Posts made by Arkandel

@wildbaboons said in RL things I love:

He started off by asking if anyone had been to a tournament before and everyone said no except for one kid that raised his hand and proclaimed, "No, but I've watched the Karate Kid!"

Completely true story. I was watching Cobra Kai a couple of weeks ago and on my way home I was dropping a coworker friend off (he's in his late 20s) at his place so we were chatting about it.

I asked him if he had watched Karate Kid. He said, and I quote, "yeah, that's the one with the black kid."

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

While @Arkandel might not feel that this problem has grown to the proportion of an epidemic, there are those of us who strongly disagree.

Fair enough.

If you're wanting an entire list of the people I think are among those who frequently skirt the line and seemingly suffer little to no actual consequences for it, that's probably material for another thread not in this section of the forum.

Can finger-pointing also not take place in this section though? It's not a matter of cursing at people or anything like that, but I'd rather we look at problems to solve rather than for people to blame.

The former might actually produce solutions, the latter only tends to generate distractions.

Note, also, how the last couple of pages of this thread have managed to somehow mysteriously devolve into a series of insults, though. That's not what I would consider civil.

Oh, people can be very mean without being uncivil. But that's a problem we can tackle as well; being called names and getting carpet F-bombed is just higher on the list for now.

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

Believe it or not, I genuinely dislike people in general, not just here or in gaming but in life.

I believe it, man. It's why I said in general.

Getting sort of kind of promoted at work. Something about work ethic and performance.

I spend half my day on MSB what the hell are my coworkers doing??

@luna

@bobgoblin said in The best I've ever...:

• Policy

I don't think any in particular stands out. It's usually a case of policies being properly enforced than what they are.

• Game System

Arx. There are many systems they introduced I felt worked really well; giving XP bonuses to people who played with newbies giving them an instant introduction to the game, to encouraging players to interact with new people they hadn't before at random every week, to their @clues system, and I liked the gearing ladder which gave something for crafters to do.

• Setting

Eldritch. For all that he's a dickbutt, @Coin did an outstanding job with it. The wiki was well written and the NPCs felt like they had personalities and lives instead of just being names on a list with positions next to them. It was the small touches that did it, like nicknaming local sports teams which came complete with thematic branding.

• Code

Hard to say. Probably The Reach, not because it still stands out any more but because it gave birth to an entire generation of derivatives who reused @Thenomain's code to run all kinds of different MU*. It was a game-changer which birthed a ton of nWoD games to the point they over-saturated the 'market'.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/8lnhhy/body_worn_camera_video_release_of_sterling_brown/

What's pretty crazy about this is that it sounds mild compared to other incidents of racism, but... damn.

Basically Sterling Brown - a black NBA player which is why the issue got as much exposure, plus a body camera video was finally released - went into a store after parking illegally.

He got out and immediately a cop walked over to him presumably because of the way he had parked, but then immediately escalated because he felt Brown was standing too close (when he walked over to Brown), and then when the guy basically said 'okay, so, give me a ticket' he called in backup.

There were like a bunch police cars there pretty soon, and before long they ordered him to take his hands out of his pockets an hour later for no reason. When Brown said 'uh, it's cold guys, it's January' like 5 of them threw him to the ground. It then got worse since although he wasn't fighting (which is obvious from the footage) one of the cops goes 'anyone got a taser?'. And they TASE him.

The police department several weeks later issued an apology and said the cops were disciplined, but not how, or which ones.

What the hell, America.

@magee101 said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:

Thus to me, it looks very bad that three people are individuals and not a TEAM. With 3 people there should be no varying facets shown from the mods, you 3 should be united especially in situations like this or SIMPLY do not comment because as people are pointing out, it is confusing the fuck out of us and making us even more worried.

Perhaps I'm in the wrong here - it wouldn't be the first time - but I don't value conformity very much when it comes to administrating MSB. Consistency yes, absolutely, and each time we had to actually act we made sure we agreed beforehand whether it was to decide on whether someone had stepped over the line, or to introduce a new forum or whatever else.

