Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.

[Derp]

@krmbm

Except it isn't. It's the summation of what @bored and @thatguythere have been saying so far. We have been asking for at least slightly more moderation outside of the pit to maintain civil discourse, and just like every other time the mods have asked for feedback, we are seeing the loyal and vocal minority think pf a thousand reasons why enforcing basic civility outside of the Pit is a no good very bad terrible idea that will cause them to walk off. And I'm calling it what it is, at this point. It's basically just a less interesting filibuster in the name of there being no consequences for keeping every thread a free for all until they all get dragged into the Pit, and some of us are tired of being held ideologically hostage to it in the name of hearing all sides again until any momentum on this fades into the ether.

The Pit was created to keep that kind of thing contained, and we are asking for that to be enforced. If that means that people who can't keep it there lose interest in participating, so what?

[krmbm]

That's not what you wrote before. You belittled @ThatGuyThere by putting words into his mouth.

Almost as if different people have different opinions about what constitutes civil discourse. Interesting conundrum.

[Derp]

@krmbm

We asked for moderation to enforce some of the ideological reasons for the creation of the Pit in the first place. Arkandel said we could try it. People objected. Arkandel asked what harm there could be in at least trying it on an experimental basis, and @thatguythere said it would cost his participation.

Where is that an inaccurate summation of what is being said right now?

That said, I'm really also not super interested in being baited into yet another debate about whether enforcing the freaking spirit of the rules as they already exist (evidence: the creation of the Hog Pit) is a good idea or not. Because that's what we've been doing here so far.

We're adults. We all know full well what constitutes civil discourse, and we know how to behave in public among a group of peers. We can have different ideas, sure, and maybe sometimes some lines will be crossed. We can point that out. We can provide warnings. We can do a lot of things. Nobody is likely to ever get run out on a rail for it.

But of people don't want to do that, then what are we even doing here? This just becomes another empty discussion where the mods ask for feedback and a vocal few who want the whole board to be basically WORA block any progress, and at some point, someone has to call that out for what it is. And that's apparently me, today.

I'm not interested in having any progress we have made on getting more and better moderation get bogged down in yet another debate about definitions. Because, again, we are adults, and we tend to know what shit will fly and what won't.

If people either don't, or can't figure it out, then there is still a Hog Pit for that.

[Insomnia]

@auspice Belatedly, and may not be an issue with the new area; and probably not easily doable with this forum because it seems pretty lacking in easy code things, but what about for ads locking them to a group. The game owner would have to say MSBPoster 1, and MSBPoster2, are staff, could you add them to our group, and then if someone leaves staff the Game owner would have to contact you guys to have them removed from the group for official threads.

But you could also still allow random people to post because they just found this really cool game and want people to know about it and lock it up. If a game then wants an official ad made they could ask for a group. I mean if you are proud of your game and staffing, why not have a badge by their name?

Not sure if groups can work this way or not, but they seem under-used.

[surreality]

@insomnia I really like that idea, and it would be really cool if that could be implemented. I dunno how much work would be involved, but having 'is staff on' tags by posters names with the game name would be seriously fantastic for a variety of reasons in the same way we have things like 'pitcrew' or 'reader'/etc.

I'm not sure why all of them don't necessarily show (they don't for me, anyway)... I kinda wish they did.

[Derp]

@surreality

A general 'Gamerunner' or 'Gamestaff' tag would likely be less of a pain in the ass to administrate. But I don't know how those group tags work with NodeBB permissions.

It would require less groups get made. And I think NBB only shows one of your many, anyway, so it probably would be less useful. Of it showed them all, then people like Thenomain or Cobalt suddenly become tag confetti if every game has a different tag.

[Auspice]

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

@auspice Belatedly, and may not be an issue with the new area; and probably not easily doable with this forum because it seems pretty lacking in easy code things, but what about for ads locking them to a group. The game owner would have to say MSBPoster 1, and MSBPoster2, are staff, could you add them to our group, and then if someone leaves staff the Game owner would have to contact you guys to have them removed from the group for official threads.

But you could also still allow random people to post because they just found this really cool game and want people to know about it and lock it up. If a game then wants an official ad made they could ask for a group. I mean if you are proud of your game and staffing, why not have a badge by their name?

Not sure if groups can work this way or not, but they seem under-used.

It's an interesting idea, but...

still adds to the whole 'pile of work for the moderators.'

I also def. wouldn't make badges on a per-game basis. That definitely adds a lot more work.

