Fair. But there seem to be plenty of posters who claim to want a sub forum… or different mods… or new mod rules… or a new admin… or to demod wookie…
Yet. Despite all this ongoing noise. Theres not a single RFC post proposing concrete, actual change. The longer that continues, the harder it is to believe that theres a good faith attempt to change the forum.
I’ll go with if they behave like an immature git AND admit to constantly trolling they can be kicked to the curb.
We don’t need to agree on what the correct definition of trolling is. That is literally what people want as they continue to troll.
No we should be saying no to all the childish antics. Not going to play semantics with it.
Dude admitted he was trolling in messages so private it was a horrific act having them made public but then we still have a number of people who need more proof or a different definition of trolling.
Stop this nonsense.
I think it was a good faith attempt by at least several of the departed posters, but to be clear my current assumption is that getting to the RFC stage now is a huge underdog. It’s more than just Keed, even though he was the one I highlighted in our reply chain. Too many of the key participants are either mod-banned or self-banned, and I think many of those self-bans are going to be permanent. As JT points out above, anyone remaining just has to read the room to see that it’s not the time and may never will be–people will just stop posting instead. This is why I noted in my other post that I’m extremely disappointed in jmakin’s actions since he effectively cut off any opportunity to actually act on what seemed like a good faith effort.
Basically, I don’t think the lack of an existing RFC says anything about the intent of those that participated.
I’m not even sure why a proposal is necessary. When this place started, in my mind at least, it was supposed to be a place people could use in whatever way interested them. If someone wanted to blog, we’d have a place for blogs. If someone wanted to do a podcast, we’d have a podcast. If someone wanted to do something else, we’d make space for that.
I used to just give people whatever they asked for. Usually this was groups and flair. Once someone asked for a werewolf forum, so I cobbled something together and made a forum for werewolf. I stopped giving people whatever they requested when, after the first time I said no to a request,I was criticized for playing favorites. I decided the easiest way to deal with that was to just say no to everyone unless they got a mandate from the community.
In retrospect that was a mistake. To me this is a site for people to use in whatever way they wish (that doesn’t interfere with others’ enjoyment), and as admin, my role is to provide them the means to do so.
If I had never adopted my do nothing policy, here’s what would have happened in this situation: I would have seen a comment in a thread about wanting a new forum to try some different approach to governance and PM’d the person and offered to set it up. It never would have occurred to me that I was doing something untoward or that could be at all contentious.
This is really important point. We need to strip away the overly complicated and onerous bureaucracy that has been assembled.
The onerous bureaucracy is literally you just start a poll and ask jmakin to make it an official RFC thingy, look here’s an example anyone can follow. Why no one else who wants a new subforum has even tried this yet is beyond me.
I don’t understand why people say this about the rule making process. Is it because it take two weeks at minimum to go from proposal to rule? There are reasons for that, and it’s not that long in the grand scheme of things, but it could also be changed if that is what the members want.
The reason we have a rule making process is because the members want community based governance instead of just delegating all decisions to the site runners.
I know that you know that the majority of the folks in the PM thread just want a sub forum with different moderation standards. Hardly qualifies as having to tear the place down.
I even got made a moderator of that forum and it was a delight to do so, I remember your post…
I remember the post you made explaining that you wouldn’t do more flairs and stuff, can’t remember the exact words tbh, but it made me sad, it was unclear to me why, at 1st I didn’t understand the reason, but I knew I trusted your judgement over mine, especially wrt forums and doing the work on them which I very much wanted to be a part of, but I felt inadequate, I could not move threads or even participate in most of all the threads made over the time I’ve been here, so I stepped down.
I didn’t step down because posters gave me grief or even questioned any of my decisions in any way wrt my intelligence or trolling, the community treated with 100% respect as a Mod & as mentioned above, it was a honestly a pleasure to do so so when any decisions I made was questioned I genuinely referred it to the wider community by using the comments after the initial complaint and took the most common & fair action.
