All people have to do is read your guidelines to see this, but for some reason they seem to get hung up on other stuff.
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Tough to imagine anyone would be against a subforum with different mods and moderation standards than the main site. Tough I say.
Jmakin has to go of course
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West of house
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
Ikes has been ethered.
> _
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I said I don’t use PMs but maybe I should send SwankyWilder one to swap details before this place collapses - been meaning to suggest we meet for beers on the beach sometime if/when the plague finishes.
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I was added to the PM chain after my LC post a few days ago, but I haven’t contributed to this conversation because I didn’t really know what to say. My primary feelings were and continue to be confusion and disappointment.
Many of the posters considering starting a new subforum and/or leaving I’d put in the group of posters that I find myself agreeing with the most, yet I must be the most oblivious person in the world because I’ve never once thought that things were over-modded or that they were victims of any sort of in-group / out-group feud. I’d have a hard time even identifying who the supposed in-group and out-group members are, and that’s after reading some of the posts in this thread and others.
My primary concern with starting a new subforum is duplication and further fracturing of an already small community. Will we have two separate threads to discuss COVID news? Two separate threads for election live-sweats? Two separate low content threads? I guess this concern is moot since the fracturing has already happened, hence the feeling of disappointment.
I’ve always been more of a low-content poster / lurker, but if more/different mods is what we need, I volunteer to be one. I will acknowledge, though, that if someone asks me which current mod I’d be most similar to I’d have no fucking clue how to answer, because I’ve never noticed the mods. Maybe that’s just my own obliviousness.
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This is basically my take on the situation. People value debate (arguing) but don’t actually value or respect disagreement. It’s ultimately a self-destructive cycle where people seek out and magnify divisions to give them an excuse to dunk on each other as savagely as possible, and then when the dunkees give up and stop posting, the search is on for a new fissure to play the game across. (To preempt the obvious response, this is a self-criticism as much as it is a criticism of anyone else.)
I think both Chris and Keed have made some good points. I don’t think there’s a rules-based solution to any of this, and all these community-based/RFC/whatever systems are mirages. All voting-based systems can be subverted to produce most any result by agenda control, so those systems mainly launder decisions made by the groups who control the agenda with a veneer of democratic legitimacy.
At the same time, I think the argument that “it’s the internet lol no one should care,” is not quite true. An internet community is a community, so people care about it because community and belonging are important to people. What should not be important is particular moderation decisions because those will often be wrong and people are just going to have to live with that reality.
Fundamentally, the only thing that will really work is a cultural shift that emphasizes respect. If you want to argue with people while thinking that the people you argue with are total shitlords, of course it’s not going to work. You can’t build a community on mutual hatred. You can have a community where lots of people hate each other if they’re ultimately there to talk about poker, but it can’t be the foundation.
Absent that kind of cultural change, it all seems hopeless. That said, some governance changes would be helpful. Generally, I think moderation should be almost exclusively 1-day to 1-week bans and should be aimed more at supporting community norms of respectful debate than dealing with “problem” posters. Bans should be explained in the post that triggered them, not in the drama forum, so that people can develop a collective sense of what’s in bounds and what isn’t.
Moderation also needs more turnover. There’s no reason to have really long-term moderators. Six mods serving three month terms, with two replaced each month by rand() from the pool of posters above a certain level of activity. Some sort of mechanism to veto really bad choices by supermajority vote.
Somewhat separately, having a rogue admin reading and publicizing PMs is nuts, and we need to get the replacement in as soon as humanly possible. People digging around trying to dig up dirt is also bad stuff.
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We’ve had people defending them for a year plus, correct, that is the problem.
Fidget is the best current example. It was clear as day he was trolling wookie, skydiver and others. Then it was revealed because they bragged about it. We’ve had people spend hundreds of posts defending them in the past, but literally zero from the same crew now. Weird!
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I’m logging back in the 2nd this, I will not post again in the main forums until Jmakin has been IP banned and all his PM are shown to the forum along with FidgetUK being unbanned.
I have personal information in PM’s that I do not want shared by or read by ANY admin.
I owe a personal thanks to @Trolly for telling me to be careful of personal information in PM’s and to have a throwaway Email account, thanks Trolly as it sure was good advice.
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Keeping up with all the burner accounts this week has been a chore.
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It’s why I want this forum to survive too SuB… 
I can remember back when posters who requested self-bans has the self-control to stay away and STFU.
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I haven’t had a chance to even really skim this thread so I’m grunching but it’s really weird to me that Wookie was basically the only Politics mod over at 2+2 and everyone thought that was fine and objected to Mat and Mason trying to add to the mod team there but for some reason here Wookie’s an intolerable tyrant and his replacement will lead to eternal sunshine and happiness.
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There are a couple of reasons I can think of why that might be.
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Absolute power corrupts absolutely (and the rules formulated by him and voted for by a majority make it pretty much impossible to get rid of him)
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On 2+2 the battle lines were drawn between deplorables and their adjacents, and others. A lot of the others left to form this site, where without the deplorables to argue with differences in political views became much more obvious and salient. People also began to feel disappointed in their fellow forumites who they’d previously believed to have more in common with politically than was actually the case. Wookie aligning himself (of course he’ll deny this) with one of those wings has led to the other wing feeling marginalised, othered and bullied.
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Victor, I don’t like singling anyone out but I will because I believe you are honest and will answer as such.
Do we want UP as it currently is, to survive?
Do you want to change the experience at UP?
Do you just want to fully breakaway?
Like I dont understand the hand wringing and thousands of messages when you can go somewhere online where people like you, you like the other people and you can have an enjoyable experience. If you don’t think this is the place for you, it might not be. It might be the fault of others. If you were treated unfairly I’m sorry for that, I have as much power over that as I do over my cats.
Happy to post the admin logs. Ggoreo can too if he wants, or the next admin. I’ve not read private messages other than this one, the other one I referred to, and my own.
Just read the words here you have written about me and others here. You’re all pieces of shit. Ban me, whatever, I told you I’m gone anyway.
a pandemic happened and everybody lost it to varying degrees
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Boredsociopath is a much better screen name than boredsocial. Can I get it as an undertitle?
Also my wife says this was ‘close enough’ so… not too too offended? I’ve been called worse.
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There’s absolutely no way someone should suffer any mod action at all for something they’ve written in a PM unless it’s a threat of some kind.
Awful ban, awful modding.
#freefidget
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Don’t care - ggoreo can confirm, or the next admin. I didn’t read anyone’s messages. None of you really matter to me that much.
Nobody cares what you think jal. Nobody. This thing as it currently exists is over. You won.
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