Now, I will consider, as I look at new forum software, the ability for someone to lock their own thread and add other poster permissions. That might help.

If I could lock a thread and add, say, Derp as an approved poster, that would help a lot.

But right now, I really want to be able to trust the forum at large to behave and keep to posting in approved areas without having to use other tools that require a lot of extra work on the mod's part. We're all adults. We should be able to go 'Oh, AnotherMUX put up an ad thread? I wanna talk about it. I should go see if there's a thread in Constructive.'

[Sunny]

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

But right now, I really want to be able to trust the forum at large to behave and keep to posting in approved areas without having to use other tools that require a lot of extra work on the mod's part. We're all adults. We should be able to go 'Oh, AnotherMUX put up an ad thread? I wanna talk about it. I should go see if there's a thread in Constructive.'

I agree. You should be able to set the rules down and have people follow them, without needing code enforcement. I imagine there might be a month or three of people forgetting and posts being deleted before people 'get' it. I think making it more complex mostly means more work for the admins/more potential problems/headache as people trying to follow the rules are interfered with by code, and so on. There's a legitimate reason to leave threads unlocked (staff changeover is the big one) but telling people to not post unless (rules, whatever they end up being). People can make their own threads. They will, if that's the requirement. A tiny amount of work on our part to outweigh a million instances of tiny amounts of work adding together into a mountain for the admin.

I really like the direction of things here. The new forum category is aces, and the ideas being generated here are great things. I'd change my vote if it would let me!

[Ashen-Shugar]

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

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

@auspice Belatedly, and may not be an issue with the new area; and probably not easily doable with this forum because it seems pretty lacking in easy code things, but what about for ads locking them to a group. The game owner would have to say MSBPoster 1, and MSBPoster2, are staff, could you add them to our group, and then if someone leaves staff the Game owner would have to contact you guys to have them removed from the group for official threads.

But you could also still allow random people to post because they just found this really cool game and want people to know about it and lock it up. If a game then wants an official ad made they could ask for a group. I mean if you are proud of your game and staffing, why not have a badge by their name?

Not sure if groups can work this way or not, but they seem under-used.

It's an interesting idea, but...

still adds to the whole 'pile of work for the moderators.'

I also def. wouldn't make badges on a per-game basis. That definitely adds a lot more work.

Now, I will consider, as I look at new forum software, the ability for someone to lock their own thread and add other poster permissions. That might help.

If I could lock a thread and add, say, Derp as an approved poster, that would help a lot.

But right now, I really want to be able to trust the forum at large to behave and keep to posting in approved areas without having to use other tools that require a lot of extra work on the mod's part. We're all adults. We should be able to go 'Oh, AnotherMUX put up an ad thread? I wanna talk about it. I should go see if there's a thread in Constructive.'

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?

This should allow sufficient time to 'cool down' from personal attacks against them on such instances, or allow someone to think on responses for technical or deep-thinking posts instead of knee-jerk responses.

We can't make people pull back how they feel or how they think, but it's relatively easy to enforce someone take the time to do so.

I wouldn't mind waiting an hour for a next post if it means overall the forum becomes more positive.

The hardest thing to deal with on the internet is realizing where people are coming from. This doesn't just mean mentally or emotionally, but physically. How someone grew up in India is absolutely different how someone grew up in Israel, or Australia, or what have you.

We forget about this. We refer to someone and subconsciously we fall into a falsity that this is just like someone next door and will automatically refer to how I feel, think, and believe because, hey, how can they not?

So we make comments based on that, and low and behold, someone somewhere gets insulted as what you didn't even mean as a personal attack suddenly is one. And who knows, deep down you may or may not have meant it as a personal attack. Fact is, it's irrelevant.

Our posts should be clear in rhetoric and done so if we write something it can be mostly clear what our intention is without falling back on tripe on local jargon or quirks of speech that others will look at and think 'wtf are you talking about?'.

It's a hard medium to discuss on without a face to face, but it's all we have. Let's try to make the most of it?

[Auspice]

@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?

We do have it setup so new accounts have to wait an hour before they can post.

I am not sure about a setting to wait an hour before you can post in the same thread. For two reasons.

a) I'm not sure if the setting exists.
b) I'm not sure I want to nanny people.

I trust you guys, by and far. We're all adults. I know we have the capacity to do these things. Part of why we haven't is that none of us have been held to it. We're going to start being held to it. Both by moderation and by each other. Hold yourselves to it. And call each other out. Not by attacking one another, but by a mere "Hey, that wasn't cool."

