Quote from: Dominus NoxTHEY BANNED A SMILEY?!?!?!?!

Could you provide more details, please?

I logged in one day and the :rolleyes: was just that.  Text.  I believe there was an initial announcement about the smiley being removed and a warning not to circumvent it's removal, or that may have been in a totally seperate thread.  Long story short the :rolleyes: was removed because it was considered disruptive, which I took to mean people complained about it.

As I'd just logged in after a long absence I couldn't even tell you what led to this.  In the end the ruling was the :rolleyes: smiley was technically not "banned" just no longer "desired".  Or some thing along those lines.

Quote from: Akrasia:confused:

Not my threads, mate....

I have no idea what the fuck you are talking about, and frankly, I don't give a shit.

Enhance your calm citizen.

I've been on the boards a while.  From the sound of it perhaps a wee bit longer than you.  So I may be referencing things that happened before you joined the forums.

Long story short: There've been periods of time when RP Open was full of threads about Exalted.  So many threads about Exalted that TT actually had threads complaing about the threads in RP Open!  Before that there were a number of threads about how D20 was going to doom the industy ("my hat of D02 know no limit" ring any bells?), and lots and lots of other silliness.

Nothing to worry about.  It's all water under the bridge.

Quote from: J ArcaneI never quite understood why this pisses so many people off.  "How dare people talk about things you don't want to talk about!  They should only be allowed to talk about what I want to talk about!  But the mods are bad fascist censors!"

There are a few reasons.

The first is that it's just plain confusing. We sign up to rpg.net expecting to talk about rpgs. You wouldn't sign on to dog.net expecting to talk about giraffes and rhinos, nor would you sign on to medical.net expecting to talk about modern literature. So if a forum stops being mainly about its title topic, well that's just confusing. It's the same reason people get annoyed when threads are derailed - you go into it expecting to talk about one thing, and there they are blabbing about another. It puts people off, and eventually people stop going to that forum at all.

The second is that in the case of rpg.net, the heavy-handed moderation came about as a result of Tangency Open. Without the dramas of that forum, there'd be not one-tenth the moderation. They wouldn't be doing shit like banning the roll-eyes smilie for the sake of someone posting about Exalted, but when it's about someone's day at work or gay rights, well then everyone gets sensitive, and out come the rules and heavy moderation.

The third is that you end up with threadcraps, like old Kiero saying, "what's d20?" in the middle of some Roleplaying Open thread. The people with no interest in the forum and those with some overlap a bit; in the case of rpg.net or The Forge, those people are the Bitter Non-Gamers, like Kiero, and they're a pain in the arse and we'd rather not have them; without subforums which encourage them (like Tangency Open, or RPG Theory), they go away. With them, they hang around being cocksmocks.

In short, there's nothing wrong with off-topic discussion in its own forum.

However, if your site is called "rpg.net," I think it should maybe probably maybe be primarily about roleplaying games.

Quote from: Kester PelagiusI logged in one day and the :rolleyes: was just that.  Text.  I believe there was an initial announcement about the smiley being removed and a warning not to circumvent it's removal, or that may have been in a totally seperate thread.  Long story short the :rolleyes: was removed because it was considered disruptive, which I took to mean people complained about it.

As I'd just logged in after a long absence I couldn't even tell you what led to this.  In the end the ruling was the :rolleyes: smiley was technically not "banned" just no longer "desired".  Or some thing along those lines.

So now the mods control even the smilies on rpg.net. Jesus tap dancing christ, what the fuck next?

Has anyone openly just left rpg.net after saying something to the effect of "It's just fucking impossible to have a conversation around here anymore without getting threatened or banned." or "I just can't stand the pompous asses running this place anymore."?

I've contributed to lots of conversations on RPGnet without the worry about bannage or using the wrong smiley. All you have to do is not be an asshole. It's pretty easy. And smileys are fascile anyway.

Oh and PS - Akrasia is one of the best posters over there. Maybe it's cuz he like the old-school stuff like I do.

I left without getting banned, I've gone back maybe three times to read specific threads Jim Bob sent me links to, and that's it. I'm much happier now that I'm no longer associated with the site, though I do miss the PbP forums there.

Here's the latest:

QuoteWe've figured out how to "fix" the board, but in the process the last 500,000 posts got eaten. We're thus shutting down the board again, to see if a restore will fix things. This will probably be another day, folks.

I hadn't noticed.

QuoteWe've figured out how to "fix" the board, but in the process the last 500,000 posts got eaten. We're thus shutting down the board again, to see if a restore will fix things. This will probably be another day, folks.

My God.

That means 499,900 Exalted threads were snuffed out in an instant.

Quote from: J ArcaneFrankly, after a while I stopped paying much attention to RP Open.  It was what drew me to the site, but after a while itceased to be what kept me there.

There just ceased to be all that much in the way of threads that interested me, just tons of spectacularly idiotic and petty flamewars, and my own attempts at discussing things that would interest me tended to be universally ignored.  Thing was too, that while I like RPGs, and enjoy them a lot, they're only one aspect of my interests, and when presented with an open forum with which to discuss all of them, the RPGs are likely to wind up being less than a majority percentage.  

