What are you doing here, then, dex?
If we’re so unbelievably a pain to deal with, then why don’t you leave? Alternatively, you could set up a messageboard and tell no one the url and close registration and spend the rest of your internet time in peaceful serenity unmarred by arbitrary collections of marks that have gained connotations of vulgarity.
“Don’t be a jerk” is not a utopia of moderation. In fact, it’s a terrible rule system for more than a small handful of people. But that doesn’t mean you can’t leave anything to moderator judgment or discretion. Especially when your goal, having a threshold on incivility in the Pit, is fundamentally difficult to quantify. You’ve settled on a well quantified but illogical rule, ostensibly because the posters won’t accept anything that’s not perfectly defined. I disagree. I think the boards would be better off simply using a logical rule, even if it means the mods will sometimes have to engage in discussions about why poster A was asked to calm down and poster B wasn’t. With sensible mods like Gfactor doing their best to be impartial and consistent, I imagine such conversations would be rare, with the majority of posters supporting the staff.
There will still be the occasional chastised poster who feels mistreated in spite of your best efforts, but so what? It’s better to set things up in good faith and lose the occasional hysteric than to let such people drive you into bunker mode, where you’re afraid to make judgment calls or even talk to posters for fear that they’re trolling you. In my opinion.
♪♪♪I think I love you, so what am I so afraid of. I’m afraid that I’m not sure of a love there is no cure forrrr!!!♪♪♪
I know a place like that. It’s a wonderful place of sunshine and rainbows.
This is a load of bullshit, man, and it wouldn’t be tolerated in a poster. If you need to warn someone for trolling, do it–but please don’t resort to such lame ad hominems in lieu of actual posts. You owe folks an apology, and frankly I wonder why you remain in a job you dislike so much.
Be careful or you’ll make him spit his VODKA AND TONIC (because he’s so urbane dontchaknow)!!!
No, he’s absolutely right. I mean, it takes a special kind of person to get their panties in a bunch just because they can’t call another poster a “cunt”.:rolleyes:
Damn, Dex, I’d have gone off the “BAN THEM ALL!!!” deep end some time ago. I salute your incredible patience.
And it takes another special kind of person to think that’s what I posted.
If you’re gonna ban anything, Dex, can you please get rid of those fucking eyerolls? They’re far more annoying and deleterious to real conversation than “fuck you,” in my opinion–I can’t believe they’re still allowed outside of the Pit.
It’s true. Fuck you and you cunt are just anger. Rolleyes dude is condescending. Of the two, condescension is more insulting.
Where did I say* you* said that? (pssst, hint, I didn’t)
Oh, this is going to be special.
I almost edited it. If you weren’t addressing me, it was ridiculous to quote me–and as a response to what I said, it was a complete non sequitur. Sorry if that didn’t come through.
No, you were chewing out Dex for giving "certain posters’ a hard time. I was disagreeing with you and saying that those “certain posters” well and truly deserved it.
I don’t normally jump into these discussions, but I think it’s pretty unfair for you to throw a racial slur into the mix as if that has anything to do with what the OP was proposing.
Saying “I think we should be allowed to swear” is not equivalent to “I think we should be allowed to use racial slurs”, and I find it hard to believe that you are unable to appreciate the distinction.
Also, let’s be honest here. You weren’t clarifying what the rules had always been, you were changing the rules (or at least changing the interpretation of those rules). It was clear before that calling people all sorts of nasty names was permitted in the Pit. In fact, it was the norm. Then you all decided it shouldn’t be. That’s your prerogative, but I can’t see why you’re seemingly trying to pretend the rules were merely being “clarified”.
Nice “us versus them” mentality you’ve got going on, Dex.
Well then, let me attempt to be as sincere as I can in my question: do you think things have improved thanks to the rule change? And if you do, do you believe things have improved on the side of the users, or just on that of the moderation?
Even if something doesn’t work the way it was intended to, doesn’t mean that every change is gonna be a change for the better. In fact, most of them probably won’t be.
Yeah, i’d have to agree that Dex’s last post would probably have earned moderator attention had it come from an average poster. Also, it’s useful in showing precisely how this rule is wrongheaded; if the purpose is to increase civility, then stopping someone from saying “fuck you!” whilst allowing a threadful of posters to be called trolls, in ATMB, rather seems like it focuses on the wrong thing. Not to mention the purpose of having mod decisions only be questioned here.
This is especially annoying, because I quite like Dex, and he’s certainly helped me out before. Being told i’m either rehashing, bringing up stupid nitpicks, or trolling is surprising and unpleasant.
@ Dex
If I’d said the stuff you said, I’d be called a whiny drama queen with a martyr complex. And you would only have grinned at it without a word. Baiting the mods? Trolling? Nitpicking? It’s a documented fact that you can’t even take your own jokes, and will suspend people (me) for saying to you exactly the same joke verbatim that you have said to others.
You need a long, long break, sir. I recommend you ask your psychiatrist whether Tranxene is right for you.
I normally keep out of this kind of thing too, but I can’t help but comment on this. If I understand correctly, this looks ever so much like Dex is telling us all to go away. Makes you think it might be so much better if there was a stronger, more direct way of expressing such thoughts…
In all seriousness, even though I might not say too much I’ve been around the boards for a pretty long time and struggle to see why the admin (I don’t think it was the mods) suddenly felt like this was a Big Important Issue, much less one to make what pretty much everyone seems to agree was an arbitrary rule change that does nothing to meet the stated objective. Still, we can always go somewhere else if we don’t like it I suppose - shame though.