US Hawks Hang Gliding Association

In October of 2021, a member identified as "Johan" signed up and made a post that criticized another member by name. As a new member, his avatar was initially defaulted to:


Johan complained, and Bill commented:

Bill Cummings wrote:Johan,
I too bristle at the WARNING. Maybe if it said the person has yet to be verified and deemed not to be and advertiser, spammer or automated webcrawler. that would be better.

I agree with Bill that the warning in the default avatar is a bit too strong.

  I hereby move that we change the text of the unverified user avatar from this:  



  to this:  

As a little history, there have been a number of periods when the U.S. Hawks was flooded with spam postings and worse. Some of the postings were clearly targeted at harming others while hiding behind an anonymous user name. The harshness of the default avatar arose from those incidents.

Since that time, we've developed policies and procedures that have greatly reduced those kinds of anonymous attacks. So softening the harshness of the default avatar warning makes sense. Thanks Bill.

For reference, here's the topic containing Bill's post:

    https://ushawks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=3795

JoeF wrote:  Yes, to change avatar as stated by Bill.  

I will   second   Bob’s motion and also vote   YES.  

I vote   Yes  

That gives us a majority.

Here's the new default avatar for newly registered (but unverified) members:


That avatar should now appear in all previously registered (but unverified) members as well as all future unverified members.

This topic was started on Thursday, August 18th, 2022 at 9:05am, and the motion was made, voted, and implemented by Friday, August 19th, 2022 at 4:14 pm. That's not a record for us, but it shows how nimble an on-line organization can be.

Thanks to all Directors for your quick responses ... and I'm sorry it took me so long to introduce the motion.