Banninations, and the rapidty of.

A failed experiment whereby board users were invited to advise the Senate, and instead attempted to replace the Senate.
User avatar
RedImperator
Roosevelt Republican
Posts: 16465
Joined: 2002-07-11 07:59pm
Location: Delaware
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by RedImperator »

Hotfoot wrote:This forum has never been particularly friendly to new people. Of all the people I know in my personal life who have signed up for this forum, most have signed up solely for the gaming discussions and STGODs that are run here, and that's pretty much it. Most people are put off by the aggressive attitudes and debating standards we live on here, and that's not going to change by relaxing our registration process. Newbies have been, are still, and always BE dog chow here, that's the nature of this board, period.

And yes, it scares people off. They look at this forum of hardcore nerds who argue over a couple of science fiction franchises and call each other "RAGING CUNTHATS!" on a regular basis and say, quite sensibly "Fuck that noise, I have better things to do."

That's just the fiction section. SLAM and N&P is even more vicious at times, because an even higher standard is held there.

And Sarevok, a forum always has more lurkers than posters, that's the nature of the Internet, and it's always been that way. The only way you get around that is by hiding the forums from view until someone makes an account, and even then, all it does is force someone to make an account, it doesn't bring them to post.

Look, folks, we are NOT a friendly forum, and that's not likely to change, period. The phrase "you'll attract more bees with honey than vinegar" has some merit. We treat the uninitiated like shit until they prove themselves, and even once they prove themselves, all it takes is one dustup with the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time and you are gone, period. If anything, that is the forum's primary cause for not drawing more quality posters, not a complicated registration.
OK...so...how is this an argument for keeping registration restricted? Our attrition rate is astronomical (and frankly, I think it needs to be lowered, but that's a discussion for another time), and our sign-up rate is pitiful. So what's the long-term solution? We can't coast on the class of 2002 forever.
Hotfoot wrote:Someone brought up that in the last invasion, kiddy porn was spammed into every forum and they don't want to see that happen again,
There's a foolproof way to avoid that: log off the Internet and never log in again.

Look, what the channers posted was disgusting and awful, and I'd prefer to never see it again either, but nobody died, nobody went blind, nobody turned to stone, and nobody went to jail. Nobody's going to go to jail for accidentally seeing a kiddy porn picture on a web forum. If there's another invasion, between the report button and the mod staff, we have the tools to shut it down in a few hours, maybe less. And there are other measures that could be put in place to prevent that kind of trolling from happening again (such as a 100 post/1 month membership minimum to post images; Starglider can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure I've seen those restrictions on other boards).

The only other alternatives I see are actively recruiting for new members (I have no idea how that would even work), starting a brand new board without the baggage, or letting the forum slowly grind down to nothing. I don't have access to the statistics, but I would be absolutely flabbergasted if the rate of new posts and new topics per day hasn't been in decline since, say, 2006. N&P and Testing are the only forums that feel lively anymore (and before someone comes hurf-hurfing in here about how that's proof Testing is somehow sucking the life out of the rest of the board, most of Testing's threads would get punted immediately to Testing if they were posted anywhere else). We need more people, and 22 a year isn't going to cut it.
Image
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.--Ada Louise Huxtable, "Farewell to Penn Station", New York Times editorial, 30 October 1963
X-Ray Blues
User avatar
Hotfoot
Avatar of Confusion
Posts: 5835
Joined: 2002-10-12 04:38pm
Location: Peace River: Badlands, Terra Nova Winter 1936
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by Hotfoot »

Dark Hellion wrote:I was typing my post when you posted your response and didn't get a warning that a new post had been entered. Sorry it seems like I ignored your post.

The first part of my post was not meant to be directed at you but at Zod's incredulity. Again sorry for the confusion.
Fair enough, shit happens. It's cool.
Ok, here is the part that I don't get. How am I revelling[sic] in the nature of the board? I hate this bullshit and I don't see how you think I like this. I think the board is unnecessarily harsh on those who don't have power or reputation and ignores numerous worthwhile posts because the poster isn't a big name member while people spend inordinate amounts of times and posts refuting people like Kast. Personally, I think Chocula would have been banned if he had acted the way he does about anything other than right-wing politics, and is kept around for comedy, which is exactly the opposite of having equally enforced rules. DataPacRat was banned for far less than Choc has gotten away with, or Kast, or Shep. I think this is a huge problem and why new members can't get in. They see that certain posters get away with things and don't get why they can't.
You were making the same sorts of demands for evidence, the same sorts of foul language, and so on. That's one of the appeals of this board, and the hostility is one of the reasons we scare the shit out of a lot of people who might come and contribute otherwise.
Also, about your sore spot. I don't plan on bringing it up, per say, but realize that this squeamishness of reaction is why such an attack type has become so common. If you have such problems with it, which you admittedly do, perhaps you should recuse yourself from the duty of cleaning it up. It is a very common form of attack exactly because people tend to react like you do. This is why some police departments have special units for dealing with such things, normal people are not good at dealing with it in a professional manner. This is not a sign of weakness but just a sign that you are a relatively normal person. But is also makes you incapable of dealing with a chan attack or the thought of one in a manner which is purely rational.
Most of my moderation duties rely solely on making sure people don't get too wild on this specific forum. In fact, this is the only place I have any power whatsoever on the board. I did not take it with the idea of cleaning up simply disgusting shit, though I have done it. In the future, I'm just going to delete the damn thread entirely if I can, but I what I don't want is for it to happen again. We don't have the luxury, however, of forming a special mod unit for dealing specifically with illegal sex acts on the board. Quite frankly, to take the comparison to reality, we're a small town, not a big city, we don't have the population to justify such overspecialized things. Moreover, even as a user I would find such things abhorrent and wouldn't want to risk opening a thread to find shit like that.

Now, ignoring the subject of the invasion and dealing with the invasion itself, and the previous invasions we've had on the board, there is nothing wrong with tightening security and making it more of a pain for random assholes to sign up. In fact, I thought it was a good enough idea to pay Mike a membership fee to come in the door. Actually, I think that's still a pretty good idea, and it's not like other sites haven't done that trick before either. At the end of the day, it's not the reason we have such anemic growth.
But to address your point made above, you say that the New members are always dog chow, that is the nature of the board. What I am saying is that this idea needs to change. We need to stop treating members differently depending upon some hidden and archaic hierarchy. If this board is to represent real meritocracy, which would be a laudable goal, then people would have to start treating each other based on merit. Now, suggestions of this in the past have always gotten a similar response, which is that the board isn't supposed to be a meritocracy, but the question is why? Why shouldn't the board attempt to change? Is there some great fear from those in the seats of power that if such a change occurs they would not have the free reign they once sported? Or is there an actual logical reason, because I may have missed it but it never seems to actually come to one.
You know what the problem is? People enjoy the debates where idiots get shredded. It's like a fucking national pastime here. One of the big draws of the original site before the forums was Mike's Hate Mail page. Hell, I remember thinking it was fucking hilarious back when I was in High School. I even remember sending Mike an email once asking about Proton Torpedoes.

That developed over time to some sick fascination with always tearing someone to shit. Now, personally, I do honestly try to give people chances. I do. It's just that when I'm presented with something I think is utterly beyond hope and lay into it and I'm met with stupidity, I tend to go all out. Some people are so willing to earn their wings, so to speak, that they'll just tear in at the slightest provocation. People who have been around for a while often have heard something so many times before that they just can't believe that here it comes again. My personal pet peeve? Any versus thread in OSF that deals with Battletech/Mechwarrior or Freespace. Every time I see one I roll my eyes and lay into it because I've seen it so many times before yadda yadda.

