sexual, political and religious topic are (very unfortunately) completely banned... it wasn't in the past but it's banned now due to the fact that members cannot handle the topic maturely without insulting another person's opinion. Look, if a simple "what do you like and what you don't like" topic got into a flame war, I see that it's impossible for PC to handle even more controversial topic such as homsexual vs heterosexual, creation vs evolution and etc. The ban on these topic must stand.
MOTM do play a part in making members leave. They never feel wanted or unnoticed because "i got so little votes". However the fact that someone can get so stressed out over a few votes is rather awkward to me, but this possibility is inevitable. My stand on MOTM is neutral. I remember 22sa saying that MOTM should take out all the "favorite ______" categories, as looking at those results you may get the other perspective of "all the other people suck except for these:". So... MOTM is certainly something to debate about. Perhaps we should divide MOTM possible participants by time they joined and etc... voting for "favorite male member" for example, gives older member such a great advantage compare to new members. So perhaps by dividing MOTM into two subgroups of "Old PC members" and "New PC members" (these are just for examples) will help the situation out a bit.
EDIT: Though the above sounds so negative for MOTM... keep your mind on this too. In the real world we have marks from school. Some people will be depressed because his/her marks are lower than another person, or are relatively low compare to others. This is an exact parallel of MOTM. Just because what you achieved doesn't show up very pretty in relative comparison to others, that doesnt mean you're worthless and not welcomed by PC, just like how your marks reflect on nothing for your intelligence or smarts. But if some members cannot handle this fact, I wonder how they will survive in the real life in the future. If they cannot even handle a little fun online poll that has absolutely no effect on your life unlike MOTM's real life parallel called "school marks", well we can't do anything about it. And life is never smooth sailing. We cannot possibly bend everything to your favor. Sometimes you have to be the one to change, not everything else around you changing for you. Blunt and harsh, but the absolute truth.
Getting upset over pairup thread is impossible for me to comprehend. It is a very easy thing to do for new members to participate in (simply by signing up and play matching game). Not to mention, in fact most of the recent pairups are all new members. Lately pairup thread didn't do much pairing due to a shortage of female members (until very recently) so that's why not much pairing is done. But if new members are interpreting this fact of female member shortage as "no one likes me" then we can't really do much about this.
The biggest problem in PC in terms of socializing is the following
a) PC social square = OC and OC alone
b) Some members are here for so long that they pretty much form their own little "groups" with other members who joined for just about as equally as long as them, excluding the newer members
c) new member's terrible fright of posting in the same forum with others who have 2000 more posts as them
Let's solve the problems bit by bit...
a) nothing you can do much about this one, but inviting people who are hiding in their own little forum to join OC and chat along with us. This is rather an unimportant issue though if we can get b and c out of the way. Certainly members and moderators alike should try to invite members to join and chat in OC to feel "more welcomed"
b) biggest problem of all I'll say... some of us know each other for such a long time that of course we'll be really close to one another... sometimes we just use some of the threads as a private chat topic pretty much... those massive amount of role playings within a few of us is one of the many examples of how we grow so close to each other that we're eliminating the slightest chance for newer members to come along and join the topic with us... hopefully there will be lesser posts in the future taht are only addressing to a few particular member, and have more "discussion-like" topics where everyone can pitch in...
c) one easy solution if we're not afraid to do it: remove post counts
this way new members won't have the fear of talking to "oh those veterans who know everything". they have no way to tell unless checking at profile (which a lot of us do not do), so they'll drop their own barrier and try to talk with us. It's like member-moderator talk... sometimes members are afraid to express themselves freely because of this "higher authority" aura from members. If we can remove post counts, I'm sure some of the new members will try to be more open towards other members with "high post counts" or "veteran who may possibly be too good for me this unknown new member"
