Page 6 of 6

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 11:34am
by J
Bounty wrote:For all this talk about a "debating culture" and "high standards of debating", I'm struggling to remember the last time I saw an actual debate on this board.
Hang out in N&P more often?
I've been involved in several debates there on financial & economic issues.

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 12:26pm
by Darth Wong
Simplicius wrote:How much of the knee-jerking isn't effectively a me-too or a one-liner?
That's sort of what I'm getting at. The rules are in place to deal with this. The problem is that the mods, I think, need to change gears from hunting bad users to hunting bad posts. Especially the kind of dipshit post where someone responds to an argument with "epic fail" or some other idiot one-liner that doesn't make the slightest attempt to address what's said. Unfortunately, as I said, that requires a lot more work on the part of the mods. There was a time when I would try to clamp down on that sort of thing myself, but I just don't have the free time any more.

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 12:28pm
by Darth Wong
Bounty wrote:Silly as it sounds, I really think we need to be nicer to people we disagree with. Not by changing the rules or mollycoddling them, but by realising that you won't have good debates without good opponents and you won't have good opponents if the audience is obnoxiously hostile.
The problem is not the hostility. It's the lack of content. If some right-wingnut comes in here and posts a bunch of stupid shit, we should still take the time to deconstruct his stupid shit, even if we're telling him he's an asshole. We should not just say "STFU" and then post a bunch of 4chan pictures of retards.

It's always bugged me when some right-wingnut would post an argument and maybe I and one other person would bother to do a point-by-point rebuttal while others just tossed out one-liners. Especially since right-wingnuts like to focus on the weakest rebuttal rather than the strongest, and the peanut gallery just gives them way too much opportunity to do so. They can even argue (with some justification) that the legitimate rebuttals were lost in the sheer volume of idiot half-assed responses.

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 12:34pm
by Thanas
Well, I try what I can to crack down on bad posts in the History Forum, but it does take a lot of time, so I am not sure the rest of the moderating staff does have that time. I am therefore not sure if the idea is practical without increasing the staff and there already is a pretty large staff in place.

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 01:00pm
by GrandMasterTerwynn
Darth Wong wrote:
Simplicius wrote:How much of the knee-jerking isn't effectively a me-too or a one-liner?
That's sort of what I'm getting at. The rules are in place to deal with this. The problem is that the mods, I think, need to change gears from hunting bad users to hunting bad posts.
Yes. I liked what Surlethe was doing in SLAM for a while and what the Thanas does in History, where they would just split the low-calorie posts off to Testing to die ignominious deaths.
Thanas wrote:Well, I try what I can to crack down on bad posts in the History Forum, but it does take a lot of time, so I am not sure the rest of the moderating staff does have that time. I am therefore not sure if the idea is practical without increasing the staff and there already is a pretty large staff in place.
This is true. I recall that there was a push a while back to add more people to the staff. Which resulted in Surlethe and Simplicus being made mods. But I think the board could pull off a crackdown on bad posts without needing a lot of staff, since an aggressive short-term crackdown plus the odd bad post being offed afterward would have the effect of suppressing bad posts for quite a while afterward.

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 01:09pm
by Darth Wong
Splitting off posts to Testing is just a way of deleting them without admitting that you're deleting them. Maybe we should make a "low-quality post" trash can thread in HoS where these things can be dumped. Or, for more serious thread pollution problems, one could go through and split the low-quality junk out of the thread periodically.

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 01:22pm
by Thanas
Well, the reason I split them to testing is that a) It may provide more comedy fodder b) I don't want to deal with people whining "where did my post go" and c) if somebody complains, the post is still there to criticize it.

C is my main reason.

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 01:33pm
by RedImperator
Thanas wrote:Well, I try what I can to crack down on bad posts in the History Forum, but it does take a lot of time, so I am not sure the rest of the moderating staff does have that time. I am therefore not sure if the idea is practical without increasing the staff and there already is a pretty large staff in place.
Well, I'll say it, then: if the job description of the moderators changes, and the old staff can't do the new job, then we need a new staff.

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 02:14pm
by Surlethe
Darth Wong wrote:Splitting off posts to Testing is just a way of deleting them without admitting that you're deleting them. Maybe we should make a "low-quality post" trash can thread in HoS where these things can be dumped. Or, for more serious thread pollution problems, one could go through and split the low-quality junk out of the thread periodically.
I think that is an excellent idea. When I have time to do more than a five-minute scan in between homework assignments and projects, I'd be more than happy to create and maintain such a thread.