And because we're not a miss manners forum, throwing around fuck and shit and motherfucker and cuntface and douchenozzle and all that are time-honored traditions, as long as you have a point along with it. Most of the time, new members are not used to that shit, and a lot of people don't like it, period. So it's a hostile environment, and they lose their shit and just go ape, and then we, with our practice of detachment, find a fatal flaw in their furious flailings and follow it "FTW".

Lurkers, on seeing this, quite intelligently will think, "Well shit, I better not say anything, or I'll be next."

And here's the honest truth, with this or any other board: People who have been around longer are given a lot more latitude in their actions, because they've contributed more to the board than some guy who just signed up a month ago. Even if that contributor is a jackass.
Frankly, a lot of members need to get off their fucking high horses and start acting like they are normal members again, not some elite.
There is truth to these words.

But here's something else to consider: We don't have a net negative of members, we are growing, just not at a huge rate. How does this translate to the forum dying? Just because some forums are not getting the posts they used to doesn't mean we're losing traffic or discussions, just that the focus of the discussions is changing. That's not a bad thing, it's just different. We're not going to magically revive SWvsST, PSW, or PST just by gorging ourselves on new members. In fact, what's likely to happen is those forums will be flooded by locked threads that end in "Don't Necro" or "Use the search function, it exists for a reason".

I mean, really, there's only so much you can say about Star Wars.
Do not meddle in the affairs of insomniacs, for they are cranky and can do things to you while you sleep.
Image
The Realm of Confusion
"Every time you talk about Teal'c, I keep imagining Thor's ass. Thank you very much for that, you fucking fucker." -Marcao
SG-14: Because in some cases, "Recon" means "Blow up a fucking planet or die trying."
SilCore Wiki! Come take a look!
User avatar
Instant Sunrise
Jedi Knight
Posts: 945
Joined: 2005-05-31 02:10am
Location: El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by Instant Sunrise »

General Zod wrote:I don't think you can do that until people stop reinforcing the notion that a certain group of older posters supposedly really are elite.
How about we move the registration date and postcount off of every post and only display it on the profile page?

It won't happen overnight, but it will diminish the perceived importance of those factors.
Hi, I'm Liz.
Image
SoS: NBA | GALE Force
Twitter
Tumblr
User avatar
Tiriol
Jedi Council Member
Posts: 2037
Joined: 2005-09-15 11:31am
Location: Helsinki, Finland

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by Tiriol »

Havok wrote:Triol

<snip>
A minor nitpick which has nothing to do with the rest of your post (I don't necessarily disagree with it per se, but I'll lay down my reasons later on, when I'm not in the middle of essay writing, why I take a little different view): the user name is Tiriol, with two i's. :) It's hard to spot, I grant you that, since there's quite a lot of "straight" letters in the name (i and l and r in its lower case is a pretty straight one, too).
Confiteor Deo omnipotenti; beatae Mariae semper Virgini; beato Michaeli Archangelo; sanctis Apostolis, omnibus sanctis... Tibit Pater, quia peccavi nimis, cogitatione, verbo et opere, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! Kyrie Eleison!

The Imperial Senate (defunct) * Knights Astrum Clades * The Mess
User avatar
General Zod
Never Shuts Up
Posts: 29205
Joined: 2003-11-18 03:08pm
Location: The Clearance Rack
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by General Zod »

Instant Sunrise wrote:
General Zod wrote:I don't think you can do that until people stop reinforcing the notion that a certain group of older posters supposedly really are elite.
How about we move the registration date and postcount off of every post and only display it on the profile page?

It won't happen overnight, but it will diminish the perceived importance of those factors.
I'm not sure about registration dates, but I could see the argument in favor of getting rid of post counts.
"It's you Americans. There's something about nipples you hate. If this were Germany, we'd be romping around naked on the stage here."
User avatar
ray245
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 7954
Joined: 2005-06-10 11:30pm

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by ray245 »

RedImperator wrote:OK...so...how is this an argument for keeping registration restricted? Our attrition rate is astronomical (and frankly, I think it needs to be lowered, but that's a discussion for another time), and our sign-up rate is pitiful. So what's the long-term solution? We can't coast on the class of 2002 forever.
Maybe the difference in registration rates in 2002 and 2009 is not due to the fact that the board is more hostile towards people( in many ways, I would think that the board is far more calm than it was in the "good old times") but due to less people being interested in finding out websites and forums that focus on debating ST vs SW?

I would think that before we starts to throw even more ancedotes, it would be better to get some sort of data first. Data like asking some of the more recent memebers how did they discover the forum would be helpful.
Humans are such funny creatures. We are selfish about selflessness, yet we can love something so much that we can hate something.
User avatar
Havok
Miscreant
Posts: 13016
Joined: 2005-07-02 10:41pm
Location: Oakland CA
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by Havok »

Tiriol wrote:
Havok wrote:Triol

<snip>
A minor nitpick which has nothing to do with the rest of your post (I don't necessarily disagree with it per se, but I'll lay down my reasons later on, when I'm not in the middle of essay writing, why I take a little different view): the user name is Tiriol, with two i's. :) It's hard to spot, I grant you that, since there's quite a lot of "straight" letters in the name (i and l and r in its lower case is a pretty straight one, too).
Oh shit. Sorry man, I've never noticed that before. :oops:
Image
It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses.
Hit it.
Blank Yellow (NSFW)
"Mostly Harmless Nutcase"
User avatar
Formless
Sith Marauder
Posts: 4139
Joined: 2008-11-10 08:59pm
Location: the beginning and end of the Present

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by Formless »

ray245 wrote:I would think that before we starts to throw even more ancedotes, it would be better to get some sort of data first. Data like asking some of the more recent memebers how did they discover the forum would be helpful.
How would we get that data though? I somehow doubt many other folks as new or newer than me bother reading the HoC. At least they don't seem to be in the habit of posting here much...
"Still, I would love to see human beings, and their constituent organ systems, trivialized and commercialized to the same extent as damn iPods and other crappy consumer products. It would be absolutely horrific, yet so wonderful." — Shroom Man 777
"To Err is Human; to Arrr is Pirate." — Skallagrim
“I would suggest "Schmuckulating", which is what Futurists do and, by extension, what they are." — Commenter "Rayneau"
The Magic Eight Ball Conspiracy.
User avatar
ray245
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 7954
Joined: 2005-06-10 11:30pm

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by ray245 »

Formless wrote:
ray245 wrote:I would think that before we starts to throw even more ancedotes, it would be better to get some sort of data first. Data like asking some of the more recent memebers how did they discover the forum would be helpful.
How would we get that data though? I somehow doubt many other folks as new or newer than me bother reading the HoC. At least they don't seem to be in the habit of posting here much...
I think checking the member list would be helpful. Break down the member list into different year, and see within that one year,how many active posters did we get out of the people who sign up on the forum.

Or even keeping track on just how many people sign up within 2008, and compare it to say 2007 would be helpful for us to see if there is even a decrease in people signing up in the forum.