I just took a look at some stats for this past month, and there have been 4717 posts made in that time. Other than like 5 of the ones Lain's assorted accounts made that got deleted the fraction of the rest we even considered acting on (let alone actually did anything with) is tiny. Miniscule.

Sometimes things get blown way out of proportion and this is one of those cases. We're not trying to resolve an epidemic here but to discuss with our users how to improve. We've been working on keeping toxicity outside of the Hog Pit, and we want to do a better job at it, so instead of conferring internally to make a decision solely on our end we brought it to you guys to see what you thought.

In the process of doing so we - as members of this community - also presented our individual thoughts. Which differ, since we're not a hive mind. I don't view this as a problem, especially since moderating a forum is different than staffing a MU* which requires the regular (everyday, in fact) exercise of authority, having a united front, clear separation between what one does as staff and what they do as a player, etc.

So I disagree with you here. I do think though the messaging itself should have been clearer when I started asking for input, which is solely on me. So my bad there.

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

I think a big part of the issue is trying to force the concept of community on people who for the most part only have MUSHing in common and generally dislike each other while MUSHing.

People in general don't dislike each other. I don't believe that.

But specific people come here carrying baggage from the games they are playing? I do believe that.

What I don't want MSB to become - and won't allow while I'm at the helm - is to try and treat this forum as a social arena to settle down differences and chase away undesirables by making life unpleasant for them. You know, the petty high school tactics that get attempted in any game that tolerates them.

Leisure Suit Larry: Wet Dreams Don't Dry - teaser trailer .

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

If you do not have the time or tools to implement things successfully

I trust you can see how this could be construed as offensive.

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

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

That's how it has been done and clearly doesn't work. We've discussed deleting the offending posts and some people are very opposed to it.

But... that's not what Ark said?

I didn't think so, but perhaps I didn't word it right.

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

What we are considering doing instead is placing a warning into the thread itself ("Please stop attacking people here") and if it's not respected then we'll start deleting offending messages. If it keeps happening, well, we'll break out the banhammer to give those posters a time out.

The reason for that phrasing is that I didn't feel comfortable simply barging in and deleting posts without warning. The idea would be to warn first, then act, other than for repeat offenses.

I have the same concern @Sunny mentioned that by leaving the original post and just deleting any follow-ups it basically enables a one-time bully pass to whoever escalates first. Which seems like it would only make things more toxic, not less.

If aggression occurs once - and anyone can be carried away occasionally - I don't think it's such a big issue. Maybe @Thenomain sees an anti-Mac post and just loses his shit, who knows! In that case I'd feel okay stepping in to tell him and whoever he's being rightly trolled by to cut it out then leaving the posts there.

If this behavior continues then we'll go in and delete posts as needed, not just by one party but all of the bickering. Nodebb's UI doesn't get in the way of that.

If however this is someone baiting @Thenomain for the upteenth time then we're past the stage of warning - that's not the point of this system. Repeat offenses will be addressed in private, but at that point we've moved past simply sending a message either in words or otherwise to signal a change in behavior is warranted.

Does that clarify the original post? Note this doesn't mean it's already decided it's the way we'll go, just that it's what was meant at the time.

There are three resources here, and I'd like any raised or newly proposed solution to take all three into account:

1. Our time. On a MUSH as @Auspice pointed out in private a 12-36 hour response time is typically quite acceptable, but here I've literally seen protests because we didn't step in within an hour of someone getting out of line on a Friday evening.

2. Our tools. Sure, we could move everything to a different platform but we looked into the possibilities and none satisfied all of our criteria; some were technologically old and it showed (for example they had no chat, WYSIWYG editors, etc) and others were even more bleeding edge than this one. Just because we can solve one problem it doesn't mean we want to lose valuable features or generate new issues elsewhere on top of losing years worth of data.

3. Our administrative neutrality. MSB isn't worth the space it's running on if it can't provide a safe environment for people to air their thoughts without having to worry about the moderators taking sides.

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

Knowing who will and won't escalate (i.e., me and Coin, respectively) is useful in this hobby.

What's also useful in the hobby though at least in this context is understanding there are other needs than our own. I do appreciate people being able to handle themselves and not being put off by personal or aimed negativity, but that's not a universal experience. There are those who can't do so, and there are also even more of those who won't.

