Best posts made by Arkandel

@Ghost said in The Great PC Death Dilemma:

Really, if MUSHers wanted to play ACTUAL World of Darkness or Dungeons and Dragons, they'd be doing just that. Where it always got difficult with me is that I'd join a World of Darkness MUSH expecting to play the WoD TTRPG with lots of prose and writing

Sometimes what system the MU* people join isn't what they're necessarily looking for. It's often simply where their friends are playing - or where people are playing.

For example I know folks who're not into either fantasy or Lords and Ladies, but they've been playing on Arx for a while. It happens to be where their social circle hangs out.

@coin said in Dreamwalk MUSH:

3. it does open the door to horrible people all swarming the game so they can just counter-vote and make sure their horrible buddies aren't banned.

You misspelled "the same guy's 10 puppet logins". Which with everyone using a single anonymous name is going to lead to one hell of a situation.

@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.

I'm sure those are the kind who work in sales or marketing - or, worse, lawyers. They're not people. Don't mistake them for such.

@Chime said:

@Melpomene But I liiiiike perl and regexes and things!

Sometimes you have a problem. You figure you'll use a regex to fix it. Now you have two problems.

(says someone who uses regexes every day. )

@demiurge It's not going to be useful to be doom-and-gloom in comments. You seem to have a handle on things, so I hope I'm wrong, and that it works out well!

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

1. Reporting tools can (and are often) used as a form of griefing

Oh I know. Some of the people we banned have used them extensively. Also when there are... let's say strong disagreements we sometimes see multiple reports at the same time about the same thread.

2. Lots of people don't actually hit 'report' when perhaps they should

That's also true. It's important to explain why a post is reported, since not all reports are actually against forum policy. For instance we've had reports in the past about too many Arx posts in a more generic thread, but being slightly off-topic isn't actionable.

Taking those things into consideration for the creation of both policies and in how they are enforced would probably go a long way towards resolving the types of things that have given me the impression of unfair/uneven moderation.

Fair enough.

You absolutely cannot change how I feel about this, no. You CAN help keep other people from feeling this way going forward, though.

I would like that.

Who cares who downvotes or upvotes? Arguments are more important than clicks, and those are visible.

@cobaltasaurus http://musoapbox.net/topic/2239/resetting-your-1-god-admin-password

Click!

@lemon-fox That sounds more like a CYA thing to me. I mean... do we need a banner to remind ourselves to behave? And if we're not planning to, is a banner going to change anything?

... They are making @Cirno admin. I knew it.

@Derp Yeah, it's silly to judge any SW game based on what Luke freakin' Skywalker's stats are. Obviously the RPG can't feature a playable character (let alone a bunch of them in the same party) with that kind of progression path.

@ganymede I've been the Storyteller for Mage many times and what I'm actually concerned about isn't so much how long people take in scenes to figure out what to do but what they do off stage.

Namely the tough part is Mage-proofing the plot so that it survives casual scrutiny by players throwing spells at it to see if they can resolve it in their downtime.

For example whodunnit questions can be trivialized by someone with enough Time and Space if you're not careful, and the worst case scenario for me would be to make that resolution a key part of my plot, then go into panic mode when that one character solved in one +job what I was planning to be a big reveal two scenes down the line.

@thatguythere We don't need to (and we won't) be perfect, but we can try. Flagging and reporting posts could work, too.

Consider it an experiment - what do we have to lose by giving it a shot?

@Wolfs Cirno came close, but mostly because some of his inline images were borderline NSFW.

(And as @Glitch pointed out actually clicking on linked ones was reserved for the truly reckless)

@Misadventure said:

Make it account to you when you enter a room where it is enabled, or when it is enabled, and make sure it can be turned off.

It would probably need a clear command, so you could clear your scene before logging out, and it wouldn't be a terrible idea to have it routinely locked to players who are in the log. Only a big public scene would start with /public going.

To avoid TS-related mishaps I'd say definitely clear the log as soon as a room is vacant, time it out if an hour has passed since the last pose, etc etc.

This has to be automated as well as manual or it would absolutely end up in hilarious threads right here on MSB.

@scorn said in Reno is closing! ....Or is it?:

But this time, we can't ignore the wind. We've run out of sharp and pointy things to throw at it. Our voices are hoarse from all those "Fuck you, wind!"s. Reno's contract with Kydance is up, the first of the year.

What are you planning to do with the MUSH's new incarnation that you couldn't do with the previous one?

@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.

The answer is always Rick.

Always.