So far, many of us seems to be arguging on purely selective memory, and only keep track on the high-profile members while failing to notice just how many new comers there are in the forum.
Humans are such funny creatures. We are selfish about selflessness, yet we can love something so much that we can hate something.
User avatar
Hotfoot
Avatar of Confusion
Posts: 5835
Joined: 2002-10-12 04:38pm
Location: Peace River: Badlands, Terra Nova Winter 1936
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by Hotfoot »

RedImperator wrote:OK...so...how is this an argument for keeping registration restricted? Our attrition rate is astronomical (and frankly, I think it needs to be lowered, but that's a discussion for another time), and our sign-up rate is pitiful. So what's the long-term solution? We can't coast on the class of 2002 forever.
As I recall, your own numbers indicated that we still had a net positive in contributing posters for 2009, am I wrong? If this is the case, I would hardly call our attrition rate "astronomical". While I can definitely see the logic that we need to be kinder to new users, in fact, I agree with it, there's nothing in there about needing to open the flood gates and get rid of all or most of the restrictions on joining. I would maybe, possibly support a relaxation on free emails, but that's honestly about it. Hell, I'm still for paying Mike $5 if you want to join.
There's a foolproof way to avoid that: log off the Internet and never log in again.

Look, what the channers posted was disgusting and awful, and I'd prefer to never see it again either, but nobody died, nobody went blind, nobody turned to stone, and nobody went to jail. Nobody's going to go to jail for accidentally seeing a kiddy porn picture on a web forum. If there's another invasion, between the report button and the mod staff, we have the tools to shut it down in a few hours, maybe less. And there are other measures that could be put in place to prevent that kind of trolling from happening again (such as a 100 post/1 month membership minimum to post images; Starglider can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure I've seen those restrictions on other boards).
Oh for the love of...for the last time, I'm not concern about going to jail or any of the other ridiculous shit. I simply am not inclined to make it easier for those cunts to come here and do it again. Invasions of that nature were rife in the earlier days of the board. Now if you want to throw in some additional protections and all that, I'm for it, but I don't see a reason to make our signup process wide open like it used to be. If you can suggest a method that offers a similar or improved layer of prevention, by all means. Up until now, it's been "hur hur open the flood gates" with several sidebars of "lol I wanna rip idiots apart again". I objected heavily to the idea that the threat of another invasion is something that we simply don't have to worry about for various reasons that I've torn apart above.
The only other alternatives I see are actively recruiting for new members (I have no idea how that would even work), starting a brand new board without the baggage, or letting the forum slowly grind down to nothing. I don't have access to the statistics, but I would be absolutely flabbergasted if the rate of new posts and new topics per day hasn't been in decline since, say, 2006. N&P and Testing are the only forums that feel lively anymore (and before someone comes hurf-hurfing in here about how that's proof Testing is somehow sucking the life out of the rest of the board, most of Testing's threads would get punted immediately to Testing if they were posted anywhere else). We need more people, and 22 a year isn't going to cut it.
Look, here's the bottom line, the core material the board was about? That's over man, and it's never coming back. We will NEVER have the heyday of SWvsST ever again, it's just not going to happen. All the other debates that have been had are slowing down too because the gigantic backlog of all the Science Fiction and Fantasy written prior to 2002 has pretty much been covered completely, so we're relying entirely on what comes out as it comes out, and that's a damn trickle in comparison. Fact of life. Same with every other discussion here. So things have slowed down, calmed down, and settled. That's what happens on forums, and adding new blood isn't terribly likely to change that. All you get in that case is more people talking about the same trickle we currently have, which isn't necessarily a good thing because the signal to noise ratio gets worse.

Allow me to provide an example. Someone posted a thread over here on SDN that I thought had a lot of promise. I threw a post in and it was engulfed by posts that I thought, while some had merit, others were piles of shit all rehashing the same point over and over again. I took the concept of the thread to another forum I frequent with a much smaller user base and activity level and I got a much better response out of it.

More =! Better

I would rather take 22 quality posters a year than 200 spammy idiots AND the 22 quality posters.

Now, as far as posts per day, XaLEv just did some quick fact checking in the chat and gave me these statistics to look at:
Posts per year (Rough) wrote:2002-2003 552784
2003-2004 519648
2004-2005 528387
2005-2006 407969
2006-2007 302363
2007-2008 255773
2008-2009 262565
So, we have seen a general decline, espcially in '07 to '08, but is seems that we've had a bit of an upswing since, just in total numbers of posts. I don't really think we're dying, just hitting equilibrium.
Do not meddle in the affairs of insomniacs, for they are cranky and can do things to you while you sleep.
Image
The Realm of Confusion
"Every time you talk about Teal'c, I keep imagining Thor's ass. Thank you very much for that, you fucking fucker." -Marcao
SG-14: Because in some cases, "Recon" means "Blow up a fucking planet or die trying."
SilCore Wiki! Come take a look!
User avatar
RedImperator
Roosevelt Republican
Posts: 16465
Joined: 2002-07-11 07:59pm
Location: Delaware
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by RedImperator »

Note: I accidentally hit reply on a post I meant to save. It'll be back, with more, in a little while.
Image
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.--Ada Louise Huxtable, "Farewell to Penn Station", New York Times editorial, 30 October 1963
X-Ray Blues
User avatar
RedImperator
Roosevelt Republican
Posts: 16465
Joined: 2002-07-11 07:59pm
Location: Delaware
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by RedImperator »

ray245 wrote:
RedImperator wrote:OK...so...how is this an argument for keeping registration restricted? Our attrition rate is astronomical (and frankly, I think it needs to be lowered, but that's a discussion for another time), and our sign-up rate is pitiful. So what's the long-term solution? We can't coast on the class of 2002 forever.
Maybe the difference in registration rates in 2002 and 2009 is not due to the fact that the board is more hostile towards people( in many ways, I would think that the board is far more calm than it was in the "good old times") but due to less people being interested in finding out websites and forums that focus on debating ST vs SW?

I would think that before we starts to throw even more ancedotes, it would be better to get some sort of data first. Data like asking some of the more recent memebers how did they discover the forum would be helpful.
The STvSW debate was dead five years ago. Really, it was dead the minute the Ep.II ICS was published; that was when everyone but the fanatics threw in the towel, and even before then, the debate was substantially finished. Of all the top-level, public forums, SWvST accounts for the second fewest topics and the fourth fewest posts--and SWvST is the oldest forum (if I remember correctly, it, PSW, SLAM, and OT were the original four; possibly OSF was in there as well). It has a fraction of the posts the other original forums have. It has a third of the posts of G&C and a fifth the topics of N&P, both much younger forums. It doesn't even have as many posts as AMP.

The conclusion? SWvST was never the primary driver of traffic on this board, except possibly at the very beginning. It turned into a general sci-fi, science, logic, ethics, and politics board very early in its history. That combination should be drawing much bigger numbers than it actually is; you can quibble over how many, but I can't imagine anyone would argue that 22 per year is a respectable number.
So far, many of us seems to be arguging on purely selective memory, and only keep track on the high-profile members while failing to notice just how many new comers there are in the forum.
Ray, I posted numbers already in this thread, based on a hand count of members with more than .5 posts per day who signed up this year. There are 18 newcomers this year, and that number is distorted by people who signed up early in the year, made a bunch of posts, and disappeared (it's probably also distorted by people who signed up a while ago but only started posting recently, but bluntly, somebody else can work out the math on that; I'll go on record saying I'd be stunned if the two numbers do more than cancel out, at best). If you've got better data than mine, go ahead and post it; otherwise, stop pretending every argument in this thread is based on "selective memory".
Hotfoot wrote:As I recall, your own numbers indicated that we still had a net positive in contributing posters for 2009, am I wrong?
All my numbers say is more people signed up and were active than were banned. I didn't say anything about active members who've gone dark for other reasons in the past year. Without better ways to sort the data on the members page, it would be a big pain in the dick to figure that out.
Up until now, it's been "hur hur open the flood gates" with several sidebars of "lol I wanna rip idiots apart again". I objected heavily to the idea that the threat of another invasion is something that we simply don't have to worry about for various reasons that I've torn apart above.
Except my argument isn't about "lol i wanna rip up idiots" and it never has been. It's that we're stagnating, and the numbers bear that out. Saverok's right: the entire Internet has to deal with the threat of invasions from trolls (he took a turn down moron lane by comparing us with Facebook and Myspace, but there's a zillion forums and a lot of them are bigger and higher-profile than we are). Bunkering down and throttling your own new membership to a trickle will prevent it, yes, but it will, in the long term, prevent activity on the board. There are methods of mitigating potential damage by trolls without locking out new members (fun fact: under this board's current policies, I couldn't join SDN; I doubt I'm the only one).

