Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.

[surreality]

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

Like for example, someone could say, 'I don't like softcode'. Fine, okay. No one would object to that.

Here's the thing, though: at one point I said, "I don't like anime PBs. They break immersion for me." No attacks on games that allow them, no attack on the people choosing to use them, just that.

"Don't you dare ever set foot on our game then you <long list of colorful adjectives and accusations> monster!"

This happened. (I'm even counting it in the 'two places' referenced earlier as one of the two.)

I genuinely want to be on the same page with you here, and believe this is the norm. I've experienced the above and similar things too often to think it is.

@three-eyed-crow said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

I was surprised it took as long to ban Nemesis as it did, given his rage-tour across the entire forum. He was banned eventually, at least.

The thing I mentioned about 'acceptable targets to attack without social consequences' is very relevant there. I'm surprised he lasted until that day at all, since there were many instances of similar offenses before that, but he did. His standards and mode of behavior were so universally recognizable and horrid various people were able to identify him when he appeared within a log.

This person is not a healthy member to have in any community like this one, and these people do self-identify quickly. Not as in 'provide their names', but 'demonstrate the behavior'. People like him, and the 4chan crowd, who are here to cause trouble and actively do harm to others because they believe it is right and just that they do harm to others should not be coddled until they've gone through with a wrecking ball for several days and done enough damage to tell them to go. Yet, this is what repeatedly happens.

This is one area in which we could do with much more 'draconian' action, because the damage they leave behind is done and they have still achieved their goal of doing harm by being here. Then they come back, say two or three things that don't involve genocide or racism, and suddenly it's sunshine and rainbows and thirty-third chances land. Banning them, thus far, has accomplished very little beyond giving them a brief vacation and 'another chance'. It's the same pattern that let Spider ruin things across the gameverse for decades and we seem to know better now about such folk on games; it's not a stretch to say the same logic applies.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@surreality
I mean I was flagging that particular dude's posts like WHOA because he was clearly just off his nut in a way I found more sad than funny. Not like that registers outside the admins, though.

[surreality]

@three-eyed-crow I only flagged his things that appeared outside the Hog Pit, but I flagged them when I saw them as well.

Until the night he was banned, zero feedback.

These folks' behavior is not subtle. It is not easily confused with the kind of petty sniping, catty snark, condescending bullshit, or GIF wars the regulars get into and maybe or maybe don't get worked up about. It's kinda past time for pretending it's hard to tell apart, because it's just not.

[Ganymede]

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

These folks' behavior is not subtle. It is not easily confused with the kind of petty sniping, catty snark, condescending bullshit, or GIF wars the regulars get into and maybe or maybe don't get worked up about. It's kinda past time for pretending it's hard to tell apart, because it's just not.

I agree.

So, we're all here good with my taking the mantle of permanent despot, right?

[surreality]

@ganymede If it means 'no longer giving banned people who only come here to cause problems endless third, fourth, and thirteenth chances to do more damage', I sure as hell am.

A second chance here or there is one thing, because sometimes it takes 'hitting it with a wrench' to get things running right. It tends to be obvious when this occurs, too -- the person with the sexy intro pose in the peeves thread being a great example of 'screwed up, owned it, trying to do better', for instance. That's a second chance going right.

But these folks are not on chance #2 -- #2 has come and gone many times over in several cases. Their pattern repeats over and over and over. It's time to not give them more opportunities to do as much damage to people as possible, which is what they're here to do every time they appear, no matter what casual ramblings they engage in as a smokescreen. (Obvious and content-free smokescreens are obvious content-free smokescreens.)

[Auspice]

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

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

These folks' behavior is not subtle. It is not easily confused with the kind of petty sniping, catty snark, condescending bullshit, or GIF wars the regulars get into and maybe or maybe don't get worked up about. It's kinda past time for pretending it's hard to tell apart, because it's just not.

I agree.

So, we're all here good with my taking the mantle of permanent despot, right?

I thought we'd pass the crown around.

[surreality]

@auspice I am down with whoever does it -- provided somebody does it. The 'well we know it's Rick Sanchez again but he hasn't crossed any major lines yet THIS TIME' excuse is worn the heck out. He was calling me a cunt and that wasn't enough of a line cross for his ass to be shown the door, despite that supposedly being verboten across the board for being sexist bullshit. (As in, the rules of the road for even the Pit ban this.)

