It was perfect. It was what the Pit should be all the time - fun, cathartic, no (well, few) holds barred. Enter at your own risk.
The Pit, and indeed the entire SDMB, have been deadly dull for quite some time now. We need a change, and the uber-Pit was a good one.
Speaking as a poster, I thought it was a good thing for a temporary basis only, but I thought it got old even by the end of the weekend. There was way too much spam to get through to find interesting stuff because idiots kept opening truly useless threads. Not threads that might just be a Bad Idea to have around, but just actual spam, threads of no real interest to anyone.
What I think would be interesting is to hear how we might change the rules after going through the free-for-all weekend. I’m all for removing rules that don’t contribute anything and get in the way of a fiery and lively Pit, rather than help sustain it.
I didn’t like it. Especially I didn’t like unlabeled NSFW links. And I didn’t like people feeling free to be bigger assholes than they already are.
So I’m a sick in the mud with a stick up my ass. There I said it, and beat others to it.
Would starting a mini-rants style thread specifically meant for any non-specific posters to air minor grievances against each other be considered a violation of the “let’s you and him fight” clause?
I suggested it because I thought it would be fun. (Also, because I did have a lot of painting to do. :p) It seemed like a harmless way to take advantage of amnesia weekend and do something different. The other mods agreed (fluiddruid was especially crucial since I planned to, you know, paint the whole time, but she was enthusiastically on board) and voila.
I vote for “Knife Fight”, because I plan to bring my gun.
I enjoyed it for the weekend - who knew acting like a complete asshole would be such fun? - but I wouldn’t want it to be permanent.
If the thread is just “bitch about posters who annoy you”, that’s totally fine. People are free to air their grievances in the Pit whenever they want. We just don’t want people trying to instigate arguing between named third parties, e.g. “fluiddruid and Giraffe should argue in this thread”.
Just like Ekers to bring a gun to a grenade launcher fight!
That’s because you know you couldn’t win. 
I thought it was mostly hilarious. We should do it every Labor Day weekend. I don’t usually post in the Pit much because it’s just so goddamn how-dare-you-say-that-you-monster deadly serious. A little lightheartedness added to the Airing of the Grievances was a breath of fresh air.
My thoughts exactly. A new Labor Day tradition!
I had fun posting with some of you degenerates over the weekend. I’ve always had a hard time remembering people’s names, but now that I’ve seen how fun some of you are I can keep an eye out for your posts 
As you’d probably have gathered if you were reading the Pit over the weekend, I really enjoyed the free-for-all.
However, on reflection, I don’t think it should be like that all the time. Don’t Call Me Shirley and OtakuLoki are spot on in suggesting that it was the impermanence of the posts rather than the suspension of the rules that was the most important factor in making it the weekend it was, at least as far as I’m concerned.
It would be great to be able to do it all again sometime, but until then the Pit can go back to the way it was before (and the Snark Pit will serve a purpose again ;))
I thoroughly enjoyed the freedom to discuss two things: other message boards, including The Board Which I’m Assuming Must Once Again No Longer Be Named, and previously banned posters, in particular the whole “who would you un-ban?” discussion, which I thought was perfectly fascinating, seeing how people’s perspectives change with time, how posters who were the Devil Incarnate are now perceived as actually having added a bit of spice and zip to the proceedings.
And I think the whole “Board That Must Not Be Named” schtick is getting real, real old. The Left Behind boarders at the time weren’t required to not be named; why this one? I think it’s dumb.
Voldemort! So there.
And I was relieved to find that the Pit did not, against predictions in some quarters, turn into the Something Awful forums. I’ve been there, and believe me, this wasn’t it. I thought the Pit pretty much stayed its same old Straight Dope self–witty, bright, sometimes cantankerous, and self-correcting. Truly dumb free-for-all Pit threads sank quickly to page 2, while the worthwhile ones stayed around.
I really think we proved we could handle an increased amount of latitude to post on heretofore forbidden subjects, at least in the Pit. I get the reason for not allowing discussion of banned posters–“He’s not here to defend himself”–but I’ve found the whole sort of Soviet “disappearancing” of banned posters to be increasingly disturbing. They get banned, and officially it’s apparently supposed to be as though they never existed, as no one’s allowed to post a “Hey, yanno, I actually miss Troll Du Jour”. I think we should be allowed to do that.
And I think we should be able to at least talk about The Other Place. There’s no subject so dangerous that it can’t at least be talked about, isn’t that right? And forbidding all discussion isn’t going to make them go away, and, actually, the more you tell people they can’t have something, the more it adds to the mystique.
And as long as we’re discussing Pit rule changes, I think the “no parody/no joke pittings” rule ought to go. Some of the parody Pittings were absolutely hilarious in the past, and I miss them.
DDG you just did that Voldemort shit to troll me, didn’tcha. It’s the Snarkpit. You can say it. It’s not the n-word or the r-word or even the p-word. It’s just the Snarkpit. Try it. It’s not against the rules.
+1. I totally agree. I have not been as active on the Dope as I once was, and I was more interested than ever in this board over the weekend.
I’d love to have a truly free forum with the rules we had in place over the weekend (no personal info, no unlabeled NSFW).
good god. yeah, a “steady grind” sure is the type of experience I hope to have in my free time. It’s a message board, not a nine to five.
It is and always has been possible to post a despicable, evil, nasty 500 word flame of someone who doesn’t deserve it in the pit. It’s done all the time. The difference this last weekend as several have said was not lack of rules it was lack of permanence.
The reason people are reluctant to post outrageous flames of the undeserving is because (to quote one poster) they don’t want to be called “horrible” and find themselves in the minority in a reverse flame. Why were they prepared to be assholes openly over the last weekend? Because they assume memories are short and they can have been “Poster A the total asshole” last weekend but be “Poster A the respected” next week.
I think it’s pretty clear that this feature is why behaviour here is very different to behaviour on anon messageboards. Even on a messageboard where you are only known by an anonymous username, people are protective of their reputation associated with that username.
What happened over the weekend would only happen here if the “knife fight” forum was anon, or had amnesia every few days and ditched all old posts.