Just like you'd (I'd hope) call a friend to task for being an asshole, pull someone here aside. It doesn't have to be out in public, but it can be in PMs or in your private chats / pages. We want to be a more uplifting, positive community? It begins with ourselves. Be better, yourself. Pressure your friends to be better. Start small.

Don't expect everyone around you to be better. Don't expect the mods to put tools upon tools or work themselves (this is a volunteer gig that comes with zero perks) to babysit you to be better. We are all highly intelligent people. We can do this.

I mean, if I Staff on a game, I do a lot of work, but I at least get to play that game and the players will generally thank me in the wake of doing that work. A lot of what I do here is answered with being shit on. It kinda blows. Of course the three of us aren't looking to stack even more busy work on. Will we mod? Totally (or I will, at least). Do we want to add tools or processes that add more busy work (like chasing down all of the staff of a game to add tags/groups?), no.

But one thing we can all do is like @Ashen-Shugar says: consider the person on the other side of the screen. Consider they don't come from the same place, means, etc., as you. Or try, at least. Also, sarcasm never translates well. Ever.

[Insomnia]

@auspice It would be work, but I do't think it would be more work than what was being suggested that I replied to, which was locking threads and mods making constructive and hog pit posts, and linking them. It's essentially what you suggested too where you lock the thread and allow the owner to allow other people to post in the thread, because now that I am more awake I remember that groups are all opt-in, aren't they? I mean sure, people could join groups and troll posts, but if they are going to do that, they are going to troll anyway.

Either way you guys would be doing work, but I admit I don't know the back-end of nodb and I don't know how many steps there are to making a group verses setting a thread in one section to allow a specific person allow other people to post.

---

Yeah we're all adults, but some of us have been dicks and had to be banned, and people want more moderation. But I'm also a firm believer of "You can't please everyone all the time." So at some point you just need to say "This is the way it is." and have to do some amount of work when people step out of line in regards to the rules.

Because yeah, we're all adults, but we're all adults on the internet. G.I.F.T. afterall. Absolutes suck, but no one can claim that they have never done it, it happens. I've had people who have been attacked who have made comments to me that I had to look because I had thought rightly that I was still in the constructive forum.

As a result while I don't have any threads on ignore, I usually stick to off topic, read posts that look interesting to me when knew ones pop up, and middles click ones that look interesting to me to read in a new tab, and mark everything else as read and mainly lurk around here is because of the community as a whole, not the moderation of it. And not just the community but culture in general. Everyone is entitled, offended, and jaded now. The internet is just a big free-for-all, and we're all adults really feels different today than what it used to mean when a lot of us got into this hobby in the first place.

[skew]

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

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

Ex: Replies to advertisements should be things like "Sorry, how do I connect?" "Please link website" "I just started playing here, if anyone else wants to join" and other positive, helpful responses.

So this was suggested once before and the utter lashback ("How dare we not be able to say negative things about a game!") was enormous.

I'm going to be undiplomatic here. I know I'm speaking in a tone that isn't exactly nice, but I'm going to anyways.

The people who are upset they cannot talk trash about a game are the reason MSB is not a more useful tool. Many of the people who post the most are the worst for a productive, useful, positive community. I advise you not bow to the pressure of the very loud minority. I am all but positive the majority of us would love to see an advert go up and not have to slog through the "yeah but this other game is better" posts.

Further, no, I don't think it would be a lot of work. There's not a lot of posts. If you need someone to delete the "Macs are better" responses to my "Here's how to use Potato" post, I volunteer. I can totally handle it.

[faraday]

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

And call each other out. Not by attacking one another, but by a mere "Hey, that wasn't cool." Just like you'd (I'd hope) call a friend to task for being an asshole, pull someone here aside. It doesn't have to be out in public, but it can be in PMs or in your private chats / pages. We want to be a more uplifting, positive community? It begins with ourselves. Be better, yourself. Pressure your friends to be better. Start small.

It isn't even remotely like this, though. These people (for the most part) are not my friends - they're strangers on an internet forum. Moreover, they're strangers who by the very nature of the problem we're describing have demonstrated that civility and respect for the rules (and by extension other people on the forum) are beyond them. Someone with no authority telling other strangers on the Internet "that wasn't cool, knock it off" is most likely to be met by "hahaha yeah whatever" at best or "F you" at worst because these people don't care what we think. They may only marginally care what the mods think, but the mods at least have the authority to kick them if they don't listen. If there are flagging/downvote tools like on many forum software systems, I'll use them, but I'm not going to play Lone Ranger moderator. That's just not going to end well.