And while we're in the realm of "I don't want to...", if you don't want to deal with invasions, I don't want our membership policies dictated by a bunch of dipshits who've probably forgotten about this board by now.
Look, here's the bottom line, the core material the board was about? That's over man, and it's never coming back. We will NEVER have the heyday of SWvsST ever again, it's just not going to happen.
See above. SWvST never drove traffic on the board.
All the other debates that have been had are slowing down too because the gigantic backlog of all the Science Fiction and Fantasy written prior to 2002 has pretty much been covered completely, so we're relying entirely on what comes out as it comes out, and that's a damn trickle in comparison.
Oh, come on. A hundred-year-old genre, and a few thousand nerds exhausted every topic of conversation in it in six years? We've barely scratched the surface. And what about SLAM? What about G&C? What about History? What about ARSE? These topics are mined out, too?
Allow me to provide an example. Someone posted a thread over here on SDN that I thought had a lot of promise. I threw a post in and it was engulfed by posts that I thought, while some had merit, others were piles of shit all rehashing the same point over and over again. I took the concept of the thread to another forum I frequent with a much smaller user base and activity level and I got a much better response out of it.
That's an argument for finally having a real crackdown on "me-tooing", not keeping membership artificially low. Yes, we'll have more idiots and spambots and lamers if we increase membership. We'll have more trolls, too. We'll also have more contributing members, and if people would lay off the nerd-rage and chest-thumping, we might actually keep more of them.
So, we have seen a general decline, espcially in '07 to '08, but is seems that we've had a bit of an upswing since, just in total numbers of posts. I don't really think we're dying, just hitting equilibrium.
Thanks to Xalev for those numbers.

Now, back to the debate: There's something interesting in those numbers. Mike implemented restricted registration around May of '03. '03/'04 sees posts drop by about 30,000 (that's misleadingly low, by the way: the board only opened in July of 2002, so between July and December of '02 we generated more posts than we did in the entire year 2003...more than any other year, in fact). There's a ~9000 post uptick the next year. Then the bottom falls out: down 120,000 in '05/'06, another 100,000 in '06/'07, 45,000 in '07/'08. Then another uptick in 2008. What else happened in '08? Mike upgraded the board and restored open registration. Then in January '09, we locked down registration again. Wanna take bets on where the number goes this year?

More fun with numbers. Ray, you might want to pay attention to this one:

As far as I can tell, Mike upgraded the board on 1 October 2008. There are no new registrations at all until the 10th; I'm not sure, but I faintly recall registrations being closed shortly after the upgrade while Mike worked the bugs out. Registrations are closed due to the invasion on 08 January; they reopen, restricted, on the 10th.

Between 10 October and 8 January, how many contributing members registered (going by the same criterion I used last time; that is, more than 1/2 of one post per day)? Fourteen; three less than have registered between 10 January and today. I previously counted Serafina with the '09 members, but she squeaked in the day before registrations closed, which leaves only 17 contributing members who have joined since registration was restricted again. And unlike my '09 count, I didn't spot any members who posted a lot and then went dark, nor are there any banned members, nor are there newbies on that list (obviously). Now, unless somebody wants to claim that conditions on the board, or conditions in sci-fi fandom in general have significantly changed for the worse in the last 10 months, there's very few factors which can account for the discrepancy, and restricted registrations has to be near the top of the list.
Image
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.--Ada Louise Huxtable, "Farewell to Penn Station", New York Times editorial, 30 October 1963
X-Ray Blues
User avatar
Hotfoot
Avatar of Confusion
Posts: 5835
Joined: 2002-10-12 04:38pm
Location: Peace River: Badlands, Terra Nova Winter 1936
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by Hotfoot »

RedImperator wrote:All my numbers say is more people signed up and were active than were banned. I didn't say anything about active members who've gone dark for other reasons in the past year. Without better ways to sort the data on the members page, it would be a big pain in the dick to figure that out.
True, I can attest to several that have gone dark for various reasons, though one overwhelming one keeps coming up with the people I know. Anecdotal, perhaps, but that's all we've got.
Except my argument isn't about "lol i wanna rip up idiots" and it never has been. It's that we're stagnating, and the numbers bear that out. Saverok's right: the entire Internet has to deal with the threat of invasions from trolls (he took a turn down moron lane by comparing us with Facebook and Myspace, but there's a zillion forums and a lot of them are bigger and higher-profile than we are). Bunkering down and throttling your own new membership to a trickle will prevent it, yes, but it will, in the long term, prevent activity on the board. There are methods of mitigating potential damage by trolls without locking out new members (fun fact: under this board's current policies, I couldn't join SDN; I doubt I'm the only one).
I'm not specifically attributing that argument to you, I'm just noting that it's a common one. As far as charging money, I don't know if it's still done, but I know that at SomethingAwful (a forum that qualifies as much larger and higher profile than us), there was at one point a fee to be able to post and such.

If we ease up on the restrictions slowly and make sure we've got a safety net to prevent invasion nonsense again, I'll gladly support it, but only if the specific proposal makes sense. I just don't think that it's going to solve the core issue with the forum's general decline. You'll note that we've been dropping off posts per day for a lot longer than the last invasion, which was in January of this year. Given that this year actually had an increase in posts per day over last year, I think it's honestly a bit foolish to attribute the decline of activity in the forum to stricter registration guidelines. There's something else at work here.
And while we're in the realm of "I don't want to...", if you don't want to deal with invasions, I don't want our membership policies dictated by a bunch of dipshits who've probably forgotten about this board by now.
A fair point, though I would point out that invasions seemed to be a somewhat regular event for a while. Even if those specific assholes are long gone, we shouldn't make it easy for any other jackasses to take their place, even if it's with a much less severe attack.
See above. SWvST never drove traffic on the board.
Fine, fiction discussions, and by that I mean everything from OSF, Fantasy, Fanfics, PSW, PST, and SWvST will not be coming back in the numbers they used to, the tone of the board has changed over the years.
Oh, come on. A hundred-year-old genre, and a few thousand nerds exhausted every topic of conversation in it in six years? We've barely scratched the surface. And what about SLAM? What about G&C? What about History? What about ARSE? These topics are mined out, too?
Sad though it is to say, yeah, pretty much. Most of the popular stuff has been done to death, and to be blunt, nobody really gives a shit about the more obscure stuff. Besides, the primary bitching was about the methodology of the debate and how to set the parameters. Everything past that is pretty straightforward.