[Lithium]

If you are going to moderate, make a list of rules. Make the rules clear lines that everyone can understand. Then enforce them. Harshly.

There is a very real schism in the way certain people say something and can get away with it, and then someone else says the /same thing/ and they do not get away with it.

The rules need to be applied equally.

They need to come down on everyone equally.

Otherwise... it's the same old meaningless circle jerk where some people can get away with saying anything, and other people cannot say anything without being attacked and railed on.

If you half-ass this moderation thing (Which is what it seems like right now honestly) it's not going to make /anyone/ happy.

On the other topic of the hog pit, if you remove the hog pit you're going to have an even tougher time to moderate things because there won't be anywhere that people can just... vent.

Venting is how some people move through stuff and move on. Without that outlet it's just going to make the explosions when they happen elsewhere be all the more messy.

It /would/ be nice if everyone could just get along and sing campfire songs and be completely nice to each other but at this point opinions are so ingrained in some cases that even perfectly reasonable statements get someone's back up and there is a pissing contest or a cat fight or a dog pile.

In a lot of ways, this Forum is best equated to the power of the Mob Mentality. In a Mob, people have anonymity, we have that same anonymity.

Everyone knows what Anonymity does by this point really, it removes filters and people behave without restraint.

[surreality]

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

Venting is how some people move through stuff and move on. Without that outlet it's just going to make the explosions when they happen elsewhere be all the more messy.

I agree with this very much.

I also have some concern that we've seen recent instances of a newcomer or someone less 'known' venting without even naming names, and then getting attacked from all sides for daring to vent in vent-space, even when they're venting in a way that isn't insulting or cruel in any way to the person they are venting about.

That is definitely something that has a chilling effect on anything remotely resembling open dialogue, and it is very not cool. I don't think there's much that can be done about it, but I think (the collective) we should be more willing to speak up about this behavior when it happens. Not the mods, but we as a forum community should try to be aware of this and speak up.

[Lithium]

@surreality I don't disagree, it happens all the fucking time.

Happens to me all the time too.

However, by posting /anything/ you are inviting discourse on the subject. To not expect people to reply is somewhat silly.

[surreality]

@lithium It's not so much a not reply, it's the 'how dare you vent about something!' that is something I think people need to maybe take a step back and get some perspective about. It's vent space... people are gonna vent.

That particular objection seems designed for nothing more than to bully, silence, and intimidate, and that isn't something I think is healthy.

[Derp]

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

I agree.
So, we're all here good with my taking the mantle of permanent despot, right?

I know you're trying to be cute or whatever, but this is a misuse of logical extremes, which is generally disallowed in reductio ad absurdum as being fallacious.

It's also not particularly helpful, when people are trying to make a genuine appeal for practical and reasonable change, for one of the admins in question to treat the topic so flippantly.

[faraday]

@three-eyed-crow said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

I mean I was flagging that particular dude's posts like WHOA because he was clearly just off his nut in a way I found more sad than funny. Not like that registers outside the admins, though.

I flagged them at least once myself, but y'know ... when the guy who did something horrible is not only not banned but the horrible post you're complaining about is still there ... it sends a message. It sends a message to the people complaining that their complaint doesn't matter so why bother. And it sends a message to others reading the boards that such behavior is okay.

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

So, we're all here good with my taking the mantle of permanent despot, right?

Aren't you guys already permanent despots?

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

Venting is how some people move through stuff and move on. Without that outlet it's just going to make the explosions when they happen elsewhere be all the more messy.

Everybody vents. It's good for us up to a point. Venting in public is generally not considered a healthy behavior, though. And repeated venting in a space turns it into a very negative space. I think it's naive to think that you can have a negative space right next to a 'constructive' space and not have some of that negativity bleed over.

But the mods have repeatedly and firmly affirmed their commitment to the Hog Pit so anybody talking about its merits are really only engaging in philosophical debate.

[surreality]

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

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

I agree.
So, we're all here good with my taking the mantle of permanent despot, right?

I know you're trying to be cute or whatever, but this is a misuse of logical extremes, which is generally disallowed in reductio ad absurdum as being fallacious.

