Ed Zotti is really depressed about all the fighting and filler on this site. This is understandable.
How hard exactly is it for a moderator to zap a message?
On most boards, when things get rowdy or X-rated, or troll-rambled to death, the moderator just starts dropping messages like swatting flies. Swat, swat, swat. No notice, no explanation, no handwringing or scolding.
Just swat, swat, swat.
If the trailing messages are lost as well, it’s no big deal- there’s more where they came from.
That would lower Ed’s blood pressure in a hurry, and make all the true fact seekers breathe easier as well.
On the one hand, yeah, this is just a message board and what’s the big deal about that? There’s a million of 'em in cyberspace.
On the other hand, it’s turned into quite a little community here over the years, a place where people have learned stuff and made friends (and more than friends, in some cases); we’ve laughed and cried and experienced a lot of human interaction.
It’s been compared to a party in someone’s home, or an evening in your friendly neighborhood tavern, and I think the comparison is fair.
We want people to have a good time here, without feeling stifled by a lot of rules . . . but there’s also limits to everything.
Not everybody understands that, or appreciates what we do or why we do it. And some want this to be a radically different sort of place than it is and express that desire in every way they can, hoping to make change.
It’s about maintaining some structure and order without being limiting or repressing. It’s about removing the negative stuff without having that removal in itself be a negative impact on the relationship we have with our forum members.
Most of all, we want people to have a good time here . . . make a friend, learn something, laugh a little. We’re a leisure time activity for a lot of folks and it’s in our best interest to make this place as good as we can. That means we try to get as much good as we can and remove the not-so-good when necessary, as we find it.
Drop the filler forums:MPSIMS, The BBQ Pit, Great Debates (replace with a list of topics already beaten to death), and (why not)About This Message Board
Don’t archive.Pick a life cycle and live with it. Search times must cost you a bundle on computer time.
Close a thread when it hits two pages. The long topics just chew bandwidth, and it’s easy enough to start a new thread.
Oh, and I was here before you, despite my new username, so your condescention won’t help your argument with me.
Oops - waited too long before sending my post and another one got in ahead. My post above was responding to TubeDiva (not Ed, who was obviously here before me).
Don’t the off-site html image files cost you more than they’re worth in bandwidth? You could drop them without losing anything. I’m sure they’re a huge drain compared to on-site smilies.
I don’t know who your are, tshirts. But I’m not being condescending.
But see, this is EXACTLY what I’ve been talking about; how people can take a statement made here and make an issue out of it. Half the time around here, it’s not so much what you say but how you say it, or even that you say it.
And I have been “here” for quite some time, going back to the AOL days. The beginning of the AOL days, if you want to be exact about it. If you were the old timer you claim to be, you’d know that.
And yes, those image files. That’s currently an issue before board management.
At the current time we allow the use of images, providing they are small in size and not ripped off from other websites. There has been some abuse of this policy in the past and we are removing images in violation of this policy as we find them.
If it gets to be too much of a pain to deal with, the use of images will be stopped. We’re hoping not to get to that place. It’s up to the users.
Tshirts, I rather doubt that your ideas will go over well. I mean, look at people’s reactions when Ed says that they’re not allowed to mouth off to him.
What you need are more smilies.
If I took a few of Slug’s faces and made them roll their eyes would you let me link to them? (It’s not a copyright infraction if it’s done as satire, is it? If so, I could just donate them to Slug and he could link to them.) :rolleyes:
Ed said it, but he didn’t post it here. You did. Just wondered why.
We don’t allow the use of unauthorized images; you cannot steal from other people’s sites just because you see something cute. I’m removing this smiley. Keep in mind further abuse of our policy re images will only result in management taking that privilege away from all our users.
It’s Wally’s world, we just live in it. You didn’t know that?
Oh, and tshirts? I’d check with Ed before I did any work on Slug’s art, even in fun. That’s EdZotti@aol.com . Ed and the Reader management have been quite accommodating in the past, but it’s always better to ask first.