G&C is pretty much the primary forum I visit these days, and even then I barely post there because what is there to really say? A game comes out, people comment on it, Stark points out how lame gameplay's gotten in recent years, and we move on. The forum games are all up STGOD land, which I thought was totally lame to be blunt, but hey. ARSE is useful because there will always be virgins on the Internet, and let's face it the social dynamic of a tech-infused society changes a lot of things. SLAM...you know, I rarely go there these days. Often times, it's a lot of stuff that just doesn't interest me. At one point you could have called it the Kuroneko and Surlethe talk higher math forum and called it a day.

As far as History, well, I suppose it beats the total number of posts in Mecha Maniacs, but that's a pretty damn low bar.

I mean, here's the thing, SLAM, History, even ARSE, they're all forums with good content overall, but it's not going to be made better by lots of newbies contributing to them. In fact, those forums are best when it's left to the people who know what they're talking about dominating the discussions. The only benefits new people have is maybe some new questions, and occasionally someone else who knows what they're talking about. Of course if they don't share it the right way, out the door they go.
That's an argument for finally having a real crackdown on "me-tooing", not keeping membership artificially low. Yes, we'll have more idiots and spambots and lamers if we increase membership. We'll have more trolls, too. We'll also have more contributing members, and if people would lay off the nerd-rage and chest-thumping, we might actually keep more of them.
People would have to be everyone though, especially the long time members, and I just don't see that happening. Even when registration was open and we dropped from 500k per year to 300k per year, that didn't stop, and how do you stop a pervasive notion that actually is one of the major draws for assholes like us?
Thanks to Xalev for those numbers.

Now, back to the debate: There's something interesting in those numbers. Mike implemented restricted registration around May of '03. '03/'04 sees posts drop by about 30,000 (that's misleadingly low, by the way: the board only opened in July of 2002, so between July and December of '02 we generated more posts than we did in the entire year 2003...more than any other year, in fact). There's a ~9000 post uptick the next year. Then the bottom falls out: down 120,000 in '05/'06, another 100,000 in '06/'07, 45,000 in '07/'08. Then another uptick in 2008. What else happened in '08? Mike upgraded the board and restored open registration. Then in January '09, we locked down registration again. Wanna take bets on where the number goes this year?

More fun with numbers. Ray, you might want to pay attention to this one:

As far as I can tell, Mike upgraded the board on 1 October 2008. There are no new registrations at all until the 10th; I'm not sure, but I faintly recall registrations being closed shortly after the upgrade while Mike worked the bugs out. Registrations are closed due to the invasion on 08 January; they reopen, restricted, on the 10th.

Between 10 October and 8 January, how many contributing members registered (going by the same criterion I used last time; that is, more than 1/2 of one post per day)? Fourteen; three less than have registered between 10 January and today. I previously counted Serafina with the '09 members, but she squeaked in the day before registrations closed, which leaves only 17 contributing members who have joined since registration was restricted again. And unlike my '09 count, I didn't spot any members who posted a lot and then went dark, nor are there any banned members, nor are there newbies on that list (obviously). Now, unless somebody wants to claim that conditions on the board, or conditions in sci-fi fandom in general have significantly changed for the worse in the last 10 months, there's very few factors which can account for the discrepancy, and restricted registrations has to be near the top of the list.
The differences of a few thousand posts a year is marginal at best as far as I'm concerned. When we dropped from 500,000 a year to 300,000 a year is the most telling value there. Between 2005 and 2007 the numbers dropped like a rock. So what happened in '05 and '07 that cause this rapid and dramatic decline? That's what we should look at, not this flash in the pan bit of registration.
Do not meddle in the affairs of insomniacs, for they are cranky and can do things to you while you sleep.
Image
The Realm of Confusion
"Every time you talk about Teal'c, I keep imagining Thor's ass. Thank you very much for that, you fucking fucker." -Marcao
SG-14: Because in some cases, "Recon" means "Blow up a fucking planet or die trying."
SilCore Wiki! Come take a look!
User avatar
chitoryu12
Jedi Council Member
Posts: 1997
Joined: 2005-12-19 09:34pm
Location: Florida

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by chitoryu12 »

^

Yes, Something Awful still has paid registration. $9.95 at the moment.

Edit: What are the current requirements for registering here?
Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba
Sith Devotee
Posts: 3317
Joined: 2004-10-15 08:57pm
Location: Regina Nihilists' Guild Party Headquarters

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba »

Just to pipe up, I commonly frequent a forum that is actually much larger than SDnet AND has much more lenient registration requirements and it gets by with only one (1) person with the power to move, lock, or ban, the Admin, with the Report Button. Sure, they have their set of trolls and spambots, occasionally, but I've never seen the board actually cluttered by those and the existence of the Button has created a tradition of 'Claiming Kills' by being the first person to report a miscreant.
User avatar
Sarevok
The Fearless One
Posts: 10681
Joined: 2002-12-24 07:29am
Location: The Covenants last and final line of defense

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by Sarevok »

Before commenting on the state of versus debates and state of scifi it would be worthwhile looking at that forum - spacebattles. Both their discussion and versus forums are extremely active. Come back one day later and you may have 2 whole pages of threads to read. Our own pure star wars, other scifi forums are much higher quality. Infact I would say they are second to none with their hard hitting no nonsense and no fanwank attitudes. It would be haven for any warsie tired of Revan wanking on another star wars site or general scifii fan wishing to discuss 40k without the silly "spess mehren" memes going on.
I have to tell you something everything I wrote above is a lie.
User avatar
General Zod
Never Shuts Up
Posts: 29205
Joined: 2003-11-18 03:08pm
Location: The Clearance Rack
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by General Zod »

Sarevok wrote:Before commenting on the state of versus debates and state of scifi it would be worthwhile looking at that forum - spacebattles. Both their discussion and versus forums are extremely active. Come back one day later and you may have 2 whole pages of threads to read. Our own pure star wars, other scifi forums are much higher quality. Infact I would say they are second to none with their hard hitting no nonsense and no fanwank attitudes. It would be haven for any warsie tired of Revan wanking on another star wars site or general scifii fan wishing to discuss 40k without the silly "spess mehren" memes going on.
Having just glanced at their general sci-fi forums, their threads are depressingly spammy and little more than Zor style "Rar" scenarios. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make by using them as an example of an active forum.
"It's you Americans. There's something about nipples you hate. If this were Germany, we'd be romping around naked on the stage here."
User avatar
RedImperator
Roosevelt Republican
Posts: 16465
Joined: 2002-07-11 07:59pm
Location: Delaware
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by RedImperator »

Hotfoot wrote:
RedImperator wrote:All my numbers say is more people signed up and were active than were banned. I didn't say anything about active members who've gone dark for other reasons in the past year. Without better ways to sort the data on the members page, it would be a big pain in the dick to figure that out.
True, I can attest to several that have gone dark for various reasons, though one overwhelming one keeps coming up with the people I know. Anecdotal, perhaps, but that's all we've got.
Would it be possible to name this reason without revealing who said it or causing too much drama?
I'm not specifically attributing that argument to you, I'm just noting that it's a common one. As far as charging money, I don't know if it's still done, but I know that at SomethingAwful (a forum that qualifies as much larger and higher profile than us), there was at one point a fee to be able to post and such.

