Quote from: Maddmansuperdimensional dork-fortress

Beautiful job slipping that into a rational explanation of things.  Well done.

Quote from: MaddmanYes, because the government and people running a message board are exactly the same.  Hint: you don't have to visit a message board if you don't like their policies.

Crud, it was just a joke - in the same spirit as "my bf is a facist!" I don't actually equate RPG forum censorship with totalitarian governments. I also doubt very much that finiera actually considers her bf a nazi. Lighten up, Gus! I'm usually only litteral if it makes a better funny.

Luckily, you can change your forums. It's a lot more difficult - and bloodier - to change governments. Let's put it this way: I post here far more often than at RPGnet nowadays. RPGnet is boring to me.  

As for governments, in my estimation if you dress the best government conceivable up real fine, in the best clothing you could imagine, it just might make a poor kind of bung hole for a dog.

Quote from: gleichmanI have no doubt that the moderation at RPGNet is biased and heavy handed. I'm of the opinion that it was a much better site when it was unmoderated and wasn't owned by Skotos Tech Inc. The change of ownership brought money into the question, and with money everything changed.

However given the site's ownership, complaining about the resulting moderation is like complaining about the sky being blue. RPGNet is now what it is, and unless it was removed from corp ownership- the moderation won't change for the better. Indeed, IMO it will likely get even worse.

Another factor is the pure size of the population visiting the site. They often have more people *viewing* the Open forum than Nunkinland has total membership. Such traffic greatly increases any conflict turning what would be a couple of heated exchanges into raging flamewars.

And just to add this in, the lost of the Search feature in the fourms made their site rather worthless over the long term anyway.

I'm in complete agreement with Mr. Gleichman in this matter.  Nowadays I get what I can from RPGnet and try not to sweat the rest.  Pundit may be correct in many of his complaints, but his invectives aren't changing things over there.

I personally prefer completely unrestricted free speech, but I know I'm only guaranteed it on the boards I myself run.

Quote from: YamoI personally prefer completely unrestricted free speech, but I know I'm only guaranteed it on the boards I myself run.

So you permit spam and massive posting of goatse pics?

Quote from: YamoI personally prefer completely unrestricted free speech, but I know I'm only guaranteed it on the boards I myself run.

Completely unrestricted free speech is not a good thing.

Nutkinland is one of the closer things you will get to unrestricted free speech on the net.  And, yet, Julius Sleazer lies in the corner with a bullet in the head, the first permaban.

We will tolerate a lot more motherfucking shit on this board than most places will.  But if you piss us off, I'll cut your fucking balls off without a second thought.  I'd rather have a fun and functional community than let every special and unique snowflake shit all over the place, like that yahoo was doing.

Quote from: Name LipsSo you permit spam and massive posting of goatse pics?

Point me to it and he might just get to experience the magic that is goatse.  :heh:

QuoteSo you permit spam and massive posting of goatse pics?

I'd tolerate occasional posting of Goatse, sure, but "massive spamming" would be less speech and more an attempt to make the site unusable or difficult to navigate, which crosses the line from speech to action.

Kind of the difference between yelling "fire" in a theater and actually setting the theater on fire.

QuoteCompletely unrestricted free speech is not a good thing.

Not if you don't want to deal with the annoyances it brings, true.

Quote from: FinairaThat explains a lot about Levi....now that you mention it....

well, you mix the letters in his name around and you get e-v-i-l

that should have been obvious.  

Quote from: BOZwell, you mix the letters in his name around and you get e-v-i-l

that should have been obvious.  

Or v-i-l-e, if you prefer.

So how does one actually decide what makes a good ban on free speech in terms of forums?  I understand that some people prefer forums that let them say what they want but where is that line?  Most forums that I've ever seen make it pretty damn explicit with what is acceptable and what is considered over the top.  So are the forums not just censoring things before they hit the page by explaining what is and what is not acceptable?


((Btw, Levi, I love you and everything....you're still crazy.))

I have lurked on RPGnet for a long time. I have all of one post to my name. So my opinion may not really count.

