On Yack Fest and Recent Events

Some general remarks from someone who used to be a Yack Fest regular:

There is a reason most forums as large as TV Tropes usually appoint moderators for specific subforums.

From what I gather—I haven't followed the forums closely in several years, so do correct me if my impression is wrong—the moderation staff largely does not participate in the "megathreads" in Yack Fest, and only really intervene in YF when a specific issue is called to their attention. This leads to two big problems: (1) the moderation staff feel they're wasting time and effort that is better spent on the more "on-mission" parts of the site, and (2) when a specific issue is called to the mod team's attention, as with the Trash Heap recently, the mods don't always have all the necessary context to know what action to take.

Appointing subforum-specific Yack Fest moderators would solve both problems. Not only would this free up the sitewide moderators' time to deal with issues they feel are more important, but appointing YF-specific moderators who are regulars in YF would mean they have firsthand knowledge of the tone of each thread and the regular posters, rather than being called to a problem and finding themselves having to deal with it devoid of context.

Again, I've seen this approach work well on other large forums, and I do feel it's the only sustainable way to moderate a site big enough that small sub-communities form among its user base. I hope the moderation staff here will at least consider this option.

Heapers’ Hangout

Agreed. I've visited the Heapers' Hangout and can tell that people are pissed we got it locked. Increased moderation would at the very least allow the Trash Heap to continue existing.

she/her/they | wall | sandbox

Question; if there's a Trash Heap spin-off site, what's the point of the Trash Heap? Hangout thread is the exact same thing. I can understand being upset, but people are making a mountain out of a molehill here.

As for YF specific mods, like I said on the other thread, my main concern is that YF posters might be too biased in favor of YF and their friends there. I speak from experience when I say that moderating a community of people you know and care about on a personal level is difficult and stressful. Everyone wants you to take their side. I'm not saying there's nobody on YF who could be an impartial moderator over the area, but from what I've seen so far, it just doesn't seem like a good idea.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Also found the Photos thread which should probably be nuked as well. It's basically dead, but I think people would be happy with it gone due to the same reasons for Insecurities.

Good point.

Edited by Scarecrow4774 on Jan 20th 2021 at 11:08:10 AM

“We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” - Lewis Carroll

So are we going to just instate a policy that nobody is allowed to post images of themself or even just...photos they took, even if they don't reveal personal info?

I don't think a Photos thread is as risky as Insecurities because it's not like it encourages people to be emotionally vulnerable and list compromising information. And even if it is, that could probably be easily fixed with a "no photos of yourself / personally-identifying information" rule. We can't get overly paranoid here. (Plus, drawing attention to these otherwise dead threads might just make things more risky if certain people are keeping watch of this drama.)

Edited by mightymewtron on Jan 20th 2021 at 11:06:18 AM

I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.

Admittedly, something similar is what prevented me from making the Shoe-Haters' Club for a while. I felt the ability to post pictures of bare feet as have been seen on barefoot communities would bring in sexual predators out for those types. It's a good idea I haven't granted that ability... yet. I'm still on the fence.

So yeah, a no personal identification rule would be good... though people still do link to selfies on external sites.

Edited by TheWhistleTropes on Jan 20th 2021 at 11:30:09 AM

she/her/they | wall | sandbox

Any personally identifiable information that you post here is your responsibility. We do not recommend it, but we also don't police it and we can't guarantee that it can be removed in such a way as to render it invisible to people looking for it.

Any topics that invite or place peer pressure on people to share personally identifiable information, including and especially images, are heavily discouraged.

---

It almost sounds as if we're coming up with a set of actual guidelines for Yack Fest. After how many years? This calls for a celebration.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 20th 2021 at 11:35:08 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Well, the Rules were first posted by Madrugada on October 10, 2010, so... shall we say a decade? If longer?

It's weird looking back and seeing how much stuff was tolerated in the old days mostly because nobody wanted to be the person who called out someone else only to get dog piled by everyone else for being judgmental.

I added some draft rules to my pinned topic in Yack Fest. Please discuss them here.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Once the rules are finalized, will you post them in the general Forum Rules thread or the Yack Fest rules thread?

I intend to make a new pinned Yack Fest rules thread and duplicate it in Forum Games.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Forum Games actually does have a rules thread here.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

Oh, right. You can see how often I go there. I'll probably replace and update it.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

One Forum-Game-Specific rule that got tossed around somewhat recently was about not being selfish- the games have had issues with players making things all about them and their interests, which was unfair to other players. So a general "be considerate of other posters" rule could be useful. It might be covered by "Don't be a Dick", but then again, some people need it broken down for them.

Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

I put something like that in.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 20th 2021 at 12:16:07 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

So what exactly constitutes "shitposting"? Non sequiturs? Memes? Jokes? All of the above?

I think shitposting is persistent jokes, memes, and non-sequiturs. One or two at least tangentially related to the topic is fine at a time.

she/her/they | wall | sandbox

So basically unfocused anarchic garbage? Makes sense.