If we ease up on the restrictions slowly and make sure we've got a safety net to prevent invasion nonsense again, I'll gladly support it, but only if the specific proposal makes sense.
I think putting restrictions on image posting from newcomers is the best way to do it. The chan invasion happened like this: a bunch of them signed up within a few hours of each other and started posting as much as they could before they got banned. There may have been one or two who had longer-term accounts, but almost all of them signed up over a period of about six hours on 8 January. If there was a 100 post/1 month requirement before being allowed to post images, all of them would have had to actually make 100 posts without drawing any suspicion they were planning anything, and wait a full 30 days before being allowed to move. That's a lot of work just to post a few pictures before you get banned.

The thing is, internally, as regular members, there's not that much invading trolls can do. Unless they hit really late at night, more likely than not there's going to be a supermod around to ban them, and the report button lets every user on the board, even 0-post lurkers, call the cavalry. If they can't post images (and I would include YouTube videos as well in this), what can they do? Links? WHORES WHORES WHORES?

The worst damage the board ever took from a troll attack was when somebody from Trollkingdom cracked a supermod's password, something restricted registration wouldn't have done a thing to prevent. I think you mentioned a DDOS attack as a possibility--well, restricted registration won't stop that, either.

Bottom line, I don't think the potential risk of a troll invasion warrants restricted membership. There are security measures we can take which are more protective than "LOL OPEN SEASON" and bunkering down like we have for the last year.
I just don't think that it's going to solve the core issue with the forum's general decline. You'll note that we've been dropping off posts per day for a lot longer than the last invasion, which was in January of this year. Given that this year actually had an increase in posts per day over last year, I think it's honestly a bit foolish to attribute the decline of activity in the forum to stricter registration guidelines. There's something else at work here.
How do you address the fact that in the four month window we had open registration late last year, we had nearly as many new contributing members sign up as we have in the ten months since then? Even if there's another explanation (or, more likely, many explanations) for the decline in overall posts, that shouldn't be affecting sign-ups. Conversely, you can't possibly be suggesting that the overall decline isn't being caused in part by a dearth of new members.
A fair point, though I would point out that invasions seemed to be a somewhat regular event for a while. Even if those specific assholes are long gone, we shouldn't make it easy for any other jackasses to take their place, even if it's with a much less severe attack.
The board has had four major invasions: the Elite Fitness idiots, the WCOTC, TrollKingdom, and the channers. I admit that's a lot, given that the first three all took place in the first year the board was active. However, we handled EF and WCOTC without any problems, the TrollKingdom saga would never be allowed to drag on as long as it did (and the worst damage was caused by a bad mod password, not by any troll account), and the channers, whose actual attack only lasted six hours (I actually remember going over to their board and seeing a few of them dismayed they'd been shut down and locked out so easily).
See above. SWvST never drove traffic on the board.
Fine, fiction discussions, and by that I mean everything from OSF, Fantasy, Fanfics, PSW, PST, and SWvST will not be coming back in the numbers they used to, the tone of the board has changed over the years.
[quot]Oh, come on. A hundred-year-old genre, and a few thousand nerds exhausted every topic of conversation in it in six years? We've barely scratched the surface. And what about SLAM? What about G&C? What about History? What about ARSE? These topics are mined out, too?
Sad though it is to say, yeah, pretty much. Most of the popular stuff has been done to death, and to be blunt, nobody really gives a shit about the more obscure stuff. Besides, the primary bitching was about the methodology of the debate and how to set the parameters. Everything past that is pretty straightforward.
G&C is pretty much the primary forum I visit these days, and even then I barely post there because what is there to really say? A game comes out, people comment on it, Stark points out how lame gameplay's gotten in recent years, and we move on. The forum games are all up STGOD land, which I thought was totally lame to be blunt, but hey. ARSE is useful because there will always be virgins on the Internet, and let's face it the social dynamic of a tech-infused society changes a lot of things. SLAM...you know, I rarely go there these days. Often times, it's a lot of stuff that just doesn't interest me. At one point you could have called it the Kuroneko and Surlethe talk higher math forum and called it a day.

As far as History, well, I suppose it beats the total number of posts in Mecha Maniacs, but that's a pretty damn low bar.
I feel like we're talking past each other here. My whole point was that posting activity was in decline (a point eventually borne out by Xalev's numbers), and almost every forum feels like a dead zone. That's an argument, in my mind, for fresh blood. I suppose I didn't really make that clear, for which I apologize. When you said, "Well, sci-fi and fantasy are mined out," I took that to mean you were arguing that "those topics are mined out, therefore there's nothing new to say and fresh blood won't help". I brought up the non-scifi forums as examples of other subjects that obviously aren't mined out even if sci-fi/fantasy is, and therefore would obviously benefit from fresh blood.
I mean, here's the thing, SLAM, History, even ARSE, they're all forums with good content overall, but it's not going to be made better by lots of newbies contributing to them. In fact, those forums are best when it's left to the people who know what they're talking about dominating the discussions. The only benefits new people have is maybe some new questions, and occasionally someone else who knows what they're talking about. Of course if they don't share it the right way, out the door they go.
Wait a minute. On what grounds are you basing this argument? What, are SDN old-timers just so fuckin' special that only they are qualified to discuss science, history, and sex? Like the fucking discussions now are at such a high standard that there's no possible way a newcomer could contribute an interesting insight or question. Come on. This is an internet board, not the Harvard faculty. Where do you expect to get new experts anyway, if registration is restricted?
People would have to be everyone though, especially the long time members, and I just don't see that happening. Even when registration was open and we dropped from 500k per year to 300k per year, that didn't stop, and how do you stop a pervasive notion that actually is one of the major draws for assholes like us?
Frankly, I don't know. It might not be fixable. I still don't see what that has to do with excluding newcomers. In fact, it pretty much says the opposite: "Well, since we'll never fix the dogpiling and the 'eat-the-newbie' attitude, we'd better keep a steady influx of new people just so we can find enough people to stick around and keep the place interesting."
The differences of a few thousand posts a year is marginal at best as far as I'm concerned. When we dropped from 500,000 a year to 300,000 a year is the most telling value there. Between 2005 and 2007 the numbers dropped like a rock. So what happened in '05 and '07 that cause this rapid and dramatic decline? That's what we should look at, not this flash in the pan bit of registration.
Well, first of all, you didn't address my second point: we got nearly as many members in four months of open registration as we have in ten months of restricted. And second, here's my hypothesis: we got a huge initial influx when the board opened and a steady steam of newcomers until 2003, when we restricted registration. Then we spent six years burning our reserves faster than we added new members. Now the forum feels like...well, not a ghost town. Maybe the old mall on the edge of town, the one where the J.C. Penney's closed last year and half the stores that are still open are thrift marts. The place that feels half-dead even on a Friday night; even the teenagers have better places to be.