The reason I came here is because I’m a Stoop kid, it says it in my profile and was told there would be space for me and some friends (I posted my favourite posters on 2/2 when the forum started so it’s never been a secret) and we were made welcome, welcome enough to start threads that have ran basically drama free, the Hope&Glory UK thread for one.
Now I had to scroll past pages and pages on 22 of Ikes and fly and others just to get to the information, I never reported posts in politics, I never complained about modding, I just scrolled past and the occasional time I read some drama, I’d be basically lost anyway.
I’d like to have the forum back I 1st came too too ggeoro the one where everyone from me to @ChrisV on the academic scale can post, interact and basically waste whatever time I want too, a sence of freedom so to say we’re people from jalfrezi to suzzer99 can post, to where Bobman and microbet can joust and to where Trolly and fidgetUK can go out out or in in.
I don’t care if people try to start threads to make money or share money, I do care about being labelled because I’d have a 1,000, ffs my daughter can change my mind quicker then I can say Boo so I’m certainly indecisive.
I’ve never hated anyone here, not one, not even Jmakin because I know for 100% that he knows that he had made a mistake and have no I’ll-will towards him or any others involved in this forum, sure I get jealous and zealous but I’m a realist and know deep down I’m in more danger of going to the shops than I am writing or reading a post, especially here.
Peace and love all 
Can you clarify, are you saying that now anyone can ask you for a forum, and if you think the request is reasonable you’re going to create it? And if somebody wanted to object to the creation of a forum, they wouldn’t get a chance to vote to object to that? I mean, you don’t think there’s a difference between making a forum for games and making a forum to accommodate a subset of users whose recent body of work has been (searching for neutral word) contentious?
Lol this post is dripping with sincerity. Feel free to explain why my analogy has you so SHOCKED and DISMAYED.
But just in case you honestly don’t understand the point, here goes:
It’s been a pretty common trope for right-wingers to defend any instance of obvious racism right up to using the N-word or being a member of the KKK. But then if the person in question actually gets caught using the N-word, the defenders sheepishly flip over to "Ok, yeah you got him - that’s racist.” This whole concept has been joked about here 100s of times and argued about on old 22 more than that.
That is the point - which I still struggle to see how anyone on this forum wouldn’t get - that some of you would defend obvious trolling (which can be as difficult to define and nail down as racism) right up to the point of the user flat out bragging about trolling, then be like “yeah ok you got him”. Which I actually expected here. But surreally, some of you have found a way to claim that trolling then bragging about it is not evidence of trolling. o_O
If you still don’t understand the point I can’t help you.
I can’t wait until the part of this exercise when the people who are constantly moderated for going over the line with abuse and personal attacks use a new sub forum for abuse and personal attacks against people who weren’t in the PM group that “can’t” be moderated how they are here.
I still don’t do anything here without a community mandate because everyone shits all over everyone for everything so I don’t do anything because I don’t like being shit on.
Completely separate from forum drama and anything going on now, I decided at the start of June that I no longer enjoyed posting here and stopped altogether indefinitely on June 1. But since I’m an admin, I get emailed when when I get PM’d or mentioned so eventually came back to deal with Bryce, and then everyone started requesting 14-day bans to prepare to anonymize, and so I decided to see if I could do anything to not have the place completely fall apart because I figured I’d still want to post here once NFL season starts. Then the PM shitstorm hit, and my goal is still to not have this place fall apart.
But back to your question about forums, who knows what I would have done back in the halcyon days when I could go into a store to buy a pair of shoes instead of holding mine together with ducktape, and post on an internet forum where everyone didn’t hate everyone else. I probably would have said, hey zikzak, what do you think about me making this category and gone from there.
If someone can explain to me what the subforum would look like, in terms of the mechanisms of how it would be moderated differently and not in terms of the hoped-for outcome, then I volunteer to write a first draft for an RFC as a starting point for people to argue about it. Writing stuff by committee is dumb. (This offer is not an endorsement of the subforum idea. I don’t even know enough about it to determine whether it is a good idea.)
However, make sure that what you want is possible under Discourse’s software.
