I’m not really aware of this body of discussion about here, but not here - and maybe I’m better off that way…
I would say the ad-hoc approach is best.
If someone is shitty to me here, they should be subject to the rules of this board (if this passes unnoticed by the mods, and I feel I want to do more than curl up and cry about it, I can report it)
If someone is shitty to me entirely somewhere else, then I can either curl up and cry, ignore it, respond in kind, seek amends from whatever authority, if any, has jurisdiction there.
If someone is shitty to me somewhere else, but uses that as ballast for a campaign of being subtly and persistently shitty to me here, this should not be the job of the mods here to detect.
If it bothers me enough, and I can argue a case that the instigator is cleverly being a jerk, supported by compelling evidence, then a jerk is a jerk and I think the mods here could act on that as they see fit.
But there’s no need for any new rules, as far as I’m concerned.
With most off-site drama (in real-life fights, board wars, etc) it’s obvious when the line has been crossed and the participants are no longer interested in contributing to this board. In the past these have been dealt with fine.
What we’re talking about is all the snark-boards and all the cutesy references to ‘that-place-we-can’t-name’. Frankly I don’t think it bothers any poster as much as it seems to bother the mods. Having restrictions, and slapping down any reference to that place just encourages them. I’d rather it was out in the open and we just had the normal policy for warnings if they’re being a jerk. In my view the mods attempted suppression of snark-board references is pretty much troll feeding.
Completely off topic, but is there a board anywhere that actively encourages trolls, basically a big troll feeding frenzy?
I don’t get it, either. Why is there a message board which is “all about” another message board? That just seems redundant to me…and a little sad.
I opened this thread thinking that it would be about one SDMB poster taking some kind of argument here into the real world–like going over to another member’s house to dress him down about George Bush or Creationism or Hillary Clinton.
My take on the SDMB is that we are held to higher standards (content, grammar, style, maturity, etc.) than other boards. I lurked (and posted a few times) of a now-defunct message board that was part of a larger site dealing with dot com flame-outs. Sometimes the content was entertaining and enriching and other times it was well, juvenile. I’d say it was a 40-good, 60-bad split. Here, it’s about 80-good, 20-bad, which for a message board is pretty remarkable.
That said, what I see is here is that any drama is quickly squelched by either the moderating staff or the community itself. I don’t think there needs to be an official rule for it, as I think most volatile situations are handled here swiftly and effectively. For those who use the message boards solely to bicker at one another, you can either ignore them or ban them. Don’t make a rule because of them.
I do have a question about the QED/GED thing. If it doesn’t bother QED, why is this such a big deal to anyone else? If it does, why can’t HE just say, “Hey, I don’t appreciate you calling me that” to the offending poster? If the poster then persisted in calling him GED, then they’d be violating the “jerk” rule, right? Although it seems a bit childish to refer to a poster by a name other than the one they’ve chosen, it’s hardly something to be moderated.
That’s pretty clearly “being a jerk”, to my mind. Enforcing the jerk rule in this case does not, despite what many are saying in this thread, require any detective work on the part of the moderators. If someone uses the 267 insult against me and I don’t know what it means, I’m maybe a little confused, but nothing else. If I do know what it means, I report it and say in the report what it means, with a link if possible.
It reminds me of a situation on a board where I’m a moderator. One of the not-too-bright bulbs there tried to get around our “no personal attacks” rule by putting something along the lines of “you’re an idiot” in his signature and whenever he wanted to make a personal attack, he posted “read my signature”. Needless to say, we were not impressed and he was rather swiftly banned. It seems to me that the same should apply here.
I agree completely with MrDibble. It always sucks to be on the shit end of a personal attack, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s something cliquish and clever that only a few understand or our own inside joke that everybody understands. I thought the whole point of no off-board bullshit was to avoid board wars. If that’s the case, then just treat that kind of attack as what it is. If it’s something being brought in by snarkers from another board, then treat it as such. The obvious problem is that some people post at both places, and so the question is whether their participation here qualifies as an attack from another board since they’re members here too. And I think that could be evaluated like any other one-note evaluation that has always been considered jerkish. In other words, **CarnalK ** posts here all the time and in various forums while someone else might swing by only when prompted from outside. That someone else is a one-note jerk, using this board only to create jollies for the other board. Ban him or her and anyone like him or her, but don’t ban CarnalK. That’s my opinion.
Dude, they all post here. The few that were banned post using sock puppets. The snarkpit is nothing but SDMB members, most of them in good standing with their original accounts. As such there is no “board war” to fend off in the first place.
In light of Giraffe’s explicit declaration that goofing on a user’s name is perfectly fine, I expect the warning given out for goofing on QED’s name will be rescinded.
I totally agree with you. 100%. Take it on a case by case basis - if someone has an “issue” let them bring it to the mods attention - otherwise, why should the mods have to play Sherlock Holmes looking for subtle jerkishness (for lack of a better word. Or lack of intelligence on my part for not finding a better word - whatever.)
Besides, if someone is shitty to me, I just beat them up. It’s worked for 42 years - why stop now?
Because they can talk about people being fat, ugly, losers, etc., plus they can make racist and sexist comments using language that would throw many of the people here into apoplexy. There is also considerable crude and specific talk about what they’d like to do to certain posters sexually.
The same behavior here, even in the Pit, would result in instantaneous bannings.
No, I think we should keep the rule about off-board cross-posting. Nobody wants to have to wade through any more Left Behind-type stuff, with hissyfit “You said THIS over here! but then you said THIS over there!” threads and posts cluttering up every forum except Comments/Comments. So yeah, snap those off at the ground when they appear.
But you don’t need to make a whole new rule about posters slyly indulging themselves in secret memes from other boards, because (A) how are you gonna police something like that without spending time at the other boards yourself, so you’ll know what this week’s secret code word from the seventh grade locker room is, and (B) nobody here cares if a subset of posters wanna snicker privately and give themselves virtual high-fives (“Score!”) for points in a game that only they know exists.
I didn’t even know that the whole QED/GED thing was a meme from another board; I just thought it was someone making snark with a poster’s name.
Well, a great number of the complaints are really too petty to actually start a Pit thread for, sometimes they want to make their complaint anonymously because they think their ire is directed towards a sacred cow, some are MPSIMSers who want to get a nasty comment off their chest but don’t want to besmirch their “good guy” rep over here. It should also be remembered that while the SDMB frowns on trolls, it also frowns on troll-hunting, so we get a bunch of that over there too.
Also, a lot of it just turns into dumb in-jokes and it’s hard to keep Dopers away from that!
Thanks for the support, btw, but this thread isn’t really meant to be about me or the other place. And while I know a few posters around here think I’m purely a troll, a look at my general posting ought to show that I’m not, so I am confidant the mods see it that way (at least the majority seems to generally vote that way!)
Keep the status quo. Deal with problems here as they violate our policies.
The concept of snark boards reminds me of the Slam Books of the 1950s and notes passed in class in the eighth grade that held such damaging information as “B.J. farted.”
Much silliness.
Shodan has the best idea. Don’t read snark boards and you won’t understand any references.
I can’t remember the specific details, but somewhere along the way, you and I made peace. I know that you took the time to explain yourself and your board to me in a way that was far less sinister than the common view of it, and I felt I had been unfair to you. If all you are doing over there is making fun of me, then for that I should be flattered.
Like I said: If someone uses the 267 insult against me and I don’t know what it means, I’m maybe a little confused, but nothing else. If I do know what it means, I report it and say in the report what it means, with a link if possible.
