Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: karajorma on April 05, 2017, 09:24:42 pm
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We've opened a new board for political discussion on HLP. At the moment access is available to anyone who wants it simply by going to your profile and clicking on Group Membership and then asking to join the Political Discussions group. Later your request to join will have to be approved by an admin or global moderator.
If for some reason you are currently banned from General Discussion, you will also find you are banned from the political discussion forum. We might consider some form of general amnesty in the near future once the Political Discussions group has settled down a little.
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If I understand correctly GD is the Bebop and political discussions are going the way of the scary lobster fridge?
(http://i.imgur.com/UA1ycFZ.gif)?
So long as I don't apply for the political board then I don't ever need to relive the following:
(http://static.fjcdn.com/gifs/Cowboy+be+nope+nopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopeyepnopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenopenope_3ebc5c_5019657.gif)
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I'm assuming the group option doesn't have any effect on us mod-types, then?
(Lesson lesson! If you see a stranger, follow him!)
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I've not tried it with a global mod account. You might need to add yourself to the group in order to see / post on the forum. You also have moderator powers on the group cause once we go over to making it require someone's permission to opt in, it will be up to the global mods and admins to decide who gets in.
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Just tested. I can post in PolDis without explicitly being a member of that group according to my user profile.
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TwoThree things:
1. Honestly, Political Discussions would be better as a child board to genDisc, not a separate off-topic area. The net result of excising it from GenDisc is going to be a reduction in participation; at least leaving it as a fully viewable (to everyone) child board, with write permissions granted on group membership would encourage people to join. The fact that you have to actually log in and join the group to even SEE it is going to dramatically narrow the userbase. Those discussions are only interesting due to a diversity of opinion, not in spite of them. Right now this just looks like an attempt to basically eliminate political discussion threads through atrophy.
2. You need to sticky a thread in GenDisc pointing people to the Political Discussions forum, with instructions on how to join.
3. The inevitable result of not doing the above is just going to be people posting politics-related discussions in GenDisc anyway because they don't see the Political Discussion board, which will result in more work for the mods.
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addendum to three,:
their posts getting deleted (moved to the read only trash bin called political discussion)
@The E: so what you are saying is I am already known to be a wrong thinker.
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TwoThree things:
1. Honestly, Political Discussions would be better as a child board to genDisc, not a separate off-topic area. The net result of excising it from GenDisc is going to be a reduction in participation; at least leaving it as a fully viewable (to everyone) child board, with write permissions granted on group membership would encourage people to join. The fact that you have to actually log in and join the group to even SEE it is going to dramatically narrow the userbase. Those discussions are only interesting due to a diversity of opinion, not in spite of them. Right now this just looks like an attempt to basically eliminate political discussion threads through atrophy.
2. You need to sticky a thread in GenDisc pointing people to the Political Discussions forum, with instructions on how to join.
3. The inevitable result of not doing the above is just going to be people posting politics-related discussions in GenDisc anyway because they don't see the Political Discussion board, which will result in more work for the mods.
I think there's definitely merit to having Political Discussions be a subfolder of GenDisc, though I'm a bit less sure about having it automatically be publicly-viewable. Subfolder or not, does SMF allow for an access-limited folder to still be visible (but not open-able) on the forum index? If that were the case, wherever it was located, we could have the instructions for joining located right in the folder description.
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TwoThree things:
1. Honestly, Political Discussions would be better as a child board to genDisc, not a separate off-topic area. The net result of excising it from GenDisc is going to be a reduction in participation; at least leaving it as a fully viewable (to everyone) child board, with write permissions granted on group membership would encourage people to join. The fact that you have to actually log in and join the group to even SEE it is going to dramatically narrow the userbase. Those discussions are only interesting due to a diversity of opinion, not in spite of them. Right now this just looks like an attempt to basically eliminate political discussion threads through atrophy.
2. You need to sticky a thread in GenDisc pointing people to the Political Discussions forum, with instructions on how to join.
3. The inevitable result of not doing the above is just going to be people posting politics-related discussions in GenDisc anyway because they don't see the Political Discussion board, which will result in more work for the mods.
I agree with this: I like the setup of having a seperate political board, as well as the notion of having a clean slate to start moderating with, but I think that having a political subboard and giving it the same restrictions GenDisc previously had (hidden from "new posts", a political prisoners group, and possibly not visible to members who aren't logged in to discourage people signing up specifically to debate politics rather then playing freespace) is good enough. The current setup seems somewhat heavy handed, even if it's just a click away.
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I agree with this: I like the setup of having a seperate political board, as well as the notion of having a clean slate to start moderating with, but I think that having a political subboard and giving it the same restrictions GenDisc previously had (hidden from "new posts", a political prisoners group, and possibly not visible to members who aren't logged in to discourage people signing up specifically to debate politics rather then playing freespace) is good enough. The current setup seems somewhat heavy handed, even if it's just a click away.
I agree with all of this.
see we can agree on things! :)
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can we put this discussion into political discussion so that ordinary decent people don't have to witness the sheer piss and vomit
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Done. All the political stuff has been moved where it belongs (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=93412.0). And it had better not come back either.