I don’t know how useful the Category Moderator function will be in what people want. (Category Group Review/Moderation - announcements - Discourse Meta)
So you thought I was lying when I already explained part of the context? I’m not the one who found himself in league with the shameless liars, remember.
They were discussing the myriad definitions of “trolling” in the context of how “trolls” should be treated, like I said. You know, the same shit you all should’ve done months ago? And I said Johnny also “admitted” to trolling the forum but his definition was so broad and vague that everybody is a troll. And I said that I agreed with Ked, though this was well before I was invited. This screenshot shows all that and I have no problem posting more as I get permission from the parties involved, but, I figured that was innocuous enough, but also info-loaded, to show without.
You thought I’d just randomly make some shit up so my Best Fren FORUM BFFs could win an internet fight?
But you all didn’t discus the myriad definitions of “trolling” in the context of how “trolls” should be treated, because,
there is no plain meaning of the word “troll(ing)” and that is precisely why you all are going HAM using it. It’s a loaded-language snarl-word designed to be an empty vessel. It’s linguistic question-begging designed to assign guilt without proof or definition. (See Marksman’s last post for just one example. He said we don’t need to agree on correct definitions of words. That’s pretty darn trollish itself!)
Basic textbook definitions piling the fuck up.
Maybe? Not everybody is a shameless liar.
A subforum like the half dozen that already exist here?
Who, Suzzer, Jman? You’re playing mighty fast and loose with that “we” here. Considering I’m in the middle of explaining this again, not sure what you want to hear. Does this example look like anything to you:
Replace “trolling” with “worst thing in the world (WTITW)”
Replace “Fidget” with “random anonymous person x (MrX)”
If I ask MrX what his definition of the WTITW is and MrX says “jaywalking”, and then later says “Oh man I did the WTITW”, we know MrX wasn’t actually “admitting” to doing the WTITW because he already said the WTITW is jaywalking, and we both know that isn’t the WTITW.
This is what Victoar meant when he kept saying “show me the trolling post” and the MENSA Meeting couldn’t even understand the request (until LG2, why he gets paid the big bux). He was saying to show him the actual WTITW, not what MrX thought was or for whatever reason labeled the WTITW. (sick unintentioanl callback to the theory-of-mind stuff)
Setting aside everything I’ve just said, if you want to extrapolate this hard (“this whole time” you had to have felt dirty typing that), I can’t stop you, but,
everybody who made an authoritative and definitive statement about the Top Secret PM without reading it (some proudly so!) was doing the most bad faith bullshit imaginable, and, like, AOFrantic just pretended he either couldn’t read at a fifth grade level or is psychotic after he got caught running his mouth, so maybe we should give one- or two-offs a pass? Empathy and forgiveness and shit.
Hm.
Ok.
And that didn’t give a Rhodes Scholar like you any pause huh?
All-star roster.
For one, we have an adopted definition of trolling, dating back to a thread started by our boi @JT2:
For two, the “plain meaning of words” I was referencing was how, plainly, fidget was not making his posts in good faith based on what he said, even putting aside an ambiguous definition of trolling. His quotes plainly mean that his question asked in the covid thread was not a genuine one, and his policing of his opponents’ words, like “gaslighting,” “clique,” and his ongoing shtick about detente were all, in his own word, an “act” that he didn’t take seriously. Now, I mean, anyone could take a fair reading of his obviously-deliberately-obtuse shtick in the covid thread and see that he was deliberately being a dumbass. I played along, because it’s important to me to communicate accurate information about covid even to someone who’s deliberately being a dumbass for his own amusement, because people lurk here and I want to help them. Anyone can see that exchange was a reiteration of the classic cartoon:
Except that instead of calling him an idiot, I supplied helpful information, and instead of publicly making a scene, he took his “victory lap” to the group PM.