But here's the problem I have with the moderation/censorship, because I think one bleeds into the other. It's made the place boring. I mean yes the bloody footprints must have been a bitch to clean up, but on the whole there was a lot of passion in those flames. Passion which I think has been doused in trying to make the place more friendly(I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt as to their motives for cleaning up the place as it were)

I despise censorship. I'll take the good and the bad which comes from making such statement. I have seen a lot of stupid comments being made but I feel it's up to fellow posters to deal with said stupidity. There is a problem (and no, I can't give specific examples - so I'm going to tread carefully) with the way how moderation is practised there. I do find it troubling. I sense a biasness esp against specific posters -not so much the views expressed but rather  against the poster making such comments- I have seen other posters making similar comments and getting away with a warning, if even that.

To be fair a lot of the flamewarriors of old have been banned. They come from both sides of whatever spectrum you care to name - but I think at this time I get a siege mentality vibe as to how moderation is carried out. I could be mistaken. I gather(and I maybe mistaken that there is a lot more people visiting the site - good for them) If their changes has resulted in more people contributing in the forums, then whatever they have done is working.

I have lurked around there for a long time, so this may just be the gripes of somebody looking too fondly at the past and making statments that does not contain any actual merit.

Regards,
David R

Meh. The main obligation of an online community is to *be* a functional community. There are a bunch of ways of doing it, but only two that work without constant adjustment. The first is to have very loose rules that allow people to settle their differences, and the second it to have strict rules that focus on a chosen set of topics.

RPGNet tries to occupy a middle ground and isn't very successful at it, though the site's getting much, much better. In truth, there were some problems so severe that the wole site should have followed ENWorld's SOP a few years ago. One example I can think of offhand was a mod's admission to me that he knew a group of posters used IM to manage political flamewars so that there would be at least a couple of their ilk posting issuing attacks on a thread 24 hours a day, and who organized mass reports of posts to abuse the moderation system itself.

Then there was the child sex offender who wasn't *banned*. Regular users had to ask him to go away. The less said about that, the better.

So RPG.net careened along for a while with the principle (this was explained to me by Kuma) that posters who were prone to attack should just defend themselves. Of course, if they did so effectively, they'd get the banstick. This was supported by a happy crew of moderators who were primarily chosen because of how they acted in the non-gaming part of the site, including people who would start arguments in a standard account and end them with a mod account sanction.

Things have progressed since then. Ironically, every single suggestion a group of us tabled a while back has been adopted. This was not because they were thinking of them. It was because it was as inevitable as the site's problems were systemic. No matter how good the people were, they were going to fuck up because they were operating on a broken premise: That establishing things in an ad hoc, case by case manner was going to control problems and open up interesting discussion.

Lax rules and tight rules have something in common, and that's a sense of consistency. It's not that every decision is perfect, but it is tolerable and mostly predictable. Rules are a user guide for members and tell them what to expect. They can empower users. But if they're vague, they're worse than blatantly unfair rules that are specific.

For example, I'm an on again, off again participant on bullshido.net. Bullshido is the kind of place where people who like full contact fighting call each other faggots and threaten to beat the crap out of each other, but y'know what? I find it a much more welcoming environment than RPG.net . There's no fronting and whining to administration. It's even blatantly unfair (basically, unless you practice Muay Thai or submision grappling somebody's going to take a big textual dump on you), but you *know where you stand.* There's none of this garbage where an "identifiable group" can mean any frickin' thing in the world. On Bullshido, you can say all the unkind things about homosexuals you like, and a homosexual who can beat the shit out of you will beg to differ.

On the other side of things, ENWorld has never been perfect but it's not bad. It has its flaws (there really needs to be an industry only "fishbowl" that people can read but not post to, because many of us are tired of posting the same thing over and over to people who say that same incorrect things over and over), but on the whole, it works.

I remember Usenet circa 1995. I remember it slowly being innundated by spam to, by the time I left in 96, 95% of the posts being spam.  The other 5% was primarily ongoing flamewars - some in their 3rd year.  Free speech requires a certain amount of civility, and unfortunately someone has to enforce it.

Ridicule is the primary means NKL has always dealt with problem posters, but occassionally things already have and will in the future rise to the occasion of banning.  What earns a banning here? We'll, that depends - I like to say there are several flavors of banned.

The classic ban, of which Justin Sleazer is our only member, requires Grade A asshat behavior. Someone with no redeeming qualities (at least within 4 posts).

Then there's the jack-ass ban.  Yamo can tell you about that one. It's not really a ban in the classic sense of the word since the jack-ass can still post - he just get's a new avatar (By the way, that one's been lifted).

There's the (EDIT: Why should I reveal what's up my sleave?)