TwoThree things:
1. Honestly, Political Discussions would be better as a child board to genDisc, not a separate off-topic area. The net result of excising it from GenDisc is going to be a reduction in participation; at least leaving it as a fully viewable (to everyone) child board, with write permissions granted on group membership would encourage people to join. The fact that you have to actually log in and join the group to even SEE it is going to dramatically narrow the userbase. Those discussions are only interesting due to a diversity of opinion, not in spite of them. Right now this just looks like an attempt to basically eliminate political discussion threads through atrophy.
2. You need to sticky a thread in GenDisc pointing people to the Political Discussions forum, with instructions on how to join.
3. The inevitable result of not doing the above is just going to be people posting politics-related discussions in GenDisc anyway because they don't see the Political Discussion board, which will result in more work for the mods.
I agree with this: I like the setup of having a seperate political board, as well as the notion of having a clean slate to start moderating with, but I think that having a political subboard and giving it the same restrictions GenDisc previously had (hidden from "new posts", a political prisoners group, and possibly not visible to members who aren't logged in to discourage people signing up specifically to debate politics rather then playing freespace) is good enough. The current setup seems somewhat heavy handed, even if it's just a click away.
Bear in mind that the idea behind this round is to get the political forum up and running smoothly. If things work out well then we can see about making it run more smoothly for people who want to casually drop in. If it doesn't, I'd rather than only those who choose to wallow in flith get to see the board. :p
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If it is made a child board of GenDisc, the posts do not make their way to the 'new posts' thing, and it's not visible to unregistered users, would that not meet that goal? I think there is a (rare) consensus forming from all angles. Even me and Josh are in agreement, when was the last time that happened?
and it might be a good idea to include "and Religion" in this, as those threads tend to be just as contentious and the two subjects lead into each other.
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Me you and Ryan aren't nearly enough to form a consensus though! It's not like this approach hasn't been discussed in both the announcements forum and on the internal mod board (or whatever communication system admins use).
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see how hard it is for us to agree on literally anything?
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that seems almost entirely to be on account of your efforts though
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Bear in mind that the idea behind this round is to get the political forum up and running smoothly. If things work out well then we can see about making it run more smoothly for people who want to casually drop in. If it doesn't, I'd rather than only those who choose to wallow in flith get to see the board. :p
That's self-defeating. If you make the board only visible to people who choose to opt-in, and then make it non-obvious about how one even finds the board and opts into it, then you're definitely narrowing the userbase to a tiny group of people, which is going to make it MORE tribal, not less.
What's wrong with making Political Discussions a subforum of GenDisc without all the hoops to get into it? You've already said moderation is going to stay the same, you can already set permissions for child boards, so I fail to see any reason whatsoever to make Political Discussions a special category of opt-in that's otherwise invisible except as a misguided attempt to kill that sort of discussion on HLP altogether, which is exactly what all of these measures look like. Literally no other board on this entire forum is opt-in (and buried under menus to do so) or accessible to the general userbase but invisible to them unless they've opted in.
There is literally no impact to anyone who does not want to participate by separating it but keeping it transparently viewable and making default forum membership allow people to post in it if they want to. No one is forcing anyone to venture in there, but you're setting up a default opt-in to "no Political Discussion" with zero transparency. It's garbage when developers hide functionality under cryptic menu schemes, and its doubly-garbage when a group of people who actively protest that behaviour in software turn around and do the same damn thing in something they manage and control.
I basically hang around entirely in the Off-Topic areas these days and I saw no notice or mention of these decisions in advance, so I highly doubt I'm the only user who's simultaneously surprised and angry at changes seemingly out of nowhere with no consultation in the actual board that the most drastic changes are being made to.
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Actually the vast majority expressed a desire to not even see the political threads. Now whether making things opt-in goes too far in that direction is another matter.
I'm not unaverse to removing the opt-in usergroup but I also like the idea of making people actually decide that they want to participate rather than simply drive-by posting. I suppose read-only access for logged in forum members might be a way to achieve that though. What I don't want any more of is situations where board members leave HLP after having stumbled into a political discussion cause they're disgusted by the opinions that are allowed on here. We've had entirely too much of that in the past.
What's wrong with making Political Discussions a subforum of GenDisc without all the hoops to get into it? You've already said moderation is going to stay the same
Actually I haven't said that. In fact I've pointed out that the moderation will be stricter. And that's the problem. I don't want people wandering into a more strictly moderated section of HLP and then whining about it once the hammer comes down.
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Actually the vast majority expressed a desire to not even see the political threads.
Who? Where? I ask this not out of spite, but if there genuinely has been a feedback attempt apparently I (and who knows how many others) missed it. Or is this purely anecdotal?
Now whether making things opt-in goes too far in that direction is another matter.
I'm not unaverse to removing the opt-in usergroup but I also like the idea of making people actually decide that they want to participate rather than simply drive-by posting. I suppose read-only access for logged in forum members might be a way to achieve that though. What I don't want any more of is situations where board members leave HLP after having stumbled into a political discussion cause they're disgusted by the opinions that are allowed on here. We've had entirely too much of that in the past.