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 02:24pm
by Lagmonster
Surlethe wrote:
Darth Wong wrote:Splitting off posts to Testing is just a way of deleting them without admitting that you're deleting them. Maybe we should make a "low-quality post" trash can thread in HoS where these things can be dumped. Or, for more serious thread pollution problems, one could go through and split the low-quality junk out of the thread periodically.
I think that is an excellent idea. When I have time to do more than a five-minute scan in between homework assignments and projects, I'd be more than happy to create and maintain such a thread.
Question: Can this be expected to deter future poor behaviour? It cleans up threads, but still offers no reason for a poster to give a shit before hitting 'submit'. Perhaps if we could follow up with the warning system internally, or something equivalent, in order to tally a record of the number of times each poster has created work by mindless idiot posting. That would give us something to use for disciplinary actions.

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 02:28pm
by Thanas
That won't work as mini-mods, me included, do not have warning power.

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 02:29pm
by Darth Wong
Having your posts in the low-quality post thread creates a permanent record of worthless contributions. There could be a shaming effect. There would also be a very convenient way to substantiate accusations that a particular member is a spammy good-for-nothing shit, if it comes to that.

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 02:46pm
by fgalkin
A locked "Wall of Shame" thread in the HoS seems like a good idea. We can also have a commentary thread where people mock the posters responsible for the newest additions.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 02:49pm
by RedImperator
fgalkin wrote:A locked "Wall of Shame" thread in the HoS seems like a good idea. We can also have a commentary thread where people mock the posters responsible for the newest additions.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin
Wouldn't that just encourage the same brainless hurf-hurfing which is a big part of the problem to begin with?

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-19 02:51pm
by fgalkin
We would moderate the thread, of course, to prevent it from turning into a spamfest. But, it's not really the Hall of Shame if we're not mocking the people involved, that's the whole point of the forum- public humiliation.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-20 11:51am
by Darth Wong
Frankly, the spammy types are worse than the people with fucked-up opinions. A person with a fucked-up opinion is an opportunity for debate. A spammy person is just worthless noise. If anything, the proposed Spam Trash Can thread would help us identify the people who really do need to be banned, as opposed to "newbies who rub us the wrong way".

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-21 09:33am
by MKSheppard
You know, I wouldn't be adverse to letting Graeme Dice back into the board; as long as he doesn't take every single opportunity possible to attack me. But I sadly get the feeling that he would just keep on behaving like he did before. Which is a damn shame.

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-21 02:58pm
by Ace Pace
This seems to go around the point I raised the last time we had a Board introspection moment. We have rules in place, many of them. What's lacking is will to implement. Not just by mods. Unlike quite a few people here, I don't hold the mods to blame, theres N posts in N&P and they don't have time to finely moderate all of them. A blanket "stop spamming" also doesn't seem to work unless the posts are split and junked, which takes time. It's also forum members responsibility, and there many people, including I, could serve by posting a better example rather than just sitting here and throwing peanuts.

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Posted: 2009-10-21 08:34pm
by loomer
To address the issue of a general lack of debate (it's there in NP, mostly, but even there it's only at moderate levels), we have an entire forum for it.

The problem is that nothing is being organized for it. I understand keeping it restricted - it's a good idea in a few regards. But maybe we need to stick a thread in there for debate ideas and volunteers to offer themselves up, randomly draw a pairing or topic a week, and roll with it. I'm not gonna stick my head in for it - I'm shit at debating, as anyone who's ever taken me on knows in excruciating detail. But it'd certainly help make that 'high debating standards' boast a little more accurate these days.

As for the rest, yeah, open reg with image post restrictions sounds good. I'm actually on a hotmail account and joined during the lockdown - didn't donate, as was required for such email domains at the time, since I had no money. Instead, I emailed one of the mods (or maybe Wong, it's been a long time) to see if it'd be alright anyway, and here I am. I know at least two other people who wanted to join but were broke and only had forbidden email domains, and who didn't put in the effort to contact the staff. Would they have been any good? I don't know for sure, but they might have been but didn't end up getting a chance. We've also fallen off the radar a fair bit these days - gone are the raging haters, despite our past. Our last invasion was a chan, and they invade anything that moves for shits and giggles! So since most of the board's old enemies don't matter, it's not such a risk - and one we probably need to take.