Appeal to the moderation

The site has for a very long time had the policy that explicit links are not permitted; it's in the rules post. We just previously hadn't done much to enforce it, I think because none of us is all that into anime, and possibly we naïvely assumed that just telling people not to do it and banning repeat offenders (Chagen springs to mind, although his ban was overdue anyway) would be sufficient to get most people to quit it.

If you want to link to an image on Danbooru, can't you link it directly?

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We have a 'no NSFW links' policy. Even if the pictures in question are SFW, Danbooru has some seriously porny ads.

edited 14th Jan '12 2:48:41 AM by Iaculus

What's precedent ever done for us?

@Bobby G: Ah, yeah, you can. You just gotta remind people to hit the refresh key if they get to a screen with a 403/503 forbidden error. Antihotlink measure but refreshing loads the image as usual.

I forgot one could do that for a second, though.

edited 14th Jan '12 2:47:04 AM by CharpocalypseNowRedux

Huh, crowners for new OTC only mods? Fascinating.

I'm tempted to put my own name on it, but I'm sure that it will end up as -50 or lower.

That, and I don't even use that section much.

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

Incidentally, Yeah Bro, if you're reading this, this kind of aggressive condescension:

...and feigned confusion and superiority when you know full well that you were winding people up:

...and blanket accusations:

...and this holier-than-thou attitude:

...are precisely why nobody listens to you and you keep getting banned.

That and, y'know, tolerating ban evasion would pretty much undermine the entire ban system.

It's a shame, because if you'd just calmly made the case that there is a lack of transparency, that emotional knee-jerk responses don't do the mods any favours, that the implementation of "don't be a dick" is punishing the people who react to horrible posts rather than those making them, and that the people who are most at fault are those who know that rape apologia is wrong but tolerate it anyway (wow, by the way), then those would all have been valid points, and I've reproduced them here because they are valid points. But instead you lost it and started acting all aggressive, and your points were consequently ignored.

I wasn't the one who trolldozed you, but you've been around long enough that I know you knew this ban was coming. You knew that this behaviour would get you banned, and why. Hint: it is not because you were critical of hate speech or paedophilia.

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Bobby G, can we just let everything burn and make some s'mores?

edited 14th Jan '12 3:15:50 AM by CharpocalypseNowRedux

Well, that's kind of what I'd rather didn't happen, or else I wouldn't be here, would I? If I thought burning the site to the ground was the best course of action I'd be doing something productive IRL right now, like a sane person.

Except for the part about the s'mores. We can have s'mores.

Aw, you deleted it and now none of that makes sense.

Thinking about the rape apologia thing: around what point do we hit the "unacceptable" mark? If I warn somebody for suggesting that there might be some truth in the argument that dressing in a particular way makes women more vulnerable to rape, and said troper feels hurt by the accusation and doesn't see it that way, am I the "opinion police" yet, and am I "stifling debate"? Because I've been criticised for those before.

I mean, if that kind of attitude wasn't commonplace, rape culture probably wouldn't even be a thing and wouldn't be discussed here in the first place.

edited 14th Jan '12 3:17:44 AM by BobbyG

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@Bobby G: S'mores for all sounds like a better plan than confusing-and-unclear-adminstration-for-some by my book, is all I'm sayin'.

I don't disagree. But confusing-and-unclear-administration-for-some is not the goal here.

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Therefore, s'mores must be.

There are too many toasters in my chimney!

@Bobby

No, that's not going too far. And you do have to opinion police a bit to moderate places like OTC anyway, most of what is posted there is opinions anyway.

"Dr. Strangeloid, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Cleanlink" - thespacephantom

S'mores sound good.

As for your worries, Bobby, I'd say you've been doing a pretty good job, from what I've seen. Sometimes (not always), it's better to step on a few toes to prevent something like our recent troublesome thread from developing. It's not "stifling debate" so much as "preventing an obvious Flame War".

Support Gravitaz on Kickstarter!

@Bobby G: The site has taken a long, LONG time to achieve goals that would have been nice some time back.

Remember the #yackfest conference? We tried to help Eddie help us help him help us. Nothing came out of it. A lot of people don't know how to make a difference around here anymore.

Zudak left. Zudak is not an impatient or brittle person. He just couldn't take the drama.

Why is all this happening, Bobby G? Everything is actually being enacted at the speed of a belt sander slowly being pressed up against one's face.

If this isn't a democracy, what the Hell is it?

I don't mean to stir up trouble but a lot of people who used to like the place (and not for reasons of YAY ANARCHY either) have left. Good people.

edited 14th Jan '12 3:22:18 AM by CharpocalypseNowRedux

The mods get bitched at every time they try to change something rapidly without input from non-mods, so it's not surprising they're changing things slowly with input from non-mods. I don't think there's a good way to change things quickly while still having non-mod input, so any transition must be at least slightly messy.

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

The mods get bitched at for a lot of things.

The major contributory cause is "You are making bad decisions."

Not all the mods do this, and not all the other mods do it all the time, but there are a lot of bad decisions and policies in the administration here, and it leads to a lot of unrest.

There are too many toasters in my chimney!

Sigh. Fair enough.

You know what? Ban me. I'm 99% sure things aren't going anywhere remotely near like what they were around here back in my glory posting days anytime soon.