1. People decide every day if they want to participate in any open area of the forums. People who don't want to participate in a particular board don't click on it. If drive-by posting becomes a problem in those boards, then the moderators of them deal with it. This seems like an effective proven model.
2. If the problem is people getting their feelings hurt because of opinions expressed, there are three remedies: (1) people can avoid those threads, (2) people can recognize that different opinions exist and being exposed to them is called "life", AND/OR (3) the community can make it clear in an amendment to the forum guidelines exactly what opinions will and will not be tolerated.
This reeks of the illiberal idea that people should only ever be exposed to ideas they agree with no matter where they wander. Segregating political discussions into an open, accessible, and publicly-viewable subforum clearly labelled as Political Discussion should be more than sufficient accommodation. It goes without saying that there is a great deal posted in the political discussions around here that I have expressly and strongly disagreed with, and I agree that general HLP users should not be made to feel the site is hostile to them, but the changes-as-implemented are the equivalent of dealing with a living you you don't like the colour of by bulldozing the house.
What's wrong with making Political Discussions a subforum of GenDisc without all the hoops to get into it? You've already said moderation is going to stay the same
Actually I haven't said that. In fact I've pointed out that the moderation will be stricter. And that's the problem. I don't want people wandering into a more strictly moderated section of HLP and then whining about it once the hammer comes down.
So put a big blinking sticky at the top with special rules for the Political Discussion area. This is also contradictory to your earlier points in your reply; if the moderation is going to be stricter, there should be less risk of people being exposed to things that disgust them and consequently less need to make the board as hidden as seemingly possible.
Communities may be built around specific niches and continued on that basis, but long-term communities also depend on the health of their Off-Topic areas. Without fail, every online community I've participated in over the last 20+ years that has continued to be successful has done it because of the availability of the Off-Topic areas, not in spite of them. Killing and segregating "political discussions" - which also tend to be the interesting ones where debates occur and you actually see people make arguments - is not good for the health of a community, and that is exactly the road the changes-as-currently-implemented are leading down. I fully support efforts to improve the quality of contentious discussions on HLP, but shoving them off in some dark corner of the board and setting them up to narrow the userbase is going to make the problem worse, not better. This is, in fact, why I spent a considerable amount of time helping revise the Guidelines a couple years ago and it pains me to see that instead of improved moderation to improve discussion wuality we're instead resorting to technical mechanics.
Again, some actual comprehensive consultation with the community-at-large would have been nice here, folks.
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Who? Where? I ask this not out of spite, but if there genuinely has been a feedback attempt apparently I (and who knows how many others) missed it. Or is this purely anecdotal?
You apparently didn't pay enough attention to the "Let's Talk, HLP" thread. Quite a few people suggested completely deleting General Discussion simply because of how toxic the political discussions on there get. Others said that Gen Dis and the forum drame it causes are a major reason why they prefer to stay on IRC or Discord instead of HLP. Quite a few others suggested exactly what I did, that it was put behind an opt-in. That thread was the main reason that Gen Dis was removed from the forums which show up on unread threads. I didn't see many posts at all in favour of leaving politics on Gen Dis and I don't remember many suggesting that the politics threads shouldn't be hidden in some way (even if it was just on unread threads).
But to move on to the main point, you seem to be missing that the current restrictions on Political Discussions are meant to be temporary, hopefully not lasting more than a month or so and loosening up when/if people can actually be civil. The idea is to start small with the core users and then open up once everyone has gotten used to the new rules. If you're trying to get people used to the new board's different culture having people wonder in all the time and posting without understanding that the place is different from the rest of HLP is not going to help. Mods are just going to spend all their time dealing with forum drama from people who got themselves into trouble. And if people can't be civil in a more heavily moderated board where the guidelines are more strictly enforced, then we might as well kick political discussion off the boards entirely because people here can't be adult enough to have them.
2. If the problem is people getting their feelings hurt because of opinions expressed, there are three remedies: (1) people can avoid those threads, (2) people can recognize that different opinions exist and being exposed to them is called "life", AND/OR (3) the community can make it clear in an amendment to the forum guidelines exactly what opinions will and will not be tolerated.
Get Dave B back. Then we'll talk about how well those remedies work. Gen Dis has such a bad habit of driving away forum members that even though I usually like and particate in political discussions it's pretty obvious something needs to be done about it. And I doubt that simply sticking it in a child board is enough. So we'll try something more drastic with that as an end goal.
So put a big blinking sticky at the top with special rules for the Political Discussion area.
There already is one of those. And from the bit earlier where you said that moderation on the Political Discussion board would be the same, it's obvious you've either not read it, not understood it, or read it and then completely forgotten about it. And you're one of the more literate posters on here! Which more than anything should prove the effectiveness of stickied threads pointing out special rules.
This is also contradictory to your earlier points in your reply; if the moderation is going to be stricter, there should be less risk of people being exposed to things that disgust them and consequently less need to make the board as hidden as seemingly possible.
Only once the board has settled down. Right now it's more of a powder keg than usual.
