize and not over-use things like 'lol' or 'omg'.

Thank you!'

As for the FAQ, saying 'Oh, they wont notice' is something improvable on either part. It is useless to bring up. I could easily say 'Oh, they'll notice.' Its a matter of opinion.
On that note, new members could have their account settings set to give pop-ups and/or e-mails on pms, then send a pm with the rules and FAQ. It'll give them hell.

And exactly how likely is someone who is asked politely (along with a nice explanation) to stop doing something to actually stop?
Also, my point about the obvious lack of success a FAQ would have still stands. If someone can't be assed to read 20 lines of rules, they sure as hell won't be bothered to read a whole page to find the answer to a question.

To be honest, I've disapproved many a post that's far, far worse than "hallo!! lol! im really excited to be a part of this community!'"

This is an interesting conversation - what forms of unconventional moderation are we doing right now? I swear I'm not doing anything differently.

Recently since Weasel has taken the reigns, you'll see that anyone and everyone is getting time out for various infractions. I think two things should happen:

A) Existing users should be mature and essentially carry on. 95% of the posts are absolutely fine, work on the rest.
B) New users should RTFM. The Manual should point out that you can use the report function every time you get butthurt so we can use our conventional or unconventional wisdom to sort it out.

Unfortunately New users very rarely RTFM so point A) is really going to have to kick into overdrive. Just don't be clowns to the newcomers -problem is if you're being clowns to each other, that's fine you won't run away. New users will run away and they won't come back, and they'll tell their mummy/respective friend group and this forum suffers because of it.

I think once this forum gets a bit more publicity we'll really have to crack down, but right now ther'es just a small trickle. Right this is my shitty post, I might ninja a few things in after uni, but for now FAREWELL.

Seraph, you are fully aware no one is a ♥♥♥♥ to anyone just because they're new. But fine, if after Weasel gets his wish and DRLFF becomes more popular tough love will be welcome again, I for one am willing lay (very) low.

Also:Working on this, many of the members write walls of text every second post, have trouble with typing out copyof's correctly and are working on zombies09 as an active developer. Heck, many of the members are working on cortex command as an active developer.
Think before posting something like this next time please.

Also seraph is a brilliant moderator because of all that has been posted above me.

See, there's a problem with this... Take a look at my sig real quick. They already exist. It's even on the damn wiki where every man and his mother can update it to reflect recent occurrences.
EDIT: In case you don't see what I'm trying to point out:

All I'm saying is that we have to give and take here. We should tolerate the little 13 year olds and try to change the way they use forums in general. Everyone makes mistakes, I used to type like a cat having a spasm, it just takes time (and a small amount of intelligence).

Maybe once this forum gets busy we'll get more users who are prepared to keep on repeating stuff to new users, maybe we won't. All I know is that Data wants this forum to make a good impression to all of those who want to throw money at him, and if it doesn't, he'll damn well make it so it does.

To be complete honest I like the way DRL's tough love has shaped me. When I first came here I didn't give a ♥♥♥♥ about my grammar or typos and I also asked stupid questions with easily found answers. While I do agree that THOR and Grif are a bit harsh, I also mostly agree with them on a lot of the things they say. They just have a harsh way of telling people how they feel.