Transparency - changes to the BBS

Just because @othermichael kept on lifting your robe to look for the mark of the chosen one didn’t make it like the stonecutters lodge – he did that to everybody.

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Say, @orenwolf, has there been any change to the viewability of the edit-history of posts?

I’ve noticed that many(?) users’ edits are viewable now [by clicking on the orange-pencil-edit-icon at the upper right of an edited post], whereas I think that most(?) of us had had our post-edits non-viewable before.

I could have sworn that I had chosen something in my Preferences in the past, to make my edits non-viewable, but I’m not seeing that as a choice in my Preferences now.

Am I completely dreaming? Is my memory faulty? If we have a choice to make our edits non-viewable, where is that found? Thanks.

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All I know, is that it has been days since I have seen a pic of @Wanderfound’s current office! I need to know!!!

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Hey, yeah, you’re right. We definitely had the ability to disable edit history (which is on by default, and @codinghorror frequently maligned). The setting for this appears to be gone from preferences.

Whether or not this is a coincidence, this is definitely new.

ETA:
Here’s the previous discussion on this:

ETA2:
And this:

Just to prove you’re not insane and there was an opt-in/opt-out toggle:

What happened here?

Cc: @beschizza

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People are overrated

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How do i earn basic?

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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