Ban me because yes, I DO have medically diagnosed obsessive tendencies, I DON'T like spending huge amounts of time griping, and I WOULD rather take that option rather than wind up throwing a huge bitchfit in the middle of the forum and causing a huge tizzy.

Christ. If I seem unduly upset it's just that so much has come between people and a niggling feeling at the back of my mind keeps telling me there was a way to avoid it somewhere down the line.

Well, agreed with that. And thanks.

I'm very much aware. It's why posting here is growing steadily more joyless by the day.

What you have to bear in mind, though, is that shit is getting done now, probably faster than it has done for a long time in the past; Eddie has listened to arguments and taken suggestions on board, and we have the new thumps, the OTC mod crowner down there, the announcements box has been dusted off and put to work again, the Forum Heralds were created, and the mod hats were recoloured but changed back because that didn't go so well. We're working on fixing things as fast as we can.

On the other hand, we're trying to be mindful that rash changes have caused a lot of upset in the past. A lot of the suggestions we're being presented with are often mutually exclusive, so it's less a case of just implementing whatever and more a case of assessing the complaints and trying to find the best solution based on that.

At the same time, the mods do have lives, and we do have other responsibilities IRL. I've already missed the cut-off date for one module, which can't be retaken and will be coming out of my final mark; I can't keep on doing that, can I? Other mods have had to do work related things, or had family members in hospital, or are moving (always stressful). Am I making excuses? No, none of those excuse anything. I'm just saying, I understand the concern that things aren't happening fast enough, but we are trying our best here. We want to get better, it's just a question of figuring out how best to do that.

edited 14th Jan '12 3:36:09 AM by BobbyG

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I...*sigh* I know, I guess. But people are still upset that some of their favorite wiki pages got wiped, people are complaining about the site becoming like a bad imitation of wikipedia even as Troper's Law says "We are not Wikipedia" and try as we might there's still no sign of that chaotic-but-well-spirited joy from the site's early days.

And then we have stuff like Eddie flipping out on people if they mention Adblock (or has he stopped doing that?)

... Did I miss the announcement that new threads aren't allowed in OTC? Is that only until the decision on new mods is over, or is this a Stealth Kill of the forum?

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Tried that one. It didn't work :v

The problem a lot of people have is that they're not even sure if they can be fixed without a major overhaul here.

At the end of the day, many of the contributory causes of the problems are stilll here; Eddie is unchecked and is not the best administrator out there, and I am not sure who I would offer up as an admin; the stresses of coding get to him, but he will not find a new coder; somew of the moderators have shown repeatedly bad jusgement and may not make the best moderators; and the posters around the place are ignorant and bigoted quite often, and I can't see that changing easily (just look at the earlier debacle with this guy in the Africa thread here).

I understand that you all have lives. But the problems may not be able to be just patched over, and I'm of the opinion that the administration is not going to take it well if people start talking about how some of the administration may need to reconsider themselves.

There are too many toasters in my chimney!

What Cygan said.

When people feel their impact on their environment is minimal they get antsy. When they get antsy we see discord. Then come the angry posts and the bannings and everything.

I keep telling ya, the #yackfest conference was a missed opportunity for the whole site's sanity.

@ Charlie Talking about Adblock is a problem because it makes the advertisers nervous if they catch wind of it. Good ad providers (SFW and making enough money to keep a site this size going) are hard to come by, so that can legitimately hurt the site.

As for the rest, this is again what I mean when I say that complaints are conflicting. I mean, I think Eddie would love to recapture the fun of the older site, but I'm not sure that level of informality is even viable in a site this big. As for the #yakfest conference, the ideas have been noted and taken on board, but at the moment they amount to just a few items on the fucking massive list of criticisms and suggestions under consideration.

@ Blue Ninja: It's just until the decision is over.

@ Cygan: I understand what you're saying. But isn't it better to work with what we have as best we can than to insist on radical changes that we know won't get made, at least not immediately?

And I am willing to vouch for all of the moderators; many of us have made mistakes, but there isn't a single moderator who I think the site would be better without, and all have made some very necessary changes and decisions in the past.

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I find it hard to imagine that the same excitement will ever return if they keep on having to file down and standardize trope names.

The Nakama name debate wasn't a big deal to me, but...I kinda miss the site's excessively weeaboo early days.

And RE: Adblock. Yes, I know, but I think customers (or tropers in this case) should always take priority, especially given that sometimes virus-laced ads make it through Google's filter.

...

Do I really have no idea just how haphazardly difficult it is to keep a site up and running these days?

edited 14th Jan '12 4:00:05 AM by CharpocalypseNowRedux

I am unclear on this; just how tied up in being admin of the forums specifically is needing to code? Because if the forums require less/no coding compared to the rest of the site, that should make it simpler for Eddie to promote one of the other moderators to be forum admin (for example). If it's integral, then I don't know how that would be solved.

I'm probably not familiar with all of the moderators, but IMX Madraguda, Bobby, and Morven are among the better forum mods I have encountered online. They're still human, AFAIK, and can make mistakes, but they are not openly biased or playing favorites among the forum posters.

Fixed that for ya.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

I agree. But can you see how this would not be satisfactory to some, because the problems that are causing them trouble are ingrained?

I think that some of the moderators here may not have the best judgement in the world. And this is a very bad quality to have in a moderator.

I can think of at least two moderators who could do with stepping back. Not necessarily quitting as a mod, but certainly being less active, so that they can consider their actions better.

There are too many toasters in my chimney!