Communities may be built around specific niches and continued on that basis, but long-term communities also depend on the health of their Off-Topic areas. Without fail, every online community I've participated in over the last 20+ years that has continued to be successful has done it because of the availability of the Off-Topic areas, not in spite of them. Killing and segregating "political discussions" - which also tend to be the interesting ones where debates occur and you actually see people make arguments - is not good for the health of a community, and that is exactly the road the changes-as-currently-implemented are leading down. I fully support efforts to improve the quality of contentious discussions on HLP, but shoving them off in some dark corner of the board and setting them up to narrow the userbase is going to make the problem worse, not better. This is, in fact, why I spent a considerable amount of time helping revise the Guidelines a couple years ago and it pains me to see that instead of improved moderation to improve discussion wuality we're instead resorting to technical mechanics.
The problem was not moderation so much as the fact that quite a few people refuse to be moderated and the board can't afford to lose members who go off in a strop because they got told off for doing something they should be smart enough to not do. The idea behond the politics subforum is to let the moderators say "In here, you don't get to mess around and you're gone if you do" In other words to allow those guidelines to actually be followed.
EDIT: Actually part of me thinks we should just make you a Global Moderator whether you want to be one or not so you can actually deal with those kinds of people instead of us. :p
Again, some actual comprehensive consultation with the community-at-large would have been nice here, folks.
You were consulted. There is a 9 page thread on the top board of the entire forum where people were asked about the direction HLP should take in the future. And then having seen the fact that the majorty of people who expressed any opinion about Gen Dis thought it was horribly toxic, the admins decided to compromise with the userbase by choosing a less drastic option than the one most people suggested of simply locking it away temporarily for those who still want to participate while steps are taken to clean it up. And now people start turning up and saying that they should have been consulted.
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Was the political discussion around here considered toxic just in the last year or so, or did it have a bad rep even before Trump came on the scene?
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What I don't understand is how "put it in its own sub-board" isn't somehow making it so most people can't see it, entirely without making it actually invisible. Don't like politics, don't go to that board! Problem solved, in less controversial fashion. MP-Ryan is absolutely right that this will de-facto kill the entire concept of political discussion on HLP, except I think we all know it'd go away for like three months until everyone forgot that such an invisible sub-board existed and started posting politics in GD again and getting annoyed when their posts disappear somewhere they can't see.
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Was the political discussion around here considered toxic just in the last year or so, or did it have a bad rep even before Trump came on the scene?
It always had a bad rep.
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Was the political discussion around here considered toxic just in the last year or so, or did it have a bad rep even before Trump came on the scene?
if anything that last year or so has been a marginal improvement.
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What I don't understand is how "put it in its own sub-board" isn't somehow making it so most people can't see it, entirely without making it actually invisible. Don't like politics, don't go to that board! Problem solved, in less controversial fashion.
The problem isn't people who don't like politics. The problem is people who don't mind politics but have a problem with the ****ed up version that ends up appearing on General Discussion. They end up wondering into what they think is going to be an interesting discussion on some subject and get pulled down into a ****ing tar pit. There are quite a few topics on this board that start out fairly civilised only to turn nasty 20-30 pages in. And then you get people who turn sour on HLP and leave. Don't tell me you can't think of people who have gotten sick of doing something productive on HLP because of politics.
The whole point of the "Let's Talk, HLP" thread was to figure out what we could do to get more people to come to HLP and play our games. I can't see any good reason why that shouldn't be the focus of everyone on HLP. And it's not going to happen if General Discussion is making people walk right back out the door again. The conclusion of that thread was that politics should be placed somewhere that it wouldn't do that. Quite a few people were quite happy to get rid of it entirely. Almost everyone agreed that it was currently far too toxic to remain in the stare it is in. Putting it in it's own hidden forum is a compromise. And like all compromises that means you don't get exactly what you want. If people want the politics section to end up on an open child board, they should be working on making sure that is becomes a forum that can be an open child board without endangering the main focus of HLP rather than demanding that they get what they want.
The idea behind closing off the political board is so that those who want it most have to prove that they can turn it into something that attracts people to HLP rather than turns them away. Now bear in mind that I count myself in that group. I don't want political discussion on HLP to go away. But it's had way too many chances to sort itself out and it never has. So now if it suffocates itself under a pile of ****posts instead of cleaning up its act, then it's no great loss.
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To elaborate a bit, there was originally a thread in the global mod/admin folder discussing various ideas for improving HLP, which was then opened up to a wider audience on the mod/project head folder, and then finally to the entire forum in the Announcements folder. What struck me the most is that the public thread contained the most vehement distaste of all over what GD had become and the strongest desire to put a kibosh on toxic political discussion. It was very much the opposite of a top-down decision.
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Yeah, I find this sentiment that it's the admins who want to kill General Discussion quite hilarious.
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I don't rightly care where a bad idea (or a bad compromise, if you want to be pedantic) came from, I still think it's going to fail at doing everything it's supposed to be doing. The forum doesn't need to be opt-in, it doesn't need to be hidden. If someone doesn't want to see it they can just avoid going in. If they can't avoid going in that doesn't seem like the forum's problem to solve.
