Sua and EvilBeth…
you two have officially hit the nail right on the head.
Ummm…get a life? If I were to leave this board (let’s say with the dramatic MSPIMS exit many have made when they had to stop posting because they got a job or something that took up their daytime hours), and happened to check the reaction, and happened to see people giving me “virtual hugs” or crying “virtual tears,” I’d have the same reaction.
I enjoy the SDMB. I have fun here. But I don’t make this the end-all and be-all of my existence. And those that do, IMHO, need to find something better to do with their lives, like, say, watching “Springer.”
Fer chrissakes, andros, of course the Boards affect people’s lives. You meet people, you get to know them, some here, some in real life because of here. Heck, I’ve started dating someone I met through the Boards, and that alone makes me very glad I started posting.
Yeah, if I posted on another MB, I would meet different people, and maybe they would be just as nice as the people I’ve met here. But that doesn’t mean that my life hasn’t been affected.
Guess me and my electrons are fucked then. What if you do like it, but you think there’s a problem. The options are leaving or ignoring? Absolutely brilliant. Where I come from, you try to fix a problem, or you point it out to those who can fix it.
Fenris - just saw your post on preview. I agree that Silo’s first post was utterly stupid, and that his defense of it was lame. I also agree that it’s their house, it’s their rules, and I have no problem with that. But it wasn’t his first post that got him banned. It was his response to Manny - and I think his response to Manny was justified.
Sua
There are very few here who do. However, you are completely incorrect in thinking that it isn’t real or important. If you don’t understand that, I’m sorry. Of course, with your attitude, I’m not surprised.
Eminently reasonable words from Sua as always.
And, andros, on the assumption that your post was directed at me, you are 100% correct. The mods don’t have a damn thing to do with my life. Except the ability to keep me from posting here. Thus, if they so much as indicate any displeasure with me, I run like the dickens. I like it here, and it is their party (well, the Reader’s, delegated to them), and they can do whatever the hell they please. They can also make mistakes.
And fuck your sorry ass.
[sub]Of course, I neglected rule #2–stay as far as possible from threads complaining about the mods…[/sub]
Hell, you’re all lucky I’m not an Admin or Mod (cool sounding titles, by the way, very New Agey/technopunk sounding) as I’d bann every last one of you. And then I’d bann myself and there’d be no Straightdope message boards and the world would sink into a stinking morass of ignorance and poverty.
And then the cockroaches would take over, and then there’d be some REAL goddamn changes, I can tell ya!
Er, what was this thread about again?
Oh yea: everyone chill out–this rates about a .00001 on the blip-o-meter of life.
Back on the 28th of June (two days before Silo’s infamous post), I noticed that the Search All function was disabled. Rather than check ATMB (yes, I’m dumb) I went to the IRC channel to ask for an update. There, I was pointed to the thread in ATMB discussing the search functionality. After poking around, I noticed the workaround that was later posted by Silo. I commented on it in the IRC channel, and said that I was going to post it to bring it to the mods’ attention.
Several people on the channel recommended that I not continue to be dumb, and to email the administrators immediately. I composed a message to TubaDiva, explaining what I found, giving a step-by-step walkthrough of how to do it, and wished her the best with dealing with it.
There’s no real point to this; I guess I’m just a little shaken at my unwitting close call. It’s true that I haven’t been a bother to the mods (as far as I know - well, except for playing against John Corrado in a Diplomacy game) so I probably wouldn’t have been banned had I made the information public, but still. I’ll be double-checking my words from now on.
Sign my name under Sua’s and evil beth’s.
Was Silo’s remark rather snarky? Indeed. Yet, was Manny’s remark over the top? Definitely.
I’ve seen Manny become very nasty and intimidating to people in the past. I think Silo would probably have backed down if Manny hadn’t shot him with his past. Naturally, to save face, Silo comes up with smartass remark.
Look, your board, your call. Still, I think it was a little overdone.
No, I don’t feel threatened. I don’t feel like my head is on the chopping block. Why? Because I don’t piss off mods, I don’t act like a jerk, and when in doubt, I take the high road. If a mod told me I was crossing a line, I’d knock it off fast even if I disagreed. There is plenty of room to be opinionated, witty, thought-provoking, and enlightened on this board without screwing things up or making more work for moderators.
I don’t know Silo personally, so I can’t speak to his prior actions or his reform. But this sounds to me like someone who needed to be humble and back off when the warning signs were issued. Maybe he was being held to a high standard, maybe it wasn’t entirely fair, but for christ’s sake, it’s a moderated forum. When a moderator tells you to back off, you back off.