Even with your explanation (I had read your prior explanations, and no, they aren’t actually evidence in any real sense except if you consider unverifiable, unsworn testimony of a participant to be “evidence.” It’s not the sort of thing that an objective observer could really use to make sense of the situation unless they take your word as gospel for no good reason at all), the most charitable explanation I can come up with for why fidget made the post he did in the covid thread and then fistpumped for trolling it – granting your entire premise that it was amidst an ongoing, serious business discussion of what they wanted to consider “trolling” in their new forum – is that it was sort of a performance art, that he somehow could not think of any way to make an argument that his bad faith posts in the covid thread should (or should not, I don’t know what side he was on) fit the adopted definition of “trolling” without carrying it out himself for all PM thread participants to see. That’s cute and all. It strains credulity that he was literally unable to think of any way to put this into words in the PM conversation without putting it into practice, but it’s a cute explanation. I don’t get why I or any active participant or any lurker in the covid thread should tolerate someone deliberately making that thread worse so as to win an unrelated argument concerning totally different people. That, in my book, absolutely deserves a ban for violating our bad faith rule even trying to discern the best argument I can come up with for why he “trolled” the covid thread given your explanation for the context of the related quotes.
And of course, the performance in the covid thread and subsequent admission that got quoted from the PM thread is not the only bad faith fidget put forth. His word policing and “Gandhi” behavior he described as an “act” to deliberately rile up his opponents. Anyone could reasonably tell that this was bad faith, because no matter how peace-seeking he pretended to be, he plainly was weaponizing his act against his opponents while giving his allies free rein to commit the same transgressions he pretended to care about. Furthermore, your explanation about a serious discussion about trolling would not apply to this, or at least, even if it were part of a conversation on whether or not they’d want to allow this, it is plainly toxic to pretend to be a peace maker in deliberate service of further discord. It should absolutely not be allowed under our bad faith rule, and if this were in an effort to subject the forum to this sort of toxic performance so as to make an unrelated point to a separate audience is most unwelcome and should be banned.
Moving on,
No, an obvious and deliberate misconstruing of what I said. Almost everything I said to a micromanager was already public information, even if it could also be reasonably described as “saying bad things.” You set the bar awfully low with “saying bad things” about someone via PM, and that’s on you. I said them via PM because that is how I was asked for clarification, or perhaps because we once voted on and adopted:
In contrast to every instance of enforcement being subject to community referendum.
As for the rest, no, I’m not going to ban or out anyone who talks about moving to a new place. Anyone is free to go at any time, and anyone can start their own brand new forum at any time. If you or Keed or jal or Sabo or anyone I’ve ever banned or anyone I’ve ever liked or anyone else want to make their own new place, that’s their business, not mine. My issue is with shitting all over this one, and I have never, not once, had a conversation with anyone about making this place worse for the people who choose to be here, in stark contrast to the people who applauded or were complicit in fidget’s bullshit. It’s a claim I am unable to back up without handing over the keys to my account (obviously any PMs I post myself can be accused of being edited, groomed or selected while hiding the real salacious material), and I’m unwilling to give up the password to my account. If you think I’m lying, have me voted out as mod.
Assuming that intent is required to troll which is a huge stretch, you can’t really know someone’s intent unless they tell you what their intent was… oh wait.
If intent isn’t require… oh hum.
What’s this thread about again?
Damn you saw thru my totally meant to be sincere post, can’t get anything past you!
New rule for me - useless bullshit like this goes on forever ignore.
that he was
trying to win some debate vs a slippery opponent?
These are two separate things, the “Gahndi act” was in reference to something else, but it sounds like you’re saying that if his opponents want to see him banned, but they can’t because he is being nice, and this riles them up, that is… Somehow also trolling?
That’s whatever though, what I’m really interested in the environment fostered where everybody is allowed to “troll the forum” over this. People didn’t read the thread when they had the chance, now they’re definitively stating what it’s about, down to incorrect specifics, and that’s not the pinnacle of bad faith?
If Sabo (or Ked, or whomever, remember, most hear are even unclear about who started the PM thread!) really had some master plan to expose all of this, that you all would behave in such a ridiculous manner with the slightest push… How on earth is that a bad thing?!?