Of course, in our case, the other customers are cannibals and the rent-a-cops shoot to kill, but it's a big town, and there's plenty of adventurous people who might like that kind of thing.
Image
Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.--Ada Louise Huxtable, "Farewell to Penn Station", New York Times editorial, 30 October 1963
X-Ray Blues
User avatar
Uraniun235
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 13772
Joined: 2002-09-12 12:47am
Location: OREGON
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by Uraniun235 »

This is the impression I'm getting from you, Hotfoot:

- We're out of things to say
- Nobody else will add much for us to say
- Why bother welcoming more people when it just means more headaches


Am I missing something?
"There is no "taboo" on using nuclear weapons." -Julhelm
Image
What is Project Zohar?
"On a serious note (well not really) I did sometimes jump in and rate nBSG episodes a '5' before the episode even aired or I saw it." - RogueIce explaining that episode ratings on SDN tv show threads are bunk
User avatar
Themightytom
Sith Devotee
Posts: 2818
Joined: 2007-12-22 11:11am
Location: United States

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by Themightytom »

Sarevok wrote:Before commenting on the state of versus debates and state of scifi it would be worthwhile looking at that forum - spacebattles. Both their discussion and versus forums are extremely active. Come back one day later and you may have 2 whole pages of threads to read. Our own pure star wars, other scifi forums are much higher quality. Infact I would say they are second to none with their hard hitting no nonsense and no fanwank attitudes. It would be haven for any warsie tired of Revan wanking on another star wars site or general scifii fan wishing to discuss 40k without the silly "spess mehren" memes going on.
Thats true, you just have to let new members GET to them. The original post was regarding a rapidfire ban. There's nothing wrong with having high standards for debate but new members have to jump immediately into the deepend if they are to swim. If you WANT to make it easier for new members, you could restrict their posting access for the first 200 posts or so to testing, and expand testing into something like "New members" where there could be a topic for introducing yourself, a topic for idle chat, a topic for conversations at the work place etc. Whoever mods the area would have to be-not Ghostrider (sorry man i know you're doing your job but you make new people cry) and would have to be willing to redirect new members a little more tolerantly. Shroom or Havok for example. The mod could ALSO protect new members from getting flamed by board members who are in the habit of harshly deconstructing arguments.

"Since when is "the west" a nation?"-Styphon
"ACORN= Cobra obviously." AMT
This topic is... oh Village Idiot. Carry on then.--Havok
User avatar
Metatwaddle
Jedi Council Member
Posts: 1910
Joined: 2003-07-07 07:29am
Location: Up the Amazon on a Rubber Duck
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by Metatwaddle »

That's basically the worst of all possible worlds. One thing that'll happen is Testing will lose its culture due to new people making boring bullshit social posts in order to get their post count high enough to make real posts. I don't know what makes Testing tick--it's RI's thing, not really mine--but I do know that making it into the required newbie stamping grounds is going to make it really lame. The other thing that'll happen is that 200 posts of tedious small talk will be too much for most people to stomach, and nobody will graduate to the real boards. They'll just find another forum. Hell, I was annoyed at a forum where I had to make 10 posts to access most of the resources; I can't imagine 200. Why would anyone want to stay?
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things... their number is negligible and they are stupid. --Dwight D. Eisenhower
User avatar
General Zod
Never Shuts Up
Posts: 29205
Joined: 2003-11-18 03:08pm
Location: The Clearance Rack
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by General Zod »

Themightytom wrote:
Sarevok wrote:Before commenting on the state of versus debates and state of scifi it would be worthwhile looking at that forum - spacebattles. Both their discussion and versus forums are extremely active. Come back one day later and you may have 2 whole pages of threads to read. Our own pure star wars, other scifi forums are much higher quality. Infact I would say they are second to none with their hard hitting no nonsense and no fanwank attitudes. It would be haven for any warsie tired of Revan wanking on another star wars site or general scifii fan wishing to discuss 40k without the silly "spess mehren" memes going on.
Thats true, you just have to let new members GET to them. The original post was regarding a rapidfire ban. There's nothing wrong with having high standards for debate but new members have to jump immediately into the deepend if they are to swim. If you WANT to make it easier for new members, you could restrict their posting access for the first 200 posts or so to testing, and expand testing into something like "New members" where there could be a topic for introducing yourself, a topic for idle chat, a topic for conversations at the work place etc. Whoever mods the area would have to be-not Ghostrider (sorry man i know you're doing your job but you make new people cry) and would have to be willing to redirect new members a little more tolerantly. Shroom or Havok for example. The mod could ALSO protect new members from getting flamed by board members who are in the habit of harshly deconstructing arguments.
Hasn't the sandbox idea of restricting new members to testing been shot down before? I obviously can't speak for anyone else here but if I see a forum that's going to restrict me from accessing most of the board until I reach a certain post count I'm going to say fuck it and go elsewhere.
"It's you Americans. There's something about nipples you hate. If this were Germany, we'd be romping around naked on the stage here."
User avatar
Hotfoot
Avatar of Confusion
Posts: 5835
Joined: 2002-10-12 04:38pm
Location: Peace River: Badlands, Terra Nova Winter 1936
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by Hotfoot »

I apologize in advance, this is going to be big, but I hate my postcount.
RedImperator wrote:Would it be possible to name this reason without revealing who said it or causing too much drama?
It's pretty much what I indicated earlier, the overall hostile nature of the board. The vibe we give off is that we're a bunch of fucking assholes who will kick you in the nuts instead of saying hello. Very few people enjoy the prospect of being berated for any reason on a place that's supposed to be community.

The second one is that there is an overall perception that long time members are more easily forgiven for oversights, poor judgment, and lapses in logic because they are long time members.
I think putting restrictions on image posting from newcomers is the best way to do it. The chan invasion happened like this: a bunch of them signed up within a few hours of each other and started posting as much as they could before they got banned. There may have been one or two who had longer-term accounts, but almost all of them signed up over a period of about six hours on 8 January. If there was a 100 post/1 month requirement before being allowed to post images, all of them would have had to actually make 100 posts without drawing any suspicion they were planning anything, and wait a full 30 days before being allowed to move. That's a lot of work just to post a few pictures before you get banned.

The thing is, internally, as regular members, there's not that much invading trolls can do. Unless they hit really late at night, more likely than not there's going to be a supermod around to ban them, and the report button lets every user on the board, even 0-post lurkers, call the cavalry. If they can't post images (and I would include YouTube videos as well in this), what can they do? Links? WHORES WHORES WHORES?
True, and I'd be willing to accept that as a relaxation of the email restriction (perhaps the most annoying of the board's limitations). Removing images and flash would be a decent security measure.
The worst damage the board ever took from a troll attack was when somebody from Trollkingdom cracked a supermod's password, something restricted registration wouldn't have done a thing to prevent. I think you mentioned a DDOS attack as a possibility--well, restricted registration won't stop that, either.
True. Though Trollkingdom in particular were persistent little shits. They had months of building up for their horseshit. You're right that we have very little defense against those sorts of attacks, and that restricting membership isn't a direct way of combating it.
Bottom line, I don't think the potential risk of a troll invasion warrants restricted membership. There are security measures we can take which are more protective than "LOL OPEN SEASON" and bunkering down like we have for the last year.
Again, a fair point.
How do you address the fact that in the four month window we had open registration late last year, we had nearly as many new contributing members sign up as we have in the ten months since then? Even if there's another explanation (or, more likely, many explanations) for the decline in overall posts, that shouldn't be affecting sign-ups. Conversely, you can't possibly be suggesting that the overall decline isn't being caused in part by a dearth of new members.
It could also be that the demographic the board appeals to is maturing overall. I know that when I was in college and posting to this board, I had a lot more time to waste on posting more. Hell, I think the largest fraction of my postcount is tied to STGOD stuff.