[Auspice]

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

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

And call each other out. Not by attacking one another, but by a mere "Hey, that wasn't cool." Just like you'd (I'd hope) call a friend to task for being an asshole, pull someone here aside. It doesn't have to be out in public, but it can be in PMs or in your private chats / pages. We want to be a more uplifting, positive community? It begins with ourselves. Be better, yourself. Pressure your friends to be better. Start small.

It isn't even remotely like this, though. These people (for the most part) are not my friends - they're strangers on an internet forum. Moreover, they're strangers who by the very nature of the problem we're describing have demonstrated that civility and respect for the rules (and by extension other people on the forum) are beyond them. Someone with no authority telling other strangers on the Internet "that wasn't cool, knock it off" is most likely to be met by "hahaha yeah whatever" at best or "F you" at worst because these people don't care what we think. They may only marginally care what the mods think, but the mods at least have the authority to kick them if they don't listen. If there are flagging/downvote tools like on many forum software systems, I'll use them, but I'm not going to play Lone Ranger moderator. That's just not going to end well.

Oh, no, I get it. For sure. But a lot of the people on these forums also have friends on the forums.

I'm asking them if they see their friends act out of time to go hey, that probably wasn't cool. Like, I'm not close friends with @Derp, but we chat a lot. I'd say we have good rapport. Decent enough that if they were out of line on something, I'd feel comfortable enough messaging them to say 'That was pretty harsh, saying that. Cool off, yeah?'

[Thenomain]

@auspice

Sometimes I will publicly praise my friends but privately admonish them. Others I will praise and admonish publicly. For me the distinction depends upon our relationship.

For instance one of the things I love about the marraige of @emmahsue and @helloraptor is how they are comfortable enough in their lives that they will say the other has messed up, or is wrong, and it’s never in anger. When they praise each other it’s never looking cliquish or suckuppery. They say these things because they believe it, and think it needs said. Thoughtful and respectful. Who doesn’t want this kind of relationship?

But not everyone is this way, and not all mistakes or wrongdoing is created equal. Not all rightdoing is created equal either, but if there is no harm in the praise then we could use more of it.

[Auspice]

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

@auspice

Sometimes I will publicly praise my friends but privately admonish them. Others I will praise and admonish publicly. For me the distinction depends upon our relationship.

For instance one of the things I love about the marraige of @emmahsue and @helloraptor is how they are comfortable enough in their lives that they will say the other has messed up, or is wrong, and it’s never in anger. When they praise each other it’s never looking cliquish or suckuppery. They say these things because they believe it, and think it needs said. Thoughtful and respectful. Who doesn’t want this kind of relationship?

But not everyone is this way, and not all mistakes or wrongdoing is created equal. Not all rightdoing is created equal either, but if there is no harm in the praise then we could use more of it.

Precisely.

One of my best friends, we call each other out regularly. Sometimes it is couched in teasing. And sometimes it has been a full sit-down-come-to-jesus talk. But our friendship is solid enough that each and every time? We have been able to move right on into our usual chatting and bullshitting right after.

Because that's who we are. We are both the sort of people where we prefer to just move on after an argument. We both know this about each other. And we both know that to us, a friendship is the value of what has come before. That 'this' (the fight) is fleeting. We talked it out. We sorted it out. Neither of us needs to sit and brood in it. It's done. Let's get back to sharing videos, discussing what matters, etc.

We've gone from arguing right back into stupid videos within moments.

But praise is good, too. We should totally give kudos to people. Maybe not always in the open (since, well, we're obvs. gonna praise our buds more often than anyone else; nature of the beast), but sometimes. Make people feel good, yo.

[Arkandel]

@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.

[Derp]

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

I'm not close friends with @Derp

But... sniffle ...but you said we would be best friends forever.

[Auspice]

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

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

I'm not close friends with @Derp

But... sniffle ...but you said we would be best friends forever.

[Sunny]

I have commented emphatically that I was on my way out; given this discussion and the changes I have observed, even though there really isn't a final answer laying around or anything...I am happy with the direction things are going, and I'm going to stick it out. Thanks for the hope that things can (and are going to) get better.