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Where is this public thread discussing this that apparently everyone missed? I'm hearing a fairly consistent message from everyone who will be affected by this decision.
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Try the announcements forum.
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Rather than replying line-by-line to kara, since the discussion has moved: apparently the consultation thread was the generically-titled "Let's Talk HLP" thread stuffed up in the Announcements board. Clearly I'm also not the only person who rarely if ever reads the announcements board, since I'm not the only one apparently surprised by this revelation. So, rather than putting a thread in GD, the main board to which the most dramatic changes are proposed, or even linking from a thread in GD to the other thread saying "hey, we're thinking of changing GenDisc, what do you people who frequent it think?" the idea of a generic announcement thread that spends its first several pages (I just looked) discussing all manner of other things is what passes for consultation? Part of my regular day job of enforcing law is also providing feedback on consultation requests for legislative amendments, and if this is what passes for consultation, frankly and with personal respect to the individuals, you're doing it wrong.
With regard to the guidelines being no different, I don't think they are. The original guideline rewrite (of which I drafted a great deal of the wording, as you may recall) was comprehensive and covered these things. Spelling them out further doesn't change the rules. My biggest problem with the moderation around here is you all spend too long waiting to deal with what everyone sees as a problem, and then down comes a punishment out of nowhere that's disproportionate to the actual offence because its based on a lengthy history of inaction and multiple problems, which is exactly the criticism I brought up during the Guideline re-write that everyone said they were going to take into account. Moving Political Discussions into a de-facto "hidden" board is not going to fix that problem. If you want civility, then you enforce quality restrictions on the posts.
I do not have a problem with moving Political (and religious) discussions into either a separate Off-Topic board or, my preferred option, into a child board of GenDisc. That is overdue. But the idea that hiding it and restricting the membership by making it obscure is going to solve HLP's problem with contentious discussion is off-base. If you want to move discussion to a subforum, do it. If you want to moderate for quality and content (and civility) in that subforum, please dear God do it. But as I keep harping on, narrowing the userbase to only the dedicated few and making it difficult and obscure to access is not going to breed those changes. Those changes come from expanding the userbase to include a greater range of people, not condensing it further.
I strongly agree with Scotty's last post above.
To sum up, in my view:
1. Make Political Discussions an open child board of General Discussion.
2. Remove the hidden properties and subscription features you've implemented.
3. Sticky a post at the top with a subject that simply says "Guidelines and quality will be strictly enforced in this subforum and violations will result in removal." Link inside to the Guidelines themselves. You could also spell out what exactly is meant by quality in the context of the child board.
4. Enforce the guidelines and quality restrictions.
5. Tell the people who have a problem with the content of Political Discussions (after the above are implemented) that they are all old enough to use a computer and can figure out how NOT to click on a link.
If I sound overly grouchy lately, it's because I have a nasty head cold and sinus infection that's kicking my ass and possibly making me more blunt than usual.
And on the idea of making me a global mod, consider the unforeseen consequences of your decisions :p
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Double post because.
I just read through quite a bit of the Let's Talk HLP thread. I really wish I'd seen it earlier and seen the discussion on the board organization. That's mostly on me. But it doesn't negate at all what I've been saying.
From that thread, I see a handful of users (dozen at most? I didn't count) saying GenDisc is/was a cesspool. They're entitled to their opinions. However, those same people are also heavily involved in other parts of the forum, and all respect to batts in particular but he is not the person who should be commenting on the contributions of GenDisc to HLP.
Why?
He's a creator. He's an active member of the FSO community who is actively playing FreeSpace mods, and I totally understand his argument about "go play the game" but it's missing a bigger picture.
I can't. And I say "I," but the better term is probably we, because I really doubt I'm the only one.
I have a steady job, a wife, two kids, a house in need of maintenance, and a love of games generally. This means that I game for a few hours a week (more lately because cold from hell, but this is unusual). I'm currently playing a bunch of large RPGs and MEA multiplayer. I've got a backlog of games a mile long and I quite frankly cannot be bothered to update my FSO install and go play a bunch of mods. That said, there are a few projects around here that I genuinely do follow and am waiting for more content from. So why am I here?
Off-Topic areas.
But, you take away what makes the main Off-Topic board interesting and kill it, and the regularity with which I check HLP will drop. It might eventually drop to nothing, which is why I've left other communities. And then, when the next BP installment comes out, will I see it? Probably not. Will I be around to help promote changes to the site? Nope.
It's all well and good that people are active and passionately involved in the community, but their activity and passion will not sustain a community over the long term between project releases, and it is not going to bring back users who have left. They miss the mark. I agree that political discussions etc should not be allowed to devolve into ****fests, that GenDisc definitely should not be the first area new users see, and that a re-org of some kind is probably a good idea. But if Political Discussions dies, and GenDisc becomes the shallow "look at this latest YouTube video / what are you reading / oooof, GIFs!" I am ****ing gone. Am I alone? Probably not.