I've posted to and read more RPG-related posts on this site than I think I had in the last two or three years or more on RP Open at RPGnet.  

And there were enough other folks who wound up engaging in similar migration, that it sort of led to the odd split that's continued to this day.  

There are indeed a number of non-gamers who post in Tangency.  A lot of them came by way of friends or family who were gamers and long time RPGnet posters, but there were also some who just seemed to wander in from nowhere in particular and nest.  A lot of those didn't really last, with the exception of a rare one or two like bulletproof.  Most of the regular Tangency-exclusive posters are gamers, they just didn't really spend much time talking about them.

Point being that contrary to the popular opinions of a lot of folks in this thread, the non-gamers remained an exception rather than a rule.

The moderators have stated that the direction they'd intended for the site was more as a general geek hangout, than a specifically focused RPG-only site.  That's just the way it is, and it seems spectacularly unlikely to change anytime soon.  

I never quite understood why this pisses so many people off.  "How dare people talk about things you don't want to talk about!  They should only be allowed to talk about what I want to talk about!  But the mods are bad fascist censors!"

QFT.  In the end, who cares and what does it matter?  If you were given the business end of the modhammer, then get on with your life.  For gods sake, its just a friggin website.  You've found another one to do what you wanted to do in, what difference does it make if RPG.net dropped all reference to role playing games, and is now called "The Curt and Cessna Dick Swinging and Dancing To Techno Metallica Power Hour Live Cam"?

Quote from: Dominus NoxSo now the mods control even the smilies on rpg.net. Jesus tap dancing christ, what the fuck next?

Has anyone openly just left rpg.net after saying something to the effect of "It's just fucking impossible to have a conversation around here anymore without getting threatened or banned." or "I just can't stand the pompous asses running this place anymore."?

No.  Because, of course, it is perfectly possible to carry on conversation without getting warned or banned.  Its not, however, possible to carry on a conversation being a cockmunch and not get threatened or banned.  Theres a difference.

Well, I still like to post there, my concern is that Tangency (which incidentally also has a lot of good about it) has resulted in far more aggressive moderation of Open than I think is healthy for debate there, I think Tangency is linked to the problems with using the historically very valuable Search function which is now near useless and I think Tangency is plainly the cause of the bandwidth issues.

Simple as that, Tangency has directly reduced the site's utility to me as an rpg forum.  That's my beef with it, and in the process the Tangency driven moderation has led to a ton of posters I found interesting being banned.

Personally I always liked the Exalted threads, I don't play the game but I do like people posting with real love and enthusiasm about an rpg they love, to me that's what the site should be about.

Anyway, the difference is that I've lost much of the utility of a site that I sunk a lot of time into and that still has a lot of great people on it, that's why I care about it.

As for Tangency posters, perhaps I'm wrong, my impression was that a significant number of the more vocal and frequent posters were not actually gamers.  I've seen a few post about how they find gaming a bit odd.

Again, I would prefer to see it split into Tangency.net and rpg.net, with cross links one to the other on their main pages.  That would mean the tangency guys could still get on with the unique thing they've created but the rpg fora could maybe be moderated a bit less heavily and have fewer bandwidth problems.

Oh, one last thing, for the moment I'm a paying member.  I'm unhappy that my membership fees are going increasingly to supporting a general geek chatsite, that's not what I paid for.  I don't see myself renewing my membership on current trends.

Quote from: HackmastergeneralNo.  Because, of course, it is perfectly possible to carry on conversation without getting warned or banned.  Its not, however, possible to carry on a conversation being a cockmunch and not get threatened or banned.  Theres a difference.

Certainly I manage, although I do think that some conversations are hampered and I think there is sometimes a vague air of simmering resentment as instead of being able to say to people "fuck you, you retarded lawncrapper, your flabby body is only held together by the accumulated dirt of years of living in your parents' basement without washing and it doesn't surprise me your game has problems, your players are probably retching from the site of you" we have to say something more like "I'm not sure I'm entirely with you on that point".

I think sometimes it's best just to let these things out...

The thing is, certainly one can still converse, however I do genuinely think that under the current climate the quality of conversation has declined in part because of a concern about getting banned if one ends up in an argument.  Sometimes arguments are good things, I learn more from being corrected than I ever do from people agreeing with me.

Quote from: HackmastergeneralNo.  Because, of course, it is perfectly possible to carry on conversation without getting warned or banned.  Its not, however, possible to carry on a conversation being a cockmunch and not get threatened or banned.  Theres a difference.

What he just said. I've never received a single warning, I think, and I've posted in whenever thread I felt like to. And Balbinus also makes good points, as usual.

I've always been surprised by all the people who spend time proclaiming how shitty, irrelevant, awful or whatever is RPG.net, or any other forum, but spent time browsing them, looking for things to be aggravated at. If I don't like a site, I stop visiting it. :raise: