Hello All,

In light of the unfortunate circumstances surrounding Tracey Smith’s resignation as from her role as Fans Representative on the Hibs Board, we felt this would be a good time to review how we operate here.

Several of you have mentioned in posts and told us directly that you find hibs.net to be a less friendly place than before. – we hear you.

Going forward we will be applying the existing rules more robustly to ensure that Hibs.net continues to be the friendly, inclusive site we all want it to be. We will do this in the following ways:

• By shoring up our zero-tolerance attitude to abusive, insulting or aggressive behaviours. Members found to be breaching these behaviours will be banned, without exception. These include personal insults, racism, sexism, homophobia and threats.
• We have been guilty of hesitance when it comes to dealing with posters who are clearly only here to wind others up. From now on, anybody who we feel is only here to troll the forums or antagonise other members will be swiftly removed. Fewer second chances on this front.
• Whilst we rarely see the kind of vitriolic abuse directed at individual club personalities that appears on social media sites, we have recently had to remove some posters that have overstepped the mark and we will continue to monitor this with vigilance.

We recognise that the vast majority of our users are Hibs fans who simply want to connect with others in the community, share their thoughts and experiences, and have some fun whilst doing it. When we look at equivalent forums for other British football teams, it’s safe to say that Hibs.net is one of the best groups out there, but it’s vitally important that we do our utmost to retain what we do well, whilst improving the areas in which we fall short.

It is at this point that we’d also like to call on you, fellow members of Hibs.net, to help us along the way – with our site rules and community guidelines in mind, please do use the report function to flag up posts that you feel go against these values.

We do review every report, this fact isn’t always communicated, but it’s true. The report function is there to allow our community to hold each other accountable and we should have been putting a spotlight on this more often. No one other than the admin team will see any reports that you send, be they forum posts or private messages, so please don’t hesitate to flag these to us.

Finally, we’d like to thank you all for making Hibs.net the vibrant, entertaining and friendly place that it so often is. There’s a significant period of change happening at the club currently and we want Hibs.net to be your favourite place to read and discuss all the news that comes along with that.

Best wishes,

The Hibs.net Admin Team