The Let's Talk HLP thread's perspective on GenDisc was driven by exactly the wrong audience, which is exactly why you're getting the reaction in this thread. They don't like GenDisc's political discussions? Fine. To each their own. But they are NOT the people who should be driving the decisions on how to retain and improve that part of the forum.
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@MP-Ryan: So if you missed this discussion thread, which was active over quite some time and regularly appeared in the recent posts lists - how many other interesting things outside of your favorite political discussions and the one/two projects you follow would you notice?
So in general: Is catering to people with radical opinions and inability to properly discuss something/accept other opinions helping to keep the board more active or does it reject more people from returning?
I mean, seriously, I've been reading GenDisc every now and then and if I were a mod for it I would have banned certain people ages ago.
So many discussions were derailed in awful ways. Even without stuff that, if mentioned in public at the wrong place, would have gotten the police involved, many people just can't discuss in a civilized way. However banning anyone does not help. They will see bias and censorship on the side of the moderation cause of their opinion.
Which leads to a certain question. Would the political discussion board even be so attractive without all the controversy?
If you can't post all this disgusting stuff, annoy, ignore and troll other people to no end and pretend to know everything better - I guess some people would leave sooner or later and the board would be rather tame and slow. Like actual political discussions between politicians tend to be slow and boring unless one side is strongly left, right or filled with heavy populism.
In the end I don't care much how political discussions are actually handled. I would prefer it as a child board of current GenDisc (so no appearance in recent posts) that is visible only to registered members but none of the threads should appear in the "unread posts" section of GenDisc. Whatever moderation approach will be used, people will complain about it and accuse the moderation of favoritism.
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Not many, and that's a result of my own time constraints. But eliminating GenDisc or killing off the more contentious discussions isn't going to make me wander into them either. Like I said, the reason I'm not playing FSO mods is a lack of time to play them, and I'm definitely not going to go reading their forums if I won't be playing them anytime soon either.
If you can't post all this disgusting stuff, annoy, ignore and troll other people to no end and pretend to know everything better - I guess some people would leave sooner or later and the board would be rather tame and slow. Like actual political discussions between politicians tend to be slow and boring unless one side is strongly left, right or filled with heavy populism.
This is pretty cynical.
I'm not advocating for some of the absolute crap that appears in political discussions on HLP. In point of fact, for years, I've been advocating the opposite - that moderation be used early and readily to ensure discussion is shaped in a civil and contributing manner. That doesn't make discussions less interesting; it makes them quite a bit more so because you remove the personal bile and focus on core topics and concepts. HLP's political discussions over the years have been full of these kinds of discussions; people just forget them because of the crap in between.
Nowhere here am I saying GenDisc is not in need of some reform. My consistent point is that the proposed reforms don't actually address the problem, which stems a lot from the negative opinions the people suggesting those reforms hold about GenDisc in the first place. I despise content-free posts, which is why I don't even click on probably 2/3 of the threads in GenDisc in the first place. Instead of shoving the topics that actually have a chance of showing some diversity of opinions into a black hole, it'd be better to give them their own niche and encourage them to develop in constructive ways.
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But here's the question. If you think the people who currently make up about 80% of the posts on Gen Discuss can't remain civil for a week or two even with better moderation (and the Sword of Damocles in the form of making the forum permanently hidden), what makes you think that they'd do so under any circumstances?
And if you think they can why not wait the week or two, prove it and then let the board be made into a child board like you want?
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But here's the question. If you think the people who currently make up about 80% of the posts on Gen Discuss can't remain civil for a week or two even with better moderation (and the Sword of Damocles in the form of making the forum permanently hidden), what makes you think that they'd do so under any circumstances?
And if you think they can why not wait the week or two, prove it and then let the board be made into a child board like you want?
Because a week or two is not a good judge of anything. The problem here isn't drastic actions, it's the drastic actions arrived at miss the mark completely. So we get a dozen people who play nice for two weeks. Then you open it up, and then other gradually move in, then the ****posting starts, and then suddenly we're back at "this is all garbage burn it to the ground."
Why don't we try an actual different approach, rather than a rebrand of the same old tired measures that haven't worked multiple times? Instead of constantly revisiting this in new flourishes of writing, I'm going to take half an hour of my grouchy misery and draft a damn plan as to how I, at least, can see this working. I'll post it up in a bit.
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Please define "better moderation" Kara because I have never seen it done successfully on HLP. Presumably, from your hypothetical, it doesn't include enforced vacations, or a werk or two would be peanuts.
HLP's moderation in GD suffers just as much from certain mods/admins/users interpreting moderation against a user as moderation against that user's political opinion, which contributes to deadlocks where no moderation ends up happening, as it does from letting issues fester until one user eats a punishment for it that was previously left unchallenged.
Evidence: that time Goober told me to my face that he was against X moderation action because he had to look out for the conservative side of an argument. That happened in an internal board I can no longer see to go quote it, but it seems like something pertinent to the case here.
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Proposal to Implement Political Discussions Subforum
Core Principles:
- Political Discussion is not a "free speech board." Posts, including opinions, are expected to be backed up by evidence (though sourcing is not definitively required). It is also not a soapbox. That is what social media is for. You have the privilege of participating in this group; you do not have a right to have your opinion heard. Our house, our rules.