It's also not particularly helpful, when people are trying to make a genuine appeal for practical and reasonable change, for one of the admins in question to treat the topic so flippantly.

This is why I treated it as something 100% serious.

@Ganymede, if you want a direct example of how differently you are treated than others are here, reflect for a moment on how @Auspice was treated in the previous discussion about administration on the forums when she made a similar remark. People practically demanded her head on a spike, that she be removed from the modcorps, etc.

That difference is noteworthy, and you really should pay it mind. It is not a small matter and you shouldn't treat it as such.

[Arkandel]

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

If you don't want to do the stuff that is clearly in the job title, then don't take the job. I and respect all three of you, but damn, the 'but we do not want to do the things that we are here to do' arguments make my eye twitch.

I don't mean to be facetious but you are making two erroneous assumptions here.

1. What you think has to be done is what we are here to do

and

2. There's a line of qualified people waiting to administrate MSB if we weren't here

I never set out to administrate a forum. I did it because someone had to. @Auspice and @Ganymede didn't volunteer either, I personally asked them to help me.

I am taking threads like this seriously, and I respect the hell out of some folks posting in it, but there is only so much I'm willing to do. Heavy policing of every thread is simply not going to happen.

Do we want toxicity outside of the Hog Pit? Hell no. We're doing what we can about it, but it's not as easy a problem to solve as it might look without causing other, potentially larger issues.

[Apos]

So why not an inverse Hog Pit that's also opt in, but extremely heavily moderated and posts have to be in a respectful and civil way, with courtesy and care to avoid starting arguments?

Call it Theorycrafting for Mu Nerds, or Ostensibly Positive, or The MSB Demilitarized Zone or whatever, and just specifically state no snark, vaguebooking, venting, rudeness, shade thrown on the sly, whatever. Moderate it incredibly heavily, and just delete rather than move anything that even is vaguely annoying or could even in the most remote way be considered insulting.

Like the base tone of the MSB is pretty snarky outside the Hog Pit. That just doesn't work great for keeping threads free of people losing their shit because how dare someone impugn their MU honor or whatever. Yeah I mean the last couple pages have been pretty much, 'So Nemesis and 4chan trolls should be banned faster', and sure yeah why not, but it doesn't really do much for the future. Otherwise it's pretty much setting yourself up for some people to say, 'Hey you guys need to moderate people that upset me outside the Hog Pit, but all my own posts are totally fine since I'm an angelic scholar free from the sins of the world. Btw do this flawlessly and for free.'

[faraday]

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

So why not an inverse Hog Pit that's also opt in, but extremely heavily moderated and posts have to be in a respectful and civil way, with courtesy and care to avoid starting arguments?

I wouldn't be opposed to that, but I think the core of the issue is that @Arkandel in particular (and I'm not sure about @Auspice and @Ganymede) really just don't want to moderate except in the absolute most extreme instances of hate/harassment. And hey - I can respect that. I personally wouldn't want to deal with the headache of moderating this forum either.

But if that's the case, then let's stop pretending this is a moderated forum. We have admins, not mods. Accept the reality that it's WORA 2.0 - sink-or-swim, (almost) no holds barred - and continue to deal with the consequences. Either someone will eventually create an IGU2.0 that is moderated, or we'll all just accept what we got and not have to have dozens of pages arguing about how different "factions" within the board would like it to be.

[Arkandel]

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

So why not an inverse Hog Pit that's also opt in, but extremely heavily moderated and posts have to be in a respectful and civil way, with courtesy and care to avoid starting arguments?

Well, there's no reason why not other than... the rest of the forum outside of the Hog Pit is supposed to kinda be like that! And my worry is that people will read this as permission to be more snarky in the non-reverse non-Hog Pit categories as well.

But again to be honest, I don't want to enter nitpicking territory. As @Ganymede pointed out to me on our super sikrit admin channel yesterday, sometimes the difference between what constitutes a 'personal attack' and what's not is very simple:

"Your opinion is stupid" versus "You are stupid"

So yeah that's an easy one, but what about:

"You are being stupid" or even more veiled insults like "I love how you state the obvious with such a sense of discovery" or "nothing you have to say is of any consequence...to anyone"?

