I suppose, though if you’ve been following me so closely that you’ve seen the one time that I responded to a topic after it was closed (mostly as a joke), surely you have seen me say several times that the moderators are Falcor and Felton and the BB editors.
What I do with topic splitting, I do as a way of meta-illustration, as in “here is what we do when a topic goes wildly off-topic”.
Ah, the old “hide the cookie jar” theory of dieting. I find that wishing people into the cornfield is an unsustainable lifestyle.
Can a moderator say why Daneel’s empty post was removed? Was it for some technical reason. It was actually on-point and funny while using no words at all.
My favourite was a couple weeks ago when you moved a bunch of off-topic bellyaching about the BBS to its own “BBS sucks” discussion. I literally laughed out loud and was sad to see that you’d moved them back minutes later when I refreshed the page. That was straight out of the Antinous playbook
I would categorize his contributions as generally of quality. Can’t really speak to his temperament. I got banned here once years back by TNH for a week for some intemperate arguing. I deserved it. I am sure by Antinous as well.
I got banned by anti for making a sock puppet account in his name. Take notes kids, turns out mods don’t like that - even if it’s for a joke. It may well have been automated though and he unbanned me as soon as I contacted him.
No. I don’t follow you. But seeing a locked thread at the top of the most recently posted list gets a ‘huh?’ out of me, so I looked. And since I don’t follow you closely I had no way of knowing it was an isolated incident.
You can be as smugly derisive as you like, but I’ve seen it work well in other communities both offline and online so I’ll continue to recommend it when appropriate.
Interesting. I consider BBS to be an extension of BB.net, your answer would seem to indicate you see the two as separate entities.
Or, y’know, it’s the kind of evasive dismissal of AcerPlatanoides’s point we should expect from this paragon of maturity.
Whatever the official rationale, moving comments to the back room aligns with the interests of sponsors, who likely prefer to avoid the risk that criticism of their schlock or links to their competitors might contaminate their precious adspace.
It’s easy to hide your own cookie jar by not reading the comments you imagine to be trolly. I’ve seen not feeding the troll work well in other communities.
The problem with hiding people from each other is that you can have three simultaneous conversations, for example, going on which all look different but contain some of each other and are viewable by different subsets of the community. It leads to confusion and incomplete and unsatisfying resolution of the issues, what ever they are.
Free speech means, in part, being tolerant of others. More speech is always the solution, not less speech or hidden speech.
Because the proper solution to problems in your family is to simply stop speaking to those members of the family, and pretend those people don’t exist… right?
This isn’t a family. It’s a cocktail party. And yes, sometimes the proper solution at a cocktail party is to turn and talk to the other folks, even if it’s about the same topic.
I moderated a great discussion board for years. We had one member who was simultaneously one of the most knowledgeable, interesting, enlightening people on the subject and a confrontational, disturbing, not quite right in the head guy all rolled up in one. He was the reason half the people stuck around and the reason half the people who left the board left.
It is very tough as a moderator to know how to handle a person who contributes so much and is also such a big disturbance in the force. I tended to avoid the threads he hung out in after a while, but because of that, as a mod I was not aware of the spew he was spewing until someone would let me know - I was just ignoring the half of the board I didn’t want to interact with.
This is to say that I totally get the trouble with Cowicide and how we can all miss his presence while also feeling like a breather is a good idea. With the person I’m referring to, I did get to know him in person and I think his mind was pretty permanently skewed in a strange direction, so I didn’t feel there would be a lot of learning going on from any interventions. I suppose we can spell out the rules and let Cow know he strayed too far outside the range of acceptable behavior one too many times, but I think some people use discussion boards as a way of indulging a mental illness, and while I like to embrace everyone, I think as someone who has spent time interacting with a lot of people with mental health issues, it’s not very loving to allow them to just go on and on with disturbing behavior with no boundaries; but I think you have to be prepared to reign in Cowicide over and over again and not expect that he will learn his lesson after one time out. He will probably adjust his behavior for a while and then go off the rails again. I’m just fine with an approach of “come and play” along with “not today” sometimes. I think some people don’t have the ability to internalize self-control and need others to provide behavior regulation on their behalf.
[quote=“ChickieD, post:132, topic:13446, full:true”]
I moderated a great discussion board for years. We had one member who was simultaneously one of the most knowledgeable, interesting, enlightening people on the subject and a confrontational, disturbing, not quite right in the head guy all rolled up in one. [/quote]
I think a lot of boards have this guy. He’s the guy who knows how to push all the right buttons, but toe that line just enough to avoid a ban. I used to run one of the largest paintball forums on the web. We had one guy who was either loved or hated. Most of the mods could not stand the guy. If I left it to my mods the guy would have been toast. But me and the site owner decided to let him stay because he brought a lot of interest to the site, and sometimes had some good points. He added character to the place, and when he stirred shit up we got more clicks on the site.
