fluiddruid, did you notice post#3? Why do you think “no u” or “fap fap” would be a continuation of off board drama?
I didn’t say so much that it was a continuation of offboard drama - my intention was to show that this is a different community with different rules and standards. Some people believe that the Pit should be no holds barred - anything allowable - and argue vehemently against any warnings here. I don’t agree and I think the moderating we do here is valuable in helping the level of discourse be a lot of levels above that. Perhaps it wasn’t the best example, but the offboard community’s posts seem to me as mostly being extremely jerkish. Even for the Pit.
The Pit does give people a certain accountability to being called out, but there’s a difference between that and persistently preying on popular victims over and over. That’s frankly where the QED/GED problem comes in - I take that as a reference to that sort of discourse (you may not have meant it that way). It’s fine, and in my opinion good, that we call people out for saying stupid things and acting like fools. It’s not fine to link to people’s websites, find an image of their family, link to it and talk about banging their developmentally disabled son or whatever. It’s not cool to follow someone around the board and harass and bully them. That’s the huge, huge gap between the Pit and the offboard site - that’s the bread and butter of that community, no doubt in large part to the fact that it’s simply not allowed here.
My personal opinion is that the Pit should be rough around the edges and should give people a place to blow off steam. It’s not a place where people can be outrightly cruel. We still have rules here about threats and the jerk rule still applies. Keep in mind we’re not talking about Opal’s offsite community and references from there (which have been common) - we’re talking about a community which exists for the sole purpose of saying the most vile and piggish things that come to mind about our members and staff. That site needs to stay as separate from the Dope as possible.
I want my SDMB Mods to enforce forum rules, control jackasses who are going to derail discussions and fight off trolls and the socks that are really trolls. In other words be traffic cops and avoid threads being turned into clusterfucks by people not honestly answering/contributing to a thread.
I don’t want my SDMB mods to be amateur Internet Detectives. To parse content or meaning by snooping about the bushes of other boards with notepad and binoculars in hand looking for references that cross boards and leaping onto the conversational stage upon instances where they think they spy such references with warnings and suspensions. With all due respect that is just not a very workable or equitably enforceable idea.
If calling someone a name violates a forum rule or threatens to derail a discussion the Mods need to jump all over that instance. If calling him a name that appeared on another board is really part of the ebb and flow of a thread I really think it needs to be let go.
Exactly. I’m not asking whether we should be responsible for knowing if a specific reference is from another site, I’m asking if in the event that a poster calls it to our attention, should we do something about it? Assume that the referenced insult is against the rules of the forum, but the reference itself is not.
Hypothetical #2: two posters have been feuding on LiveJournal, leaving nasty comments on each other’s blogs. Poster #1 starts working a reference to these fights into their posts, trying to bait poster #2 into blowing up and getting a warning. Poster #2 complains to the mods, and gives links that demonstrate that poster #1 is repeatedly referencing LiveJournal posts.
Pretend you’re a moderator. What would you do? This example has nothing to do with a real life situation or the snark blogs, I’m just trying to probe how people think our rules should work.
All this hypothetical is making my head hurt.
Can someone give me a concrete example of what an “off board drama” would consist of? Cause I don’t read other boards and I’m trying to figure out what the issue is.
Well, unless one of those forums happens to be the Pit.
To me, that would be the sort of ‘stalking’ type behavior that should be moderated.
There’s a bunch of posters here whose political opinions I don’t share, for example. If I followed them around and made comments continually about “well, obviously that’s the conservative in you coming out again” when they comment about not liking a particular movie or what not, that’s, IMHO, stalking/jerkish stuff.
I’ve been invovled in a couple of heated threads from time to time, and I rarely recall the folks I got pissed at. Sometimes folks don’t believe me when I say I don’t recall crossing paths w/them, but it really takes an awful lot for me to keep that sort of shit uppermost in my mind.
Unless people start being harassed in real life-addresses and phone numbers being posted, etc, or whatever, just let it be.
At worst it’s pathetic, and at best, it can be somewhat amusing. Honestly, I don’t see that it’s worth getting all up in arms about.