- Board membership will remain open to all users unless abused. Multiple warnings will result in suspension from the sub-board.
- Posts in the sub-board will be subject to the core HLP Guidelines, but shall have stricter moderation standards than enforced elsewhere on the site.
- Posts should contribute quality, not quantity, to the discussion.[/i]
Expectations:
- The Political Discussion sub-board is for possibly-contentious but respectful and content-driven discussion. Posts that personally attack other users, rather than criticize positions, will be immediately deleted and the user warned.
- Posts that lack relevant content will be either deleted or moved at the moderators' discretion. Tangents will be split at the earliest opportunity.
- Drive-by posting is not permitted. Users who repeatedly post without engaging in follow-up will be warned and their posts removed.
- Topics that discuss discrimination through evidence-based content are permitted. Posts that engage in or advocate for discrimination will be subject to deletion and warning. There is a thin line between these two things and users are advised to use their best judgement.
- Thread titles shall be descriptive and moderators may rename them to reflect their content as required (though humorous titles are not discouraged).
Mechanics:
- The Political Discussion board will remain a sub-group of General Discussion with full open membership to all registered users, but hidden to users not logged in.
- Irrelevant/tangential but content-driven posts in PD threads will be moved to either Political Discussion or a more appropriate Off-Topic area, with a link provided.
- Warnings given out in Political Discussion shall be done publicly in the thread; they are NOT up for public debate in the thread by the warned party or others (any dispute will be handled by PM)
- Suspension from the Political Discussion board will be for a minimum of one week to allow for a cooling off period. Multiple temporary suspensions may result in permanent suspension.
- Political Discussion should have consistent moderation from only a small number of moderators specifically tasked to handle it (not that they can't be Global Moderators / Admins, but not all Global Mods or admins should be moderating PD if they aren't regularly part of it.
I think that should make it abundantly clear that PD will be for actual discussion (which is not to say that it shouldn't also be fun). However, if people want to drive-by post with a random GIF or video, go play in GenDisc.
And if you really want, I'll even put my money where my mouth is and volunteer to moderate the damn thing.
EDIT: One additional temporary idea would be a "Doesn't meet the cut" thread stickied in PD, where the moderation team moves, rather than deletes, posts not meeting the content restrictions above as an example. Purpose would be not so much to shame the user in question as to provide examples to the entire userbase of what not to do. I'd say a month should probably be sufficient for its existence.
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I'm on a business trip right now where I wanted to use the return journey to type up my thoughts on the matter, but seeing how Ryan already did so, I'll just say that I agree with him.
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I am not entirely sure how what MP-Ryan proposed is all that different from what is currently being proposed by members of staff, but I like it anyway.
(I also do trust MP-Ryan in a moderator position).
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Main differences in MP-Ryan's proposal are in default membership and accessibility/visibility to the board.
I do have some concerns with what constitutes a 'drive by' post, because sometimes you just don't have time to keep up with a thread. Or you get sick of it and what ever line of argumentation is going on.
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The correct answer in both of those cases is "don't post" and I thought that was pretty obvious but apparently it takes some thought.
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Because a week or two is not a good judge of anything. The problem here isn't drastic actions, it's the drastic actions arrived at miss the mark completely. So we get a dozen people who play nice for two weeks. Then you open it up, and then other gradually move in, then the ****posting starts, and then suddenly we're back at "this is all garbage burn it to the ground."
Ah, but we have two weeks of relative peace as the baseline to point to and say "That's what it's meant to be like, none of this sarcasm and sniping at each other."
Why don't we try an actual different approach, rather than a rebrand of the same old tired measures that haven't worked multiple times?
Actually on the moderators side there isn't that much of a difference. If you can get the board to agree to
- Warnings given out in Political Discussion shall be done publicly in the thread; they are NOT up for public debate in the thread by the warned party or others (any dispute will be handled by PM)
- Suspension from the Political Discussion board will be for a minimum of one week to allow for a cooling off period. Multiple temporary suspensions may result in permanent suspension.
I'd be happy to open up the board more. Problem is that if an admin tries that we get months of complaints from users who think we're being too repressive of their freedom of speech. Let me give you an example, get Bobboau to agree with that AND also agree that he would have deserved it had we kicked him out for a week for calling Joshua autistic earlier and you'll have proved your point that forumites will actually accept that. Cause one of the big problems moderators have is getting people to accept their own guilt instead of publicly blaming it on the moderators, starting off forum drama and then leaving. Limiting that was one of the main reasons we decided on a closed board.
And if you really want, I'll even put my money where my mouth is and volunteer to moderate the damn thing.
Good, I was kinda hoping you would.
One additional temporary idea would be a "Doesn't meet the cut" thread stickied in PD, where the moderation team moves, rather than deletes, posts not meeting the content restrictions above as an example. Purpose would be not so much to shame the user in question as to provide examples to the entire userbase of what not to do. I'd say a month should probably be sufficient for its existence.