Now, the lack of new people to make up for the people who are leaving may have something to do with it, but I still say that the biggest problem we need to look at is the 2005-2007 drop, which of all the falloffs is the most significant because we lost roughly half our yearly post generation. in that two year period. What changed? Was it then that we applied a new registration restriction, or did something else in the board change?
The board has had four major invasions: the Elite Fitness idiots, the WCOTC, TrollKingdom, and the channers. I admit that's a lot, given that the first three all took place in the first year the board was active. However, we handled EF and WCOTC without any problems, the TrollKingdom saga would never be allowed to drag on as long as it did (and the worst damage was caused by a bad mod password, not by any troll account), and the channers, whose actual attack only lasted six hours (I actually remember going over to their board and seeing a few of them dismayed they'd been shut down and locked out so easily).
Hm, I thought there were more, but I suppose the Trollkingdom's starts and stops over the years stuck in my head, and I may be confusing the cross-pollination with Darkstar's forums as an invasion of sorts.
I feel like we're talking past each other here. My whole point was that posting activity was in decline (a point eventually borne out by Xalev's numbers), and almost every forum feels like a dead zone. That's an argument, in my mind, for fresh blood. I suppose I didn't really make that clear, for which I apologize. When you said, "Well, sci-fi and fantasy are mined out," I took that to mean you were arguing that "those topics are mined out, therefore there's nothing new to say and fresh blood won't help". I brought up the non-scifi forums as examples of other subjects that obviously aren't mined out even if sci-fi/fantasy is, and therefore would obviously benefit from fresh blood.
At this point, I think we're at an impasse of quantity over quality. I would rather stop by a forum that has fewer but more well-crafted responses than a lot of spammy shit. Like I indicated above, a better signal to noise ratio is something I think is more important overall. The one thread I mentioned transplanting from SDN to another forum that was less active, the difference was staggering. On SDN, the thread died at page four or so, after being filled with insipid nonsense over and over again, while the transplanted version is currently reaching about 12 pages and is still having content added, albeit at a slow rate.
Wait a minute. On what grounds are you basing this argument? What, are SDN old-timers just so fuckin' special that only they are qualified to discuss science, history, and sex? Like the fucking discussions now are at such a high standard that there's no possible way a newcomer could contribute an interesting insight or question. Come on. This is an internet board, not the Harvard faculty. Where do you expect to get new experts anyway, if registration is restricted?
We just so happen to have several engineers, scientists, mathematicians, teachers, and mature adults in stable relationships. Trust me when I say that this particular combination is not terribly common on most webforums. Now I'm not saying we won't get more if we open the floodgates of registration, just that the signal to noise ratio is going to get a whole lot worse and the average value of a given post will go down.
Frankly, I don't know. It might not be fixable. I still don't see what that has to do with excluding newcomers. In fact, it pretty much says the opposite: "Well, since we'll never fix the dogpiling and the 'eat-the-newbie' attitude, we'd better keep a steady influx of new people just so we can find enough people to stick around and keep the place interesting."
Frankly, if there's no interest in keeping the quality posters we've been losing due to our attitude, we're not going to keep the new people for long either.
Well, first of all, you didn't address my second point: we got nearly as many members in four months of open registration as we have in ten months of restricted. And second, here's my hypothesis: we got a huge initial influx when the board opened and a steady steam of newcomers until 2003, when we restricted registration. Then we spent six years burning our reserves faster than we added new members. Now the forum feels like...well, not a ghost town. Maybe the old mall on the edge of town, the one where the J.C. Penney's closed last year and half the stores that are still open are thrift marts. The place that feels half-dead even on a Friday night; even the teenagers have better places to be.

Of course, in our case, the other customers are cannibals and the rent-a-cops shoot to kill, but it's a big town, and there's plenty of adventurous people who might like that kind of thing.
I think your tolerance for activity may be influenced by twitter. Regardless, I have my own thoughts about what may have happened, but it's not something we can really do much about. All that said, I'm willing to accept opening the gates a little as long as there is additional security in place.
Uraniun235 wrote:This is the impression I'm getting from you, Hotfoot:

- We're out of things to say
No, we're not out of things to say, it's just that the backlogs of debate when it comes to fiction are pretty much tapped, and new debates, when they happen, are rather short and decisive. Mostly, we're talking about the shows, books, and so on themselves, not having dozens of versus debates constantly. That naturally has a much lower post per day volume than heated debates over who would win, Starship Troopers or Stormtroopers.

- Nobody else will add much for us to say
If we add 30,000 new members, what new insights into the versus debates, or the analysis of various fictions will we actually gain? There may be some, but the signal to noise ratio will get worse. A slow addition of people who are more willing to make meaningful contributions is better than a large influx of dumbasses who spam, necro, and post nonsense.
- Why bother welcoming more people when it just means more headaches
Vast amounts of new people. I don't have anything against new posters, and in fact I think we should be gentler to newbies to help ease them into the community. Moreover, I objected to what was at the time a push to open registration with no intention of adding security safeguards to defend against further invasions, which has been now taken under consideration at least.
Am I missing something?
Only what I've clarified.
Do not meddle in the affairs of insomniacs, for they are cranky and can do things to you while you sleep.
Image
The Realm of Confusion
"Every time you talk about Teal'c, I keep imagining Thor's ass. Thank you very much for that, you fucking fucker." -Marcao
SG-14: Because in some cases, "Recon" means "Blow up a fucking planet or die trying."
SilCore Wiki! Come take a look!
User avatar
Coyote
Rabid Monkey
Posts: 12464
Joined: 2002-08-23 01:20am
Location: The glorious Sun-Barge! Isis, Isis, Ra,Ra,Ra!
Contact:

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by Coyote »

Trollkingdom punk'd us good, because they had a guy go long-term, deep undercover here and had us pretty much fooled (Raoul Duke Jr). But the only real pain in the ass invasion we had was the /b/chantard invasion with the kiddie porn and looking back, I think we all reacted really well. The mods from super- to mini- all responded quickly and in the long run, it was contained within a few hours.

We could just open registration, let folks come in, but the moment there's an invasion have the Admins put the close-up registration in effect again without having to go through any formalities like discussions, votes, etc-- just an automatic lock-out to new members until we know what's up.
Something about Libertarianism always bothered me. Then one day, I realized what it was:
Libertarian philosophy can be boiled down to the phrase, "Work Will Make You Free."


In Libertarianism, there is no Government, so the Bosses are free to exploit the Workers.
In Communism, there is no Government, so the Workers are free to exploit the Bosses.
So in Libertarianism, man exploits man, but in Communism, its the other way around!

If all you want to do is have some harmless, mindless fun, go H3RE INST3ADZ0RZ!!
Grrr! Fight my Brute, you pansy!
User avatar
ray245
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 7954
Joined: 2005-06-10 11:30pm

Re: Banninations, and the rapidty of.

Post by ray245 »

I think putting restrictions on image posting from newcomers is the best way to do it. The chan invasion happened like this: a bunch of them signed up within a few hours of each other and started posting as much as they could before they got banned. There may have been one or two who had longer-term accounts, but almost all of them signed up over a period of about six hours on 8 January. If there was a 100 post/1 month requirement before being allowed to post images, all of them would have had to actually make 100 posts without drawing any suspicion they were planning anything, and wait a full 30 days before being allowed to move. That's a lot of work just to post a few pictures before you get banned.

The thing is, internally, as regular members, there's not that much invading trolls can do. Unless they hit really late at night, more likely than not there's going to be a supermod around to ban them, and the report button lets every user on the board, even 0-post lurkers, call the cavalry. If they can't post images (and I would include YouTube videos as well in this), what can they do? Links? WHORES WHORES WHORES?
I seconded such an idea. A few forums I've been to have implemented this measure. Although in my opinion, we should extend such an idea to linking to websites as well.
Humans are such funny creatures. We are selfish about selflessness, yet we can love something so much that we can hate something.
Locked