And can we please stop the whole “oh my god, you mentioned The Other Board!” crap? The admins making so much fuss about it only makes it worse.
To those of you who are saying it’s not a big deal, does this translate to feeling that we should get rid of our rules about off-board cross-posting? Or is it more of a statement of “I don’t care what you do, it doesn’t really affect me?”
Not to be nitpicky, but I’m trying to get at people’s opinions on what our policies should be, not just how they feel about stuff like the snark blogs.
Well I guess the best example of this was the badchad banning for targetting Polycarp, which I guess had some merit. But surely grudges aren’t going to be banned? Personally, that’s why I disliked the lissener/Liberal warning. To me it gives a little flavour knowing that for years to come lissener would have kept calling him Libertarian.
eta: Nicely spotted splatterpunk.
Cross board postings give Mods specific, very real and fair evidence to enforce rules.
Cross board references require the Mod to chin-pull, raise eyebrows, mutter at their monitor and, (there really is no way around this) make their best-guess call that the preponderance of the evidence suggests that poster X has referenced a (secret, never to be named) board on the shit list that the Poster may never have ever visited before he took an obvious jab at a username.
Why do we really need to have a “policy” in the first place?
Unless there’s a board war, or whatever, I don’t think it’s an issue. It’s not causing any problems, as far as I can see.
Fair enough, that’s what I wanted clarified. Thanks.
Why all the hypotheticals? Who cares? Wouldn’t Poster #1 just be warned/banned because he’s being a jerk?
It’s not rocket science.
Is it too much to propose a Las Vegas Rule( - what happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas) for these sorts of things?
That’s myopic. You could be a target. Imagine what might happen if Anonymous Snarker A says “it’d be funny if somebody called Guin out on living in her parents’ basement” and then Doper B rather innocuously posts it as a playful jab here. We have a possible conflict.
If we don’t have a conflict, we at least have a perceived conflict and people like What Exit? and bbs2k will be clicking Report like they were sending telegraphs from Sutter’s Mill itself. That stuff makes the mods’ jobs harder.
Once we open ourselves to cross-board skirmishes we also open ourselves to some serious shit. Right now a bunch of tards with orange buttcracks are either fapping with glee or scuttling like roaches. Unlike snarking little shitbeetles hard-ass Nazis at [name redacted] mean business and will do their level best to fuck us up.
But if that happens outside the Pit, it would be an insult and would be moderated anyway. And if it happens in the Pit, it would be in poor taste, but there’s really no need for moderation.
Well, I doubt Guin is myopic on this issue as I think your exact example has probably happened. She’s got some bizarre “fans”. eta: And she lives in an attic, people! Get it straight!
I once saw a nature show that talked about individuality among non-human species. It mentioned that within a flock of birds there tends to be a few members that squawk and give a danger signal a little too easily, so the other birds tend to stop listening to them as much. Maybe it’s possible the Moderators here could manage that concept.
If you think you see someone snarkily bringing up issues that properly belong on another board, such as secret code word insults, why not just deal with it via an e-mail to the offender?
Frankly I think the whole OP is a non-issue. Probably most of of us have no clue what “other boards” are doing or saying, and when the Seekrit Slams go past, we just assume it’s something to do with the current season of Project Runway, or yet another Youtube/Wiki/Fark meme, and we ignore it. We don’t really care to be involved as bystanders in a mod smackdown of posters utilizing arcane insults stemming from a group of people we’ve never heard of. It’s kinda like listening to a D & D session from the other room, with the geeks arguing over esoteric points of rolling a Cleric. Like, we totally don’t care.
So I’m with Guin. Why do we need to have a “policy”?
Heh, I used to think that too before they gave me the damn mod hat. 
I’m not sure everyone would agree that we should warn poster #1 in this case. Poster #1 would argue that his posts were not against the forum rules, since you’d have to know the backstory to catch the references. I think the behavior is clearly jerkish in this case, but is it the type of jerkery that we as mods should try to stop?