Posts made by Derp

Rough couple of days for celebs we love.

Ron ZImmerman

@Doozer

Where did you find this picture of me?!

@Groth said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

I think there exists a certain irony in that the person responsible for the most bans in the history of the forum and managing to squeeze that into a single day talks about being against ostrazisation on loose grounds.

You may want to verify your facts on this one.

I think comparing exclusion from online communities to physical abuse or the justice system is inherently misguided. Being part of an online community is not a right, it's a privilege...

Yes. It is.

and the primary goal of anyone managing a community is to do what is best for that community.

Which happened. The administrator of the forum at the time made a call that she felt was best for the community, the first being to hire people that could fix a problem that nobody else wanted to deal with, and then a second to remove an objectively small number of individuals in light of repeated disruptive behaviors.

Waiting beyond all reasonable doubt to verify that someone is a bad actor often leads to that bad actor having plenty of time to poison your community, just like a gardener can't afford to wait until the blooms wilt to do something about the weeds, so does a the manager of a community have to be pro-active. They need to encourage the behaviors they want to see...

Which also happened. We laid out the behaviors that we want to see and encourage those behaviors by removing the people that refuse to abide by the rules. My standard isn't beyond a reasonable doubt. It's preponderance of the evidence. I'll take action if it seems more likely than not that the accusation in question is valid.

But both of them still require some sort of evidence.

and they need to root out what looks to be a weed even at the risk of it sometimes not being one.

Nope.

This is no great injustice, there's countless of other online spaces out there for anyone to join or even create their own ones.

Indeed.

@Arkandel

The occasional personal attack isn't really what I'm talking about here. The sustained campaigns of character assissination that those personal attacks allowed are.

Show me yours. I can show you mine.

@Arkandel said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

Of course there are different points of view and philosophies. I don't think they are nearly as incompatible as you make them out to be - otherwise MSB would have imploded years ago.

I suppose that I'll firmly disagree with you on this as well, then. Because plenty of us had noticed that there was a growing incompatibility on this forum, and that one group was routinely shouted down for not agreeing with the more vocal group. Several people in this thread alone have mentioned it.

That isn't a difference of opinion. That is, as someone on the other board put it, a fundamentally incompatible philosophy about what these games are about, how they should be run, and who should have a voice in them. Debating the standards of exclusion isn't just academic. The people in these circles hold grudges for literal decades filled with harassment for slights both real and imagined, and usually on nothing more than the social currency of which-group-dislikes-who.

I don't expect you to see it, because of where you're situated in the community and the ideals that you hold to when it comes to administration, but it should be telling that every administration after yours reined in some of those policies to offset some of those volatile excesses. Until you've been on the receiving end of the results of those policies, you can't really claim enough experience with them to call them compatible. It's easy to say that "they aren't that incompatible." You're not the one constantly being attacked and browbeaten for refusing to get on board with the normalization of ostracization based on nothing more than an accusation.

@TNP

You mean things like saying "these people engaged in problematic behaviors, got banned, and then went and did this other thing?" Because that's repeatedly the context that they keep coming up in. And that's a fine context to bring them up in, even under the current rules, because again, we have receipts of that behavior.

@TNP

"These people went and made their own forum" is not a personal attack.

And also, by the standards of the users in question, yeah, apparently it is.

@Arkandel said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

This forum's sole purpose was to bring the community together.

This point has been made many times, here and on the new board, and there's always an underlying thread that people gloss over:

we are not a community.

Or, more precisely, not one community. There are several different communities, philosophies, and ideologies lumped in that 'community', and frankly, some of them are incompatible in rather volatile ways. Which is why it's nice that there are two boards. People have choices. People can choose which set of rules/administrators/posters they want to interact with.

Keeping people on one forum was never going to work. People were already being driven off before the bannings. The bannings just reversed the polarity, much to the shock of a lot of people who didn't see themselves as being openly shitty a good lot of the time.

@Tez said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

I would like to hear how this is not in fact a mod making a broad personal attack on those unable to answer it.

You've said this multiple times, and it keeps coming up in the other thread.

Let me answer, clearly.

Those people are no longer current users of this forum, and they can't "defend themselves" due to clear consequences from their own actions after warnings.

@Arkandel

Dude, come on.

https://brandmuday.mythicus.net/topic/44/bannings/1399

That's pretty blatant. Let's not pretend that some of the BMD users have no axe to grind. They're grinding it pretty openly, and that thread in particular is just the launching pad for them coming over here to stir shit up.

You don't get a black mark for being a member of both forums, but I'm telling people this now: if you're coming here just to shitpost and troll, you're not engaging in good faith, which is a violation of the Code of Conduct, and I'm pretty done with it.

ETA: The general 'you' naturally, not you specifically.

@GreenFlashlight

I disagree.

@GreenFlashlight said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

I will never change your mind, and cannot ever affect your ability to implement whatever policy you want, so I'm not sure why you bother arguing with me at all.

Because I disagree.

I think the better question at this point is, if you think that we're all tyrannical victim-blaming authoritarian misogynists? Why are you still here?

What do you think you're accomplishing? What's the end goal, here? I don't understand. You're already said that you don't think you're going to change my mind or any of the policies implemented and you have an entire other forum full of like-minded people to support you, so why this? Why here? What's the point?

