Five years of BBS 📅

[gracchus]

@codinghorror

Not accurate. Read the actual trust level requirements

Fair enough. None-the-less it let through a small number of users who were still able to persist here for a long time despite being considered trollies by a large number of Regulars (including those who set up the Lounges devoted to discussing the particularly sneaky behaviour of said alleged trollies that allowed them to persist).

@codinghorror

It is fair to note that maybe Discourse didn’t provide proper guidance around the meta-moderation purpose of the lounge areas – that is discuss desired behaviors, not specific people .

I wouldn’t put that guidance responsibility on the devs, especially since your design philosophy and rules system, strong as it is, manages to favour a lot of flexibility and freedom for those running instances.

As I recall the mods here made it clear they’d take a lighter touch on the TL3 Lounges; it didn’t work out and eliminating them was the decision they came to.

@codinghorror

I dunno, I’ve seen some pretty big PM username lists floating out around out there in the ether. Is that better or worse than a TL3 lounge? There’s also diasporas where sites fragment into additional instances, with a change in ownership as some users permanently leave for the greener pastures of the new world, while sometimes maintaining shadow accounts in the old world to monitor it. Is that better or worse than a TL3 lounge?

That’s not for me to answer but for those who control the various instances of Discourse or whatever other platforms are running in the various greener pastures. Their joints, their rules.*

What I will say is that, after the brief period of tumult and bad feelings and lost users (caused by the abruptness of the removal than the removal itself), BB BBS hasn’t suffered much by management’s discontinuation of the TL3 Lounges. The user-created topics in the non-boing categories visible to all(?) seem to be doing most of the same job as most of the old Lounges. I suppose if people want to discuss more private or personally sensitive issues that used to be done in the Lounges they can now do so in the PMs.

As I said above, personally I’m not averse to the member-created TL3 Lounges coming back here, as long as they have an optional invite-only feature which would solve or at least mitigate the problem we saw last time around.

[* enhanced by a system that, among other smart features, would degrade the TLs of monitoring shadow accounts you mention as a matter of course]

@codinghorror

I’ve always felt that at least one active moderator should come from the community itself, as a sort of volunteer pseudo-elected position.

Absolutely agree. I think @orenwolf came into his current position that way, which is why he’s so good at it. It’s a great idea for the devs to build in features that encourage those running instances to choose their mods that way.

@codinghorror

Bad faith is tricky. I totally get it, and I support it, but you see why Twitter and Facebook resort to positively orwellian phrases like Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior to describe it.

It’s absolutely tricky. Due to the scale of BB BBS and the maturity level of its existing community compared to Twitter and FB, though, I do think a 1-2 month re-labeling of “Something Else” to “Bad Faith” accompanied by a policy announcement by the mods would be a worthwhile experiment. Whether it would translate over to other instances is another matter but I believe we’re the willing guinea pigs in your mad science lab.