Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.

[ThatGuyThere]

@arkandel said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@ashen-shugar said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Don't know if it may help, but maybe an option that requires a poster wait a full hour before posting in the same thread after their last post?

I would curse the moderator who did that to me.

I get where you're coming from, but I think this would penalize the whole for the actions of very few. Not every MSB poster is aggressive to a fault.

It also wouldn't really solve anything unless the ability to edit was also removed. Since you can edit to include more information my guess would be the result would be getting a post at the start with continual updates.

[surreality]

@sunny We may have our differences, but I am genuinely -- no snark whatsoever -- happy to hear this, and was sad to hear you were thinking of leaving the hobby all together. (I figured you were just busy off playing somewhere and didn't have time for forum bullshit.)

I've been in the same boat and had been feeling much the same.

Sincerely, I hope these recent trends take root. They seem to be good things, and I hope they continue to get better.

[faraday]

So just for the record... the Vault Girl "apology" thread? The one where folks are literally telling each other to f-- off, jumping down each others' throats about who has more right to be upset about what, quibbling over RL gender (WTF people, it's 2018 - can we not start a war about how someone identifies online?), etc.? The one that's so blatant that people are posting actual dumpster fire GIFs? That right there is the kind of thing that those of us asking for more moderation have been talking about.

I can only assume the mods are aware of it since they've been posting in the thread. And if people haven't been flagging posts like mad, that says something too about what the community is willing to tolerate. (I didn't flag personally because I was just curious to see how far it would be allowed to go.)

Allowing Jerry Springer level crap persist in the "Mildly Constructive" forum sends a message about what behavior is allowed, and sets a tone that pervades the rest of the forums.

More constructively, I think that the "Mildly" part of "Mildly Constructive" is just too much of a gray area for people to handle, and it's too easy to stray over the line when tempers get heated. I'd suggest a reshuffling of categories:

Constructive

• Game Dev
• Interest Checks ((new category for pre-MU ad posts that seem to be a rage lately))
• Tastes Less Gamey
• Coding
• How-Tos

Gloves Off

• Game Reviews ((new category where people can post reviews, including full-out negative ones and public service announcements warning about certain admins))
• Peeves ((new category -- split off the RL Anger / Peeves threads to here)
• Hog Pit
• Politics

You could maybe color-code the little icons next to the category names, or put --Constructive-- --Gloves Off-- after the thread titles to delineate which goes where.

Up to you whether all of the Gloves Off topics are opt-in like the Hog Pit or only Hog Pit / Politics. They all kinda seem the same to me. But at least making a clear distinction between Constructive/Gloves-Off sets a clear expectation about what's tolerable where.

ETA: @Ganymede did say something while I was typing this, but the flamey posts are still there for anyone wandering through Mildly Constructive to read and say: "Oh okay, this is what goes on here."

ETAx2: Someone moved it to the Hog Pit, so thank you.

[Roz]

Honestly, any and all apology threads should just be moved directly to the Hog Pit, because that's pretty much always where they end up. (And really, it's pretty manipulative to post an apology thread for terrible behavior in a section of the forum that lets them be like "but don't personally attack me for this terrible behavior!!")

[faraday]

@roz said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

"but don't personally attack me for this terrible behavior!!"

Well I'd have to disagree in general. If someone posts a sincere "I did something horrible and I'm sorry" apology, I think that dogpiling them for the horrible thing they've already admitted to is a crappy thing to do. Splitting off to a Hog Pit thread calling BS (or a PSA type thread in the Reviews section I mentioned) seems more appropriate there.

[Arkandel]

@faraday said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

I can only assume the mods are aware of it since they've been posting in the thread. And if people haven't been flagging posts like mad, that says something too about what the community is willing to tolerate. (I didn't flag personally because I was just curious to see how far it would be allowed to go.)

That's not a good assumption to make. I won't speak on Gany and Auspie's behalf but personally I only really read through threads that interest me, and the best way to ensure I skim through one is when it's filled with GIF memes. So it's quite possible that when I post on a popular thread it's for a specific part that caught my eye and that things might have fallen through the cracks in the last 6 pages this past hour (which happens :p).

Also... even if we first read something we might not think it through at the time. If General You think something doesn't belong, tell us. The only reason I ever mind seeing flagged posts is if the reports are getting weaponized to settle personal grievances, else what's the worse that can happen? Maybe something gets flagged that we decide isn't so bad and we ignore it.

Or something is bad and we do something about it. Tell us.

[Roz]

@faraday said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@roz said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

"but don't personally attack me for this terrible behavior!!"

Well I'd have to disagree in general. If someone posts a sincere "I did something horrible and I'm sorry" apology, I think that dogpiling them for the horrible thing they've already admitted to is a crappy thing to do. Splitting off to a Hog Pit thread calling BS (or a PSA type thread in the Reviews section I mentioned) seems more appropriate there.

It doesn't have to be a dogpile, but you have to consider that most apology threads that get posted on MSB have the other side of the apology -- or at least some of them -- on the forum as posters. If you decide to open up your apology to the public, and there are people on the forum who have been personally victimized by the behavior you're apologizing for, they should be able to respond on the same thread. I don't think it's appropriate to expect to be able to dictate how the people you're apologizing to respond to your apology if you've seriously wronged people.