@GreenFlashlight said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

Beginning from the assumption that a victim's story must be litigated is indistinguishable from beginning from the assumption that victims are liars until proven innocent.

And yet it's strange how almost every society in the world has structured its systems of justice around the premise that an accused is innocent until proven guilty, which requires, you know -- proof.

@GreenFlashlight said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

We are only disagreeing about who are the default bad actors: the reporters, or the reported.

That's not at all what we're disagreeing about. Nobody is saying that those who report bad behavior are by default bad actors. The debate is where the standards of proof lie for those accusations, and at what point it is appropriate to take action based on that.

@Warma-Sheen

That's a fair take. But I think that I provided a bit of guidance on what we'd like to see from that kind of exchange moving forward. You can call out a behavior, but it'd be nice if there was more of a point to it than simply trying to shame a person for things in the past.

The call-out at large is because we're quickly sliding to/over the line of where 'acceptable' is, and I told people that we'd warn them when they were crossing/getting ready to cross that line, since people said it was unclear where it was.

And also because we just had to do yet another ban of a person that doesn't seem to give a fuck where that line is, despite repeated warnings to stop the behaviors in question.

@TNP

I disagree that bringing up something from years ago that's already been addressed on multiple occasions constitutes 'hypocrisy' just because it differs from what they say now. People are allowed to change their minds.

But even if that were the case, there are constructive ways of doing that that actually move the conversation forward in some way that doesn't just involve hurling insults.

Ok but now for real Tony Dow.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/tony-dow-big-brother-wally-on-leave-it-to-beaver-dies/ar-AA102vPG?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=964b9f05ff84472098bc1c761a9a8e37

@Tirit said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

How can we appeal to a younger generation to bring them into our love for MUs?

This question has been asked about a billion different ways, and really it has a fundamental conflict in it:

A MU is a very specific type of text-based game that requires typing out poses, presumably in a specific order, or at the very least operating a command line interface in order to play most games. There might be some graphical support with newer bases like Ares and Evennia, but at the very heart of the thing -- it's still just a writing game. It's text based roleplay or MUD dungeons. If you get away from that, then you start to distance yourself from the fundamental qualities of a MU.

Which means you aren't bringing a younger generation to MU, you're moving an older generation toward something that might appeal more to a younger generation, but probably not, because they've got Dark Souls or whatever.

@Seraphim73 said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

If there's a place where you can't shame actual crypto-fascists for being crypto-fascists, I don't want to be a member of that community.

You can here, so long as you provide some kind of evidence for the accusation and aren't just engaging in the current generation's equivalent of a Commie Hunt.

And your continued use of "some of these personalities" and "they" is complete bullshit.

I disagree, personally, but I want to point out that this is an acceptable statement for reviews and debates, because it's about a behavior or an idea. Not about a person.

you were one of those most vitriolic members of the Hog Pit, you just couched things in terms you thought were nice (sometimes). @Kestrel previously called you out with receipts for some of the many times you've done this. You were/are part of the problem, and you were/are part of normalizing it.

This is less acceptable. What is the point of this? You aren't trying to say here, "some of the things you did contributed to the problems that we're currently facing, and you should consider how you're going to handle that going forward." This is just meant to browbeat and shame a person based on personal dislike for no other reason than to vent your spleen in an argument. And frankly, you're intelligent enough to already know this. I know you are, I've seen it firsthand when we've talked.

Don't do this. You're better than that.

For everyone, at large: We really, truly aren't fucking around when we tell people to lay off the personal attacks. STOP IT. Debate ideas all you want to. You can even call out behaviors that you find problematic with evidence, but just trying to browbeat someone to win some kind of internet points is not gonna fly.

and now you're trying to shove that all on people who have been split (some by their own choice, some not) from this community and are in no position to correct your gaslighting.

Alright. I want to make a few things clear here, since this keeps coming up.

1. The people who aren't here are all not here of their own choice. They were explicitly warned multiple times to stop engaging in the behavior that they were engaging in, and then continued to do so even after they were made aware of what the consequences would be, so can we please stop repeating this line like it's somehow going to become truer based on volume of appearances? It's not. They all knew precisely what they were doing, and there is documented evidence in visible parts of the thread for this already. They weren't innocent bystanders. They made a choice, each and every one of them, and while I might not agree with the overall outcome in all cases, pretending that they were somehow swept up in a flood of bannings like some kind of tidal wave they had no way to get clear of is about as revisionist as you can get when there is actual, verifiable evidence to the contrary.

2. There were some mentions made awhile back that some of the bannings were due to inappropriate PMs. To be clear, there was one due to DMs, Farfalla, as was announced on the forum at the time, and one banning based on reported predatory behavior. Those were not reconsidered at all, and anything attributed to those should not be lumped in with the rest of the bans.The rest of them were about continuing to engage in a behavior they were repeatedly told to stop engaging in. I want to get that out there, for the record.

ETA: I am mistaken, we did in fact reverse Farfalla. My brain is an imperfect meat sponge.

@Seraphim73 said in What Would it Take to Repair the Community?:

As for needing popular friends to speak up, I'm certainly not anyone's idea of a popular figurehead among any group here, but right there in my example, folks defended me.

...really? I mean, you only ran what, two? Three? Wildly popular games, and staffed a few others, and happen to be probably the most FS3-savvy combat coder in the hobby right now.

I think you underestimate how much support that can bring with it.