Home ›
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
and does afraid of paper trailleaves an awkward trail of destruction.That gigantpost contains both my comments as a user and my comments as a moderator. You are probably right, though, that I should have separated the two. Perhaps I should have locked that thread and started a new one. Would you prefer I do that?
about the content and don't attack each other in the process. (And yes,
this includes calling names.)"
I think that kind of attitude is why the old fora was such a hellhole. Invective is, in my book, perfectly acceptable as long as valid points are made in concurrence with it. To try and mandate politeness and outlaw insults is putting the cart before the horse, because it just promotes a culture where idiocy is less harshly punished than exasperation and outrage, which is silly. That sort of thing is why BonSequitur was banned, and anyone who knows him is fully aware he contributed a great deal to the old fora, and continues to contribute to both IRC channels.
I say let the insults fly, and punish them only if there is an absence of evidence the person doing the insulting is capable of rational thought or debate. To use myself as an example, I don't think anyone can deny that while invective laced and to some eyes angry, my posts are generally at least thought through enough to make reasonable points that can be addressed independently. This is a far cry from simple antagonisation through insults, and a good moderation team would in my opinion be aware of the difference, rather than lumping both behaviours in together.
That's the main reason I didn't lock it. That said, it probably doesn't matter if I do.
Rott's thread is a big pain in the ass. I'll decide on that later.
And in my book, it's not. You can call this "hugbox" or any other name you want; haters gonna hate. And I wouldn't say that Bon was an especially notable contributor to either the forum or #yackfest; I have not hung out on #tropers in ages so I wouldn't know about that channel.
Yes, people can read your posts and get your points independent of your invective, GB, but that does not prevent the invective from being distracting.
Or, if you prefer, really fucking distracting.
His only bugbear was rotty, and he was banned on the basis of an offhand comment made about Rotty that was by anyones standards entirely ridiculous and clearly a method of simply describing exasperation with him.
Compare that to, say, Chagen, Tnophelia, Rotty himself, Vorpy, DLC, Tongpu, Sand Joseiph, Spain Sun, or any number of others, and the man was a bloody saint. None of them contributed anything, most were tremendously stupid, SS in particular seems to have some anger issues, seeing as being factually corrected, with reference given, was apparently enough to "Make him angry as far into the red as it is possible to go". I can't say I'm cut-up over the absence of any of these people from any forum, and any that are left, either here or on the TVTropes fora proper, are the exact reason I'm not a major member of either any longer, because they're annoying and contribute nothing, actively degrading quality of conversation, yet the lax moderation and backwards set of priorities shared by both sets of moderators seems determined to let them thrive no matter how dumb they are, while providing them a safe haven from those um-heap-big meanies that might dare to actually call them as stupid as they are.
There are far more important problems to be considered on the topic of forum moderation, than politeness. One of them is quality of conversation, and while its impossible to vet a forum for intelligence, its more than possible to note which users opinions are so consistently uninformed they preclude intelligent discussion by other users when that person becomes involved in a discussion. Your main interest should be to provide an environment conducive to long term conversation, that doesn't rely on passive aggression or veiled insults to allow members to make their opinions of others known. Allowing negative elements such as Vorpy or Chagen to continuously derail and destroy discussion through either having such a reputation it destroys otherwise worthwhile topics, or by taking advantage of a backwards priority like excessive politeness, is more damaging in the long run to any fora, than predictable and controllable flamewars over topics that people can be expected to get heated over, like religion. As my long rant pointed out, that thread was full of passive aggression, mockery, sarcasm, and all sorts of negative feeling, that had it been against anyone but Chagen, could only have been called "A forum full of people being dicks to someone"
Oh wait. Its still called that, no matter how much Chagen deserved it.
2. No ad hominem attacks. Attacking a person and not their argument cheapens the discussion, even if no insults are used.
3. Shitposting is discouraged, but allowed if the resulting hilarity is considered funny enough by the other users.
4. Bans are done by moderators and are done publicly, along with a justification for the banning. Permanent bans (i.e. those lasting more than six months) may be overturned by popular demand from users in good standing, if the reason for banning was a social infraction and not an attack on the site.
5. Drama is discouraged, but an unpopular argument is no reason for bans. Should a controversial thread become too heated for any meaningful discussion to take place, moderators may temporarily lock the thread.
6. Non-work safe material (sexually explicit, violent or profane) is reserved for threads marked with the tag "(NSWF)" at the beginning of the thread title. Additionally, titles may not include sexually suggestive language (even if it's funny, like a thread entitled "Red hot young pussies rubbing together" containing pictures of wrestling orange kittens), profanity or other significantly objectionable material.
7. Hate speech (defined as slurs against a person's race or ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, political identity or other intrinsic traits) is forbidden.
That's all I can think of for now.
EDIT: If enough regularly contributing people fervently think that someone is a good contributor and the reason for his ban is lacking, then one mod's perspective on the issue is questionable.
"Good standing" would be defined as "regularly posts, hasn't been banned recently and isn't a sockpuppet."
@Hatter: But those walls of invective text bring back the mugginess...
Turning the mods into glorified playground attendants for a bunch of geeks old enough to not necessarily need that sort of patronising supervision regards their language and demeanour, is counter-productive. Its more work for the mods to start with, since it requires practical involvement in a much lower level part of forum life, and it doesn't attack the root cause of any such dispute, which is usually that one or other people involved is being stupid and needs to render themselves more informed on the topics they're discussing, yet refuses to do so to the extent one or both parties becomes angry.
Not to mention of course, the fact that its staggeringly easy to be breathtakingly rude while still being perfectly civil. My post in the zelda thread pointed out a few examples, and what little I've read of this board is just as littered with that sort of crap, as the old IJBM always was.
After all, correlation is not causality. Its as easy to rely on invective through exasperation as it is through being unable to reason. And vice versa, its as easy to get under someones skin politely, as it is to do so with insults. In fact, given the art-form the TVTropes fora has managed to make out of passive aggression and veiled insults, its arguably what most tropers are best at, given the two options.