[faraday]

@roz I can understand that, but IMHO constructive is constructive. If somebody posts something in the constructive zone, then the replies should be constructive. "You're a horrible person and I spit on your apology" isn't constructive, no matter how much of a horrible person they may be. (But if the mods want to move all apologies to the Gloves Off area, that's up to them.)

[saosmash]

I dunno, I feel like "I reject your apology because I think it is manipulative and disingenuous" or whatever is a reasonably civil way to respond to an apology you find insincere as opposed to being like "you're a garbage person and that's a garbage apology" and then you can go to the hog pit your own self to be like "holy shit HOW DARE YOU SPEAK TO ME."

YMMV, I guess.

[Arkandel]

@saosmash That's the problem. YMMV but when admins are asked to intervene then it's our standards that decide what gets to stay where.

It took about two minutes from when I moved a thread today to being accused of picking sides, and that's on an issue where if you asked me right now what it was about I wouldn't be able to tell you.

[faraday]

@saosmash said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

I dunno, I feel like "I reject your apology because I think it is manipulative and disingenuous" or whatever is a reasonably civil way to respond to an apology you find insincere as opposed to being like "you're a garbage person and that's a garbage apology" and then you can go to the hog pit your own self to be like "holy shit HOW DARE YOU SPEAK TO ME."

Oh I actually agree with that. It's certainly possible to reject an apology civilly, depending on the wording. Like you said, YMMV and each case is probably different. As @Arkandel says, ultimately it's up to the mods to decide.

[Auspice]

The thread initially began in a way that was more constructive and lacked personal attacks. People were behaving and trying to explain to VG why her apology may not be accepted.

When it began to slip, I tried asking people hey, please try to keep this on the right side of the fence due to the part of the forum that it's in.

But getting on today I see that's very much not what happened..

[ThatGuyThere]

@faraday
I would argue that public apologies are not really constructive either, not commenting on this one since I don't know the principles but the vast majority of them are propaganda not motivated by actual contrition.

[Thenomain]

@thatguythere said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

@faraday
I would argue that public apologies are not really constructive either, not commenting on this one since I don't know the principles but the vast majority of them are propaganda not motivated by actual contrition.

I think there’s a difference between “not constructive” and “hostile”, which is why the forum is mostly constructive. It has a better ring to it than “non-hostile”, though the latter is more technically accurate about the purpose.

Vault Girl was not hostile. Hell, she’s one of the least hostile people in that thread. I’m 100% with @saosmash: You can dissent without being a dick about it, and this is what should be done on those forums. If they can’t handle that, it’s they, not the original poster, who should be censured.

If you (general you) can’t manage that, start a Hog Pit thread: Vault Girl is a dirty whore and here’s why. Mind you, we all get to laugh at you (fictional straw man you) when your evidence turns out to be brazen false-faced lies.

Incidentally, I do not believe anyone on this forum is a dirty whore. I’m sure any whores on Soapbox are clean and respectable.

(Call me.)

[surreality]

@thenomain said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Incidentally, I do not believe anyone on this forum is a dirty whore. I’m sure any whores on Soapbox are clean and respectable.

(Call me.)

I retired. My con hookup days are twenty years in the past. I'm sorry!

[Ganymede]

I respect everyone’s opinion regarding whether we moved too slowly on that thread. From my perspective, I believe Valkyrie kept things as clean as she could, and I believe the civility could have been better from the rest of us.

I’ll try to move faster in the future, but in my defense work is treating me like its bitch.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@ganymede
For my part I kinda wish the original apology had been left as was (whatever my opinions of it, which are low, but I'm not a mind reader so fair enough) and maybe locked, and what followed moved.

[bored]

I want to strongly support and echo @faraday's post here re: the VG thread and forum organization.

What she's discussing is precisely what was at the core of my argument the last time around (not in this thread, in the prior one where we talked about the advertisement board). The one where, incidentally, the mods had even seemingly come to agree but then there was no real movement to re-arrange things.

While we've made progress (with the more heavy moderation dev section per the last round of fisticuffs, and thanks mostly to @Auspice apparently ignoring the other mods and general bureaucratic inaction to do it herself), the overall organizational model still seems insufficient and/or incorrect. There's still an unresolved question of what content can go in ad threads, whether it's appropriate to call BS propaganda BS, etc. 'Apology' threads are a pretty specific case, but they run into the same general issues.

[DeadEmpire]

@apotheosis We don't need sexist, homophobic, racist or transphobic comments running free on the Hog Pit. If you wanna get nasty, get nasty, but you shouldn't have to be allowed to attack what they are instead of who they are.

Constitutionally protected free speech allows for some vitriolic bullshit, and I think the rules regarding the only things that can't be said in the Hog Pit are fine.

[Arkandel]

@apotheosis said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

It would lower the workload for administrators, allow for the Hog Pit to serve its purpose, and also create a reasonable mandate of civility in other forums.

Our workload isn't the primary consideration. We also need to feel good about what we do here, and administrating an even partially racist, homophobic, etc forum isn't something I'd be interested in doing.