The calls they make may not always be perfect, but it’s like sports officiating. Sometimes they’re more on the mark than others. Don’t play the game too much on the edge, and it won’t effect you overmuch. Which is why an incident like this might make me feel bad for the person involved, but I don’t feel as terrified for my own membership as apparently rob would have me feel.
And you’d have won large sums of money.
Without going into too much detail, we staff members have been torturing our brains, trying to figure out ways to make the board run more smoothly. The work-around that Silo mentioned completely would completely negate all the tweaking that’s been done. The work-around cannot be programmed out, unless we choose to disable search entirely. Several people figured it out, but only ONE had the nerve to post it for everyone to see and use.
Several people commented that Silo was “completely forgiven” after becoming unbanned. This is not so. He knew that if he screwed up, he was outta here. This was, apparently, not an innocent mistake, as he didn’t apologize, he was saying that it was a nice little luxury for those who knew how to use it. In other words, he was encouraging others to screw up the workings of the board.
There’s a lot of stuff that goes on in the background that you folks don’t see, and mostly it’s boring, boring, boring. And very necessary. But we have to take ALL factors into account, and try to predict what’s gonna happen. Sometimes we’re wrong (though I don’t think so in this case), but we do the best we can. And for this work (and it IS work, I spend about 30 hours a week on this, and I think that I’m slacking compared to the rest of the staff) sometimes we get praise, but far more often we get people bitching us out.
We’re not gonna warn each other in public, but I assure you, if one of us mods does something that’s objectionable, we DO hear about it.
While I’ve written this as a staff member, it is not THE Official Position. It’s just my take on the subject.
The Official Position:
Don’t be a jerk.
Don’t screw with the workings of the Message Board. Especially, don’t make it harder for people to access the Message Board.
If you DO mess with the Message Board, don’t give the mods any lip when it’s pointed out to you.
If you’ve been warned, don’t pull an attitude.
If you find a bug in the software that can be abused, DON’T post it for all to see. Email a staff member!
There’s other stuff, but this is most applicable to this situation.
Lynn
While I appreciate this in theory, Lynn, the problem is that even if manhattan has been reprimanded for his conduct (his on-going conduct) he is not showing that it has had any effect whatsoever. All we see is his repeated insults and jerky behavior.
I seem to recall a while back that he was stepping down temporarily from his Mod duties and Jill was talking over in the interim. Is this still the case? If so, he should be treated as any other poster and warned in public. If not, he should at the very least apologize for his blatant breaking of the rules in his post.
I know you run this board the way you have to, I understand that. However, one of your staff (voluntarily working here or no) is violating the rules repeatedly and those of us who do follow the rules are more than a little upset by this. Does that mean you have to change it? No. Does that mean we have to like it? No.
I believe I shall print this thread, cut out select posts, and use it to fertilize my freaking garden, since it the posts I am considering are pure concentrated bullshit. I will have a bumper crop of tomatoes, and I will enjoy them.
Lynn, all bullshit aside, you left out a part.
I really don’t see that, but to each their own. Obviously, the correct thing to do would have been to email this to y’all, but instead, he posted it to the thread, started by the over-seers of this board to discuss this very thing. Well, not that exact thing, but that seemed to be the best place to post such a thing. Comments on the board. When pointed out that it was bad/wrong, he said (not like anyone needed his permission) that it wound be fine, and would probably make the most sense, to just delete the post in question. Sure, not in those words, but common sense would take it that way, rather than decide it was time to jump his shit. Anyhoo…
FTR, whenever I screw up and ask them to fix a post, and they do, I make an effort to thank the Mods. I know I’m not representative, but FYI.
Of course, because there are a lot more of us than there are of you, and some people live to catch others in mistakes. When they do, they seem to revel in pointing out their errors to anyone and everyone. This also seems to apply to Mods, or one in particular. I’ve never “met” or had issue with the Mod in question, but it would seem jerk-ish behavior is not restricted to non-coms. IMO and $0.02, so onward-
I appreciate the distinction, and I think it is very helpful, especially in situations like this, for that distinction to be clear and unambiguous. Again, IMO and $0.02.
As some would say “Don’t be a jerk, unless you are a Mod, in which case your shit don’t stink.” There is some serious discontent and angst floating around cases of Moderator backlash. Some make an effort to differentiate their moderating posts from their regular posts, and that is a good thing. They should be able to post glib and MPSIMS-y stuff, or opinions in GD or the Pit with out the “official” status backing up their post. They can be “normal people.” However:
What if they are posting as a “normal person,” though, can they up and pull rank once they get pissed off? Doesn’t seem fair. Fair’s got nothing to do with it, sure, but hey, we can dream.
