This doesn’t have anything to do with the recent (9th Circuit IIRC) decision about mods and the DMCA safe harbor, does it? It doesn’t seem like it, because there’s still moderation, but I was wondering if we’d see things changing on the BBS and now this …
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Open a new topic please with specifics it is buried here.
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Aye. Back in me old dialup days, the old boards had a feature of
auto-quoting the post you responded to. And nicely saved all your sent
posts in one place in your inbox. Discourse has no such norm; preserving
context is imperative. Few regs have access to the old Lounge threads
now… It is the duty of those who remain to scrape as much as possible.
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I still don’t grok why it was a bad thing. If the consensus is that administrative conversations should take place outside the Lounge (particularly ones regarding non-Lounge activity), that would have been a pretty simple policy to institute: just say the word, and it would have been so.
There was a reason for TL3. It was a good reason, involving that T. It’s gone now.
This is not an improvement. I honestly wonder how anyone can consider it so. Whatever recent issues have arisen, how does this address them at all? Except for “leveling the playing field” by equalizing good-faith contributors of several years’ standing with even fresh-off-the-TL0-turnip-truck tyros with six posts and four likes to their name.
But hey, we get fancy titles next to our names. Which at least demonstrates how long ago we fell off that same turnip truck, but which affords us precisely no benefit whatsoever. Especially compared to what existed before: a gently gated community whose sole (and very democratic) standard for entry was that one demonstrate one’s ability to engage at length and with some frequency with the larger community without shitting the bed. That bare level of curation and gatekeeping turned out to be invaluable to those who felt a level of comfort and security in the Lounge that they could find nowhere else online. I myself didn’t recognize the depth of that need until now.
I do feel it’s a bit disingenuous for you to shoulder blame for the 2-tier “mistake” when it really comes across as a punishment of the Regulars for… what? Squawking about bans? For wanting to feel some investment and ownership in the community? For some other sins?
I do believe you’re being sincere with us all the time, Ken, but I really have trouble believing that TL3 was in fact any kind of mistake. I’m keen to discover if @codinghorror disagrees with me.
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Please explain to me why such is that important to have/create the risk of compromising semi private data?
And why you think it’s a duty?
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I’ve been wondering about this as well. Doesn’t this basically break the entire gamification aspect of trust levels? I would love to hear his take on this New World Order.
As for everything else you’ve said, I couldn’t agree more.
Now I get to go to bed upset, angry, confused, and befuddled at these events. Maybe tomorrow someone up top will have a change of heart but I’m not holding my breath. God speed, BBS.
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When we typed the posts in that thread, it was under the impression that it would be available to us Regulars as long as there were Regulars, and that Regulars were trustworthy, and that if our local cache (our human memory) failed, we could review the thread ourselves. But the first premise has now been invalidated; there will no longer be Regulars - nor will that thread be open to people who once held Regular status.
I have always been a digital hoarder; one school year, I downloaded and scraped ALL the posts on the forum before the sysadmin wiped them. Because those were our stories that we wrote, together. Those were our threads about our lives. We built entire worlds on the forum. In previous years, the sysadmin killed them all at a stroke of the keyboard. Even though the exact same people attended year after year, nothing we did mattered. Until it did.
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I hear you. I still have thousands of chat logs from BBSes (like, real ones) I used to frequent back in the day. My #lounge access was revoked so quickly I never had a chance to even try to save anything I may have been sentimental about.
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I think it’s worth mentioning that there were several possible outcomes, and what Ken is proposing is easily the least worst. Just my opinion, I am not in charge here, but that is my honest opinion. Should there have been other options? Not for me to say.
I definitely nominate Donald Petersen as the very voice and soul of BBS, though.
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Take a deep breath for a moment please. You are talking for all regulars. And for how long where you a regular? You say a lot of “We”, it can be appreciated. But it feels now a bit intruding.
Scraping data can be a good skill, especially if you want to play with such, So kudos. What I try to make clear here is that, even if you have such skill (and many, many regs have such as you maybe know, lots of mutants are pretty skilled. And/or security aware.) Even if you have such skills, you don’t need to use them. Or run into doing things before thinking about privacy, and risk. Risk assessment. In good English I think.
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Yeah. It sucks. Staff moved wayyyy too fast. They should have created an alternate trust level 3 and gave us regs permanent read-only access to Lounge. ;-;
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Honestly? I think you have more to worry about from TLAs than other regulars going rogue - if they were inclined to go rogue before, when they had access to all the lounge topics, they would have. I’m really tired though, spent too long under a trailer and had a splittin’ headache for the best part of the evening. Standing right behind me with a hatchet is my sister… I can’t finish scraping tonight.
False equivalence. People here weren’t posting things they wanted to keep from TLAs. Don’t be an asshat.
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Hey, you missed my point completely.
I think you, or anybody else, should not take the risk of scraping things. And putting them outside in the wild.
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So other than your word, what assurance is there that my shit ain’t gonna end up, say, all over the chans?
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Mate, when I think ephemeral, I think IRC. BBS is all about a paper trail.
I’m not posting the archive for world and dog. But I am preserving it for those who contributed to writing it.
Did they asked you to do so?
Are you a trusted and well known and curated archive?
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I didn’t say anything about ephemeral. Thanks for “explaining the techs” to me though. Much appreciated.
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To archive the lounge thread? No. But most were angry their access was revoked; an archive is the closest thing I can do to restore them the access to their conversations. I don’t have enough bandwidth to upload a friggin’ mp3 file let alone the last 1000 posts (total: 170mb of HTML. Alone.)
This. Potentially anybody could reach that level (or it could have been made possible for anyone to potentially reach it without favouritism by tweaking the criteria), but it took effort. People felt safer sharing because not every random trolley could see those posts and anyone who wanted to do damage based on those needed to play a long game.
I wasn’t on the “inside” for long, but what I saw was a supportive, welcoming group of people who cared about each other, even if they didn’t all like each other. This seems partly because everyone had gotten a chance to know who they were dealing with. This is basically the “trust” that the trust level engendered. ‘We trust you because you’ve been round long enough and revealed enough of yourself that we know who you are.’
Trust and feeling safe aren’t easy for vulnerable people on the Internet. I can see why a lot of people are mad, hurt, or feeling betrayed now that is being taken away.
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