So yes, we could move things around and we have. The problem then then becomes that the onus is exclusively on administration and there's no real consequence for violating the forum rules. General You can just attack people and the worst case scenario is that the post gets shoved under the Hog Pit carpet.

I'd like nothing more than to treat people like adults, but they need to behave like it, too. Since that's wishful thinking we need tangible policies on how to best handle it when, and not if, the opposite happens as well as to discourage it in the future.

I'm certainly open to suggestions - I just don't think moving the posts (which is what we've been doing, sort of, since nodebb doesn't facilitate it as much as we'd want) is a better approach than deleting them which at the very least sends a message.

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

But you cannot expect that I will always agree with Auspice and Arkandel, and I don't.

That's by design. There are people around whose views are very close to mine but I didn't just want more moderator-bots operating within an echoing chamber; I wanted an active triage where we could bounce questions and ideas together.

MSB's administrators should be a microcosm of MSB in general - people coming from within the hobby, not always agreeing with each other, but respecting and occasionally liking each other anyway.

In that light consistency is a problem, I agree. @Sunny is right on that front, there's no denying it. But it's something we can work on, and which I don't think has been that bad so far.

@coin said in Good TV:

I honestly didn't want any Bruce Wayne in Gotham. I wanted Gotham to be, basically, a GCPD series about them dealing with the mob and occasionally a wacky, out-of-sorts criminal that was particularly nasty (like the Ogre, which they handled horribly, but otherwise was a good example).

The way I'd have preferred it would be to keep Bruce as a background character who, to the main cast, is just irrelevant. They shouldn't see what the audience does - that this kid is staring at the impossible odds they are facing, the deep rooted corruption and the need for something else he can't even name yet. He'd just show up in their investigations once in a while in a cameo-like fashion where he doesn't really belong but also not in a way that'd raise too many eyebrows, and then fade away again until a couple of episodes later.

But what I missed was the fact Gotham can't handle itself, that the GCPD just can't do it on their own. That's the whole damn point of Batman after all... they needed a vigilante to get rid of the mob, and once he appeared then the costumed freaks also did, each time escalating the stakes until the police even with Gordon in charge had no chance of playing catch up at all. I didn't get that vibe from the show - Gordon could do it, he was doing it.

None of this means it couldn't still be a good or great show, it'd be up to the execution, but I don't want to spend the time catching up if it didn't get better after mid-season 2 when I stopped watching.

The reason I asked about those two shows is because they seemed (at least while I was watching Gotham, not sure about Krypton which I didn't even start) to abandon the traditional protagonist and focus on the rest of the cast.

But - for me - that wasn't enough. I wanted more of a Year One feel for Bruce even if he started a bit younger, and it just felt weird seeing Gotham more or less handling themselves without Batman; isn't that the whole point, that he was needed? Nevermind the secondary point often made, that in a way he also caused the customed criminals to rise by his very existence? Because none of these things seemed to be true until season 2.

I'm also not sure how much I care about Krypton without Superman in the picture. A comparison I heard was that it was kinda like Game of Thrones in space, but that's a high bar to set, especially on a low budget.

Anyone watching Gotham (past season 2) or Krypton? Any mini reviews you want to share?

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

@arkandel I was already on the train for this approach earlier. I tend to roll my eyes whenever people bring up CENSORSHIP on forums anyways. And especially since this is not even telling people they can't say the things, just that they need to say them in the appropriate place. You're totally gonna have hurt feelings when people lose some big involved screed they wrote, but I think eventually people will learn.

I don't care about hurt feelings when it comes to administrating this forum. It's just that one of MSB's most valuable traits is that you get to come here and speak your mind - which is a luxury on many games where you specifically cannot.

It's just that toxicity is worse.

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

@arkandel

I like the plan in theory, my only concern is that it's going to end up unevenly applied. Consistency has been a problem so far, and it's going to make things yet more toxic if particular people get come down on and others are allowed to skate by with no consequence.

I mean, isn't what we are doing now prone to inconsistency as well? The only difference seems to be that at the moment we get to fence-sit a bit since if things get bad we can just shove the whole thing under the carpet.