Yes. We do not need shit polluting the threads, hence why the Trash Heap was created (as a communal bathroom). But Anti-Necro ended up being even trashier than the Trash Heap with its even faster pace, so it was locked because of explosions of drama. Trash Heap suffered a similar fate, and I believe many people have migrated since to Heapers' Hangout or the Hangout Thread.

she/her/they | wall | sandbox

The overlap between the users that were part of the Trash Heap when it ended vs. the people that use HH, past and present, is minimal. Aside from one person that joined HH after the Trash Heap on Yack Fest was closed, there were maybe three users that made use of both platforms in a significant manner prior: Ultimatum, Ozbourne and myself.

HH has been its own thing for the better part of a decade, enough so that most of the users present on the site today don't recognize the current (final) userbase on the Trash Heap. It would be a mischaracterization to portray them as still really having close proximity to each other anymore — they did at one point, but that was six, seven years ago at this point. Some of the people that are taking their leave are figuring something else out, because HH has its own identity and culture that's pretty distinct from anything that's been present on these forums for a long while.

The thread's been going for long enough and has been such a consistent presence in that time that you can genuinely look through and see several different generations of tropers passing through it (including the folks that ended up forming most of HH's userbase from the early part of the decade), whereas the Hangout Thread hit a peak of activity on the earlier side of the 2010s and stuck around in fits and bursts (mostly from a significantly smaller amount of regular users, prior to its 2021 revival) but ultimately has had a fraction of that same engagement — some of which could probably be classified as "shitposting," mind you, but also with a significant amount of actual honest to God conversation in there.

(Also, there is indeed no real way for the mods to keep people from sharing personal information. Writing an indiscriminate ban on it into the rules would be both ineffective and user-hostile.)

oh, that's why I need this binary mind // ⌘

^ Well, there doesn’t seem to be an actual ban on posting personal information on the Yack fest rules draft. It advices against posting personal information but says said rule is just a voluntary guideline so if someone decides not to follow it and post their personal information on Yack Fest, the mods won’t be responsible for removing it if requested to.

(Unless I am misunderstanding something)

Edited by MacronNotes on Jan 20th 2021 at 10:24:10 AM

Macron's notes

Yes, it is a voluntary decision. If someone decides to post their personal information, they assume all responsibility for posting it and therefore the mods cannot get involved. It is expected that they use their better judgment and retract it immediately, I believe.

she/her/they | wall | sandbox

"Don't post anything that you don't want the greater internet panopticon seeing; we can't obliterate it from the internet because that's not actually a possible thing to do" seems to be the approximate intent of the rule

Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.

Regarding the Trash Heap thread

Since I'm the one who started the thread in the first place, I should probably comment on it.

If I recall correctly...

When I started that thread, nearly 11 years ago, there was a big problem of people wonderposting on Yack Fest. What I sought to do was to give people one central place to collect such posts. The term "wonderposting", a.k.a. "shitposting", could refers to quite a great variety of different types of content, from the bad to the good, but if I recall correctly, the issue was that we'd have all manner of tangential posts, generally silly jokes and side conversations, that I wanted to herd toward that one thread, so that people wouldn't get in trouble with the mods for being off topic.

Eventually it evolved into a hangout thread, though in my opinion the distinction from just any other general hangout thread is that, in the Trash Heap, there was an assumption that it didn't "matter" as much what one posted — in the sense that one doesn't need to catch up on the conversation or know what's going on before just jumping in with a post about whatever. Post about your cats, post about your day, post about your food, post a bad pun, post a silly joke, whatever. Started posting about an idea and then forgot about it? That's okay.

At least, that's how I saw it. While it was maybe a couple years or so after I made the Trash Heap that I stopped being as active on TV Tropes as I used to be (in part because it was really taking up way too much of my time), the Trash Heap was basically the only thread I posted in for some number of years, every time I made an occasional visit here to the forum. All other threads I had been subscribed to, it felt like all this stuff had happened and I should catch up on what's going on. For example, I could talk about how much I love the Castlevania games, but I've already done that before, and the Castlevania thread these days is (my guess, I haven't actually checked this) probably talking about the anime series. And I oughta be courteous about this when posting, but mostly this just meant I didn't bother posting. Especially because the TVT forum goes super fast. Conversation here often takes a lot of attention to keep up with. But the Trash Heap was different; the Trash Heap could be joined and left at any time. There was no need to keep up with it.

That's not to say "anything goes" — I even specified in my opening post that it was a bad idea to wonderpost certain things, such as spamming giant walls of text (which IIRC actually did happen back then sometimes, as a gag).

Basically, something like this. Off-topic running joke that you really want to perpetuate because you think it's hilarious? Take it to the Trash Heap. Recent conversation remind you for some stupid reason about some episode of some TV show no one is actually talking about and you suddenly wanna go on and on about it? Take it to the Trash Heap. Have the urge to be too cute by half? Take it to the Trash Heap.

Edited by GlennMagusHarvey on Jan 20th 2021 at 1:50:03 PM