Sorry I wasn't around, I've been a bit busy latey.
So the idea of the Abyss was one that we were unsure of from the start, specifically I was unsure since I first suggested the idea to the other staff, so technically it's my fault. However to compromise we decided we would put up a poll on it, and the majority vote at the time agreed to having a separate 'safe' area, which is what The Pit is intended to be and then The Abyss, where we would relax the rules, would allow NSFW stuff to be a little more direct.
The idea of hiding it away from newcomers is the best idea, in my opinion, since the idea I had for The Abyss originally was for it to be as rule free as possible, to allow people to express themselves in ways even the somewhat already relaxed rules didn't allow, but that was going to inevitably end up with 'questionable' stuff being posted there. When Lurker appeared it gave the perfect reason for us to need something like The Abyss, since gore is, honestly, an artistic expression, yet it's one that is unpleasant to most people, so we need somewhere to allow people to put that and keep it away from everyone else. I did attempt to make a post giving warning of what's in The Abyss, maybe it's not clear enough or I need to write the warning a bit better?
Sure, you're allowed to disagree with it, and by all means, express your opinions of it, that's exactly what we want. We want to make sure we're doing things right and keeping as much of the community happy as possible. We can't make everyone happy all the time and we're aware of that, but the unhappy part of the community definitely should let us know exactly why they're unhappy with things. And if you did read the original poll post on the topic, I stated that we may decide The Abyss was a bad idea and remove it, but my personal opinion is that it has its place, maybe we should just alter it a little bit.
I don't think this has really been in danger of becoming a shitstorm, Forrest raised an issue with the forum, as we want the community to do when they have one, and it's been discussed pretty politely so far, and we've come up with what I consider to be at least a partial solution to the problem.
With the whole rule issue, if anyone has any suggestions on things they'd like to see change then feel free to let us know, from what I'm gathering people want a change to us allowing gore in The Pit, which technically we don't now that we have The Abyss but I think we just sort of didn't think about it, so that should be changed.