Look, I want to state again that I appreciate the boring shit you guys must wade through because you don’t have the luxury of skipping things that don’t look interesting to you. You accepted a position, a voluntary one, but a position of authority over others. It seems, to me, not unfair, but wrong to take personal action that breaks rules then hide behind the cloak of power while convicting someone else.
Just my opinion, I’ve been wrong before.
Uh. IF this banning has anything to do with the workaround, why is the workaround still posted in two places? (not that anything that was ever posted was more than the average poster could figure out on his or her own)
Manny should lose his moderator position for at least 6 months.
I’m curious. Where did you come up with “6 months”? It seems an arbitrary number. Why not, say 5 months and 3 weeks? Or 142 days? Or a full year? **
**[sub]note: I do not believe Manny should lose his uh…modding privilages for any amount of time[/sub]
I feel that you people are NOT going far enough.
I want to see manhattan CRUCIFIED.
Upside fucking DOWN, like Saint Peter!
And I want to be there underneath, holding a basin, to collect the blood, so I can offer it to Silo to drink.
The more I think about this, the more enraged I become.
Manhattan flew off the handle. Which is fine. He’s human. But he did it from a moderators POV, which sucks ass. I thought this board was so much better than that.
I was wrong.
We have a damned loyal base, you realize… so many posters with upwards of 1000+ posts to a REALLY slow message board with pretty unbending rules. Why? Because its a community. We’ve grown fond of one another. We’ve grown fond of that big “STRAIGHT DOPE” logo in the upper left hand corner…
It really is more like a family than a random msg board. I would hope that this would enable its moderators to see beyond smaller quibbles and see that yes… our cousin Silo is an asshole sometimes, but he’s amusing and colorful and adds more to this msg board then his moments of oversight take away.
sigh
Let us not forget. Manny did not ban Silo (so Sua, your analogy is not exactly correct). Other people have been banned for showing how to circumvent vB. Other posters have been banned for having more than one username and have not been invited back.
Like I said before, I like Silo. I hope when tempers have cooled there can be a reconciliation. But that doesn’t mean I think the mods and admins deserve to get reamed for doing their jobs.
This message board is the best I have found on the Internet. The reason it is does not have a thing to do with speed (obviously) or the personalities of its administrators. The fact is that there are not a whole lot of general information forums with the readability that this one has. Especially there are not a lot of places where politics, religion, philosophy, and science are all discussed, and the debate is not overwhelmed daily by screaming morons and jerks.
Why is that? Because being a jerk is against the rules. Because bitching about the board is confined to one forum, and bitching about other shit is pretty much confined there as well. Because everyone has to remain identifiable if they want to continue to post. Because the people who are moderators actually do provide the function of enforcing the rule.
You can fuck up in spades, while being verbally abusive to the people who run the place, and **still get back on the board ** if you are really sincere in your desire not to be a jerk. There is a phenomenon that destroys most openly generous and good stuff in the world. I call it the TASA problem. The tragedy of the commons is a more formal presentation. Treating free access to a public resource as a chance to get the most you can causes the failure of the commons. There’s Always Some Asshole. So you cannot have open forums without controls, because there is always some asshole who will fuck it up for everyone else.
Because of the TASA problem, there has to be someone who is in charge of kicking the assholes out. It’s a sucky job. Assholes are people too. They have friends, they have problems, they promise they will be good. But there is always some asshole . . . well, you get the idea. Tuba and Ed are the ones who have to do it here. I certainly don’t want the job.
Mike Masterson had a chance. Then a series of sock puppets had a chance. Then Silo got a chance. He almost made it. He was so close to overcoming the TASA problem. But he doesn’t see the obvious fact that publishing the information on how to precipitate the tragedy of the commons is the root cause of the failure of open systems. I would have banned him and deleted the post without comment publicly. I would have advised him in email not to bother trying to come back. I am not all that nice a guy.
You know why? I would love to see open free access forums, common garden plots, free bicycles at bus stops, and a thousand other general access solutions to minor social needs. But I will never see any of them happen. And whether he likes it or not, Mike Masterson is part of the reason why. There’s Always Some Asshole, Mike, and this time, it’s you.
Tris
“The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.” ~ Albert Einstein ~
Check the mirror, Tris. You’ll find another.