Transparency - changes to the BBS

I think you just have to browse a bit

  • entering at least 5 topics
  • reading at least 30 posts
  • spend a total of 10 minutes reading posts
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Read the entire Questions topic!

Seriously, though:

  • entering at least 5 topics
  • reading at least 30 posts
  • spend a total of 10 minutes reading posts

You currently have 1 minute read time, and have read 9 posts.

You still have a ways to go, but just try to read a variety of stuff and you’ll get it in no time.

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I’m not sure. There’s a setting to globally disable viewing edits, which I just disabled right now. Apparently, based on the links posted, it used to be off but got switched on at some point.

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The dealing with trollies threads got pretty ugly from time to time, and I’m relieved that they are gone - despite a few snarks in there that I thoroughly enjoyed. Remember, on at least three occasions people became “regular” and discovered that nasty dissections of their character had been going on behind the curtains.

As for people opening up, OK, I do sympathize with what you are saying and replied on this topic already, but the restricted threads were never really a safer space than the unrestricted ones in any real sense. Visible moderation and never being on the front page is what makes a thread work the way you remember, not arbitrary hurdles having nothing to do with humanity or empathy.

Most of my swords are sporting equipment; rattan, bokken, shinai, subaritos, epees, foils, sabers, schlagers, &etc. I’m more of an axe and spear man really. But I do have, um, lessee, 2 marine dress single swords, a couple of antique masonic swords from an obscure smith in Baltimore, and a civil war artillery officer’s sword.

On the other hand I’m comfortable with a bokken or a case of schlagers against any rapier lighter than an estoc :wink: so as long as you leave the .44 at home I feel good about my chances!

Wait - @Missy_Pants has a board with a nail in it! Curses!

I never wanted or asked for it, so don’t expend any extra effort to put mine back. Seriously. I’d rather be irregular (but only in the Baker Street sense, not the Raisin Bran sense).

All right, back to work again. Ta for now.

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The conclusion there represents an insider view however it should be equally obvious that those of us who have been around BoingBoing in various incarnations over a long time who did not achieve insider status see things differently and that from the outsider perspective, the insider view actually re-enforces the idea of “some are more equal than others”.

If indeed the goal is some kind of equality, “some more equal than others” would seem to be opposite to the goal.

Having been online in some form or another for almost 4 decades now I completely understand what you mean. Really though these online scenes come and go, just like scenes offline.

Life not being a fairy tale, online communities also dong get “happily ever after”. They come and go and for me, there’s value in the time they are there and that value will always be with me even after the scene changes.

If its not clear by now I have lots of respect for you coming so clean with this. Its damn hard as a community manager to make changes and to be so clear with members of the community, knowing that there will be a backlash. I’ve seen such change management handled in horrible ways IRL that resulted in years of venom and real life consequences by not being so clear and communicative.

Its human nature that the in group will gossip about and look down upon the lessers.

As per my comments to you above and my comments to @stinkinbadgers right above, essentially my answer is a qualified “yes”. Even the best of people, once part of an in group, will celebrate their status over the common people. Maybe outright, maybe through dog whistling, code words or polite forms of gossip, but it happens.

This confirms what I suspected and affirms what I’ve been saying in this comment to @Donald_Petersen & @stinkinbadgers.

If it werent for irregulars, we might not have a nation state called Italy

https://m.warhistoryonline.com/history/7-wars-irregular-forces-thwarted-professional-armies.html

In real life, communities are often affected by the decisions of a single person. However it looks as if @orenwolf was not a lone gunman in this case.

This is what cooperative ownership is a reaction to. Not that co-ops are perfect or immune to human nature, politicing and other foibles, but there in your example, and here in what we are discussing, non owners do not get a say in how the ship is run.

Not legal here or I would.

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Speaking of changes to the BBS … we have a category of General now. I kinda liked Dizzy for the catch all but whatever.
EDIT oh Dizzy changed names… I has a small sad.

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“General” fits in well with the authoritarian vibe. Dizzy was just too anarchic.

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Careful – the owls see all…

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10 posts were split to a new topic: The REAL BBS of BBS

Nc dsmvlld cstm usr ttl

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As a complete aside, what the heck happened here?

I thought I was experiencing some deja vu when I saw posts I thought I had already read and then I looked at the timestamps and saw something was quite odd.

A couple of day-old posts later it jumped back to correctly sequenced 2 hour-old posts.

Cc: @codinghorror

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I split out the swords conversation (which was great in its own right) and a few of the replies that went with it were better left back here, but perplexingly, when you move posts like that, they lose temporal order.

I suppose the argument is if they’re in “the past” then up-to-date thread readers won’t see them, but it leads to issues like out-of-order topics.

Worse, if you decide to move a conversation as a mod, you better get it right the first time, because if you miss some older posts, when you move those they all get stacked together as “new”.

I’d really rather they maintain temporal order (or at least give mods the option to “reorder conversation by time posted”.)

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That’s quite strange but yeah, it makes sense from a code perspective. Thanks for sanity checking me.

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Where were you with the isms when we had a whole thread on this

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Figures, I just got in there, and it closes.

See - can’t be a member of any club that has somebody like me for a member…

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Agreed.

Aside from the initial shock and sense of up-heaval, it seems to me that a helluva lot of all the sniffling and huffing on the part of some individuals who claim “the lounge was elitist” is just straight up sour-grapes that they didn’t/don’t bond well with certain groups of specific individuals; and I gotta say boo-fucking-hoo to them.

It’s not anyone else’s fault if you ‘don’t play well with others’ or if your persona is somehow repellent, and blaming your feelings of rejection on the existence of the lounge is just disingenuous at best.

So are all the comparisons to cliques, country clubs, and Mean Girls (although that is totally my jam, as far as teen movies go.)

We didn’t choose the Lounge, the Lounge chose us, via our metrics.

It’s been stated repeatedly anyone could achieve regular status with enough interaction, and that’s true; there were plenty of mutants who were regular status for whom I had no love lost and with whom I rarely engaged.

Enso was a perfect example; we didn’t care for each other at all, despite having many similar viewpoints and core values.

But as both he & @Donald_Petersen rightly said, there was a sense of familiarity therein that was comforting, even if everyone wasn’t buddy-buddy with everyone else (and please believe it, we weren’t.)

It sucks that that ‘comfort zone’ is gone, and the members who will miss it have a right to vent their feelings of disappointment.

For everyone else who never got the opportunity to experience all the in-jokes, rambling discussions and meta-insanity of spending way too much time on the BBS, here’s to you:

##(Just look at it.)

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To amplify on that a bit, all the TL3 metrics are around simple participation, as in “this person shows up daily, for weeks and weeks, and participates a lot”. Primarily by reading stuff, with a reasonable amount of posting and liking (both directions) mixed in.

It is very strange to claim that set of metrics is elitist in any way.

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