I don't want to police this shit, man. There are a myriad ways people can be cruel to each other without resorting to swear words and I don't intend to sift through them to figure out remark #1 crossed the line but #2 was fine, and then figure out how to be consistent about it, and on top of that try to ensure all three admins are consistent with each other.

So instead what I can (and intend) to do is curtail the worst of it. It's not perfect - as @faraday points out it's still sink-or-swim for some people, either because they have a thinner skin or just because they are targets for whatever reason but that's my threshold for administrating a forum like this. I can go after the people who bust out the fancy Nazi words or who're being creepy, but since the appearance of civility still leaves a lot of leg room to be a shithead to others, it's beyond the scope of administrating MSB.

Like the base tone of the MSB is pretty snarky outside the Hog Pit. That just doesn't work great for keeping threads free of people losing their shit because how dare someone impugn their MU honor or whatever.

That's true. There's definitely way more snark than I'm comfortable with. Not surprisingly when I speak up about it people are like how dare you single me out?? even (or especially) when they were being complete jerks to someone else.

Otherwise it's pretty much setting yourself up for some people to say, 'Hey you guys need to moderate people that upset me outside the Hog Pit, but all my own posts are totally fine since I'm an angelic scholar free from the sins of the world. Btw do this flawlessly and for free.'

And yeah, that's a big part of it as well. I sometimes see staff from games talking to admins in ways they would have banned people ten times over for. It is pretty hypocritical, but I guess it's part of the job.

[Sunny]

The only reason I'm here is because I care about some of you people and the relationships I've built in my ridiculous number of years in the hobby. I read some of the threads out of lingering interest in the topics, but I am working towards getting rid of my emotional investment -- in this board and in the hobby as a whole. I'm tired of the way that I've been treated by both the mods and some key vocal posters. I'm not wanted here and I'm well aware of this fact (which should make it easier to just walk, but it doesn't). I don't have any suggestions for improvement or fixing things; I stopped believing that was possible a while ago, and even if I did have ideas, I have absolutely no expectation they'd be considered, given the source. So why bother even thinking about it?

My health is improving to the point where I could probably come back to the hobby without losing my tiny little mind again, but I never quite get past the point of thinking about it, because the people I used to want to play with ... well. From the position of having taken my first steps back, I can't figure out why I would want to subject myself to the way that people treat each other on games. I used to be better at not caring about the shit people were saying on discord and here and whatever, but I am old and I am tired and I no longer have the energy to do the things I would need to do to combat the whisper campaigns.

So instead, what time/effort does go towards the remnants of this hobby mostly go towards trying desperately to stop caring at all about it.

ETA: I've long had a habit of caring a lot more for people than they do for me. It's both blessing and curse. Until recent years, I was better about being OK with it. Age or circumstance has made it a lot harder for me to swallow. It is what it is; this tribe is no longer my tribe. Coming to terms with it is rough. For the 'haters' out there, never fear. I cannot imagine it'll be more than a month or two before I wander away much more consistently.

[Auspice]

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

I wouldn't be opposed to that, but I think the core of the issue is that @Arkandel in particular (and I'm not sure about @Auspice and @Ganymede) really just don't want to moderate except in the absolute most extreme instances of hate/harassment. And hey - I can respect that. I personally wouldn't want to deal with the headache of moderating this forum either.

Oh, I would moderate heavily.

I just don't want another 48 hours of 'let's tell Auspice all the ways that she's a terrible human being and should probably die and suffer for it' because I did choose to moderate.

I can moderate. I can moderate and see that the rules laid out are followed thoroughly.

But the rules would be applied evenly and I think that's what a lot of people are afraid of: being 'old guard' or a popular name or a game runner isn't going to get you a pass. I would not care if you're brand new or an institution, but even my ability to get up, close the site, walk away, and remind myself that I don't know most of you from Adam wears thin when I realize that you're putting dedicated time and effort into detailing the ways you want to see me suffer.

(And now I set my personal bet with myself for someone like bored to start that exact behavior in this thread.)

Would it be exactly-perfect-no-mistakes moderation? No. None of us are perfect. No one is. And if you expect perfection out of other people without being perfect yourself, you're not someone I personally want to be engaging with. But if our aim is to craft an uplifting space in which to engage in, I think the majority of people would prefer the occasional mistake than seeing more garbage through than not.