Problem with that is that you can't always chop out a single post from a thread without creating a non sequitur. Usually by the time a moderator gets to an unsuitable post, someone has already replied to it. And the moderators try to avoid deleting post whenever possible anyway.
The idea has possibilites though.
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Actually on the moderators side there isn't that much of a difference. If you can get the board to agree to
- Warnings given out in Political Discussion shall be done publicly in the thread; they are NOT up for public debate in the thread by the warned party or others (any dispute will be handled by PM)
HLP has always had this problem where a significant number of people who receive a warning don't feel like they deserve it. Warnings shouldn't be up for any debate whatsoever, PM or otherwise, or there will be disputes and debate and general unpleasantness about every single one of them. Refusal to admit fault or wrongdoing is why most of the people who have been banned from HLP were banned, when it comes right down to it. I don't see this going any differently.
Which isn't to say I think this is a bad idea, I just think that opening the door to even private disputes is sending the wrong message. There shouldn't be any. Take your lumps and get over it.
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Well there have been some past cases of shockingly bad moderation. But that should be in the past now so in general I tend to agree.
Or we can just tell them to PM MP-Ryan. :p
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get Bobboau to agree with that AND also agree that he would have deserved it had we kicked him out for a week for calling Joshua autistic earlier
for the record I called him disingenuous.
also good luck on what you just volunteered for MP! :D
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So if I were to give you a week off for that, you'd agree it was deserved?
Or at least not publicly object to it?
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for accusing him and you (you were the other person yelling "strawman" at me right?) of being disingenuous, yeah I would dispute that as deserving of punitive action because the two of you were.
but I don't think we need to rehash that subject in this thread again.
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I'd like to point out again that you can just look up those posts if you follow the instructions in the OP.
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See what I mean about people not being able to take responsibility?
Jesus, you lot are either autistic or utterly disingenuous.
Quite apart from being a pretty loaded statement, either way it's insulting. It certainly doesn't further discussion. Would you say that in the same way to a friend you're having a drink with? If not, you shouldn't be saying it here on HLP on a political discussion. If so, you're a terrible person and you still shouldn't be saying it here on HLP. :p
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I felt like I was having accusations made against me in bad faith.
If you were a friend, and we were in person, I would have phrased it more like "are you ****ing me? how can you possibly be that full of ****?" because in the scenario we were friends, and friends rip on each other all the ****ing time. I act the same way far less "civilly" than I do here other places on the internet (and no I don't mean 4chan) or in my personal life and **** never gets an eighth as vicious as it does here because I'll tell people to lick my dick and they'll tell me to suck their ass and we won't batt an eye about it. I tell my boss at work to shut the **** up, he laughs. But for some reason here if there is a way to possibly construe something as a personal attack or insult it's hyped to 11.
I guess that makes me a terrible person.
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But for some reason here if there is a way to possibly construe something as a personal attack or insult it's hyped to 11.
Bobbeau, you have several times now have argued that what you said was okay because you were responding to something you saw as a personal attack. You have doubled down on this even after being repeatedly told that this was not okay, and you continue to do this now. The only one hyping here is you.
For you, here, now, that is a problem. All that is being asked of you, and it has only been asked of you becuase you asked where the line would be drawn, is not to throw around psychological diagnosisis willy-nilly. Why is this so difficult for you to accept?
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Actually, even if you were personally attacked it would still not be okay for you to just attack back. If you're being personally attacked you report it. See why moderation on here is so hard? Everyone decides to take things into their own hands rather than doing what they are meant to actually do.
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being repeatedly told that this was not okay
By the two people who were attacking me. This is starting to feel like gaslighting.
I was not calling you autistic, that was put there to show how beyond reasonable your interpretation was. I was calling you disingenuous, I think both of you are disingenuous right now.
And the thing you were quoting was a general statement, not about this stupid ****ing argument.
And kara, 1) it's arguing in bad faith not simply an insult, 2) one of the two people involved is an admin, what is reporting going to acomplish?
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And what do you think an action that will get you banned is going to achieve? Apart from forum drama?
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HLP has always had this problem where a significant number of people who receive a warning don't feel like they deserve it. Warnings shouldn't be up for any debate whatsoever, PM or otherwise, or there will be disputes and debate and general unpleasantness about every single one of them. Refusal to admit fault or wrongdoing is why most of the people who have been banned from HLP were banned, when it comes right down to it. I don't see this going any differently.
Which isn't to say I think this is a bad idea, I just think that opening the door to even private disputes is sending the wrong message. There shouldn't be any. Take your lumps and get over it.
Not empty quoting myself.
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just by asserting someone was in the wrong over and over and saying that refusal to accept being in the wrong is the problem, does not make that someone one wrong.
mods/admins who are in the weeds and part of the argument making decisions on who is in the right I think is part of the problem.
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What this thread is making abundantly clear is that the problem of users getting into protracted rows in a spirit of belligerent bad faith is the real problem and PolDisc isn't going to contain it by itself.
mods/admins who are in the weeds and part of the argument making decisions on who is in the right I think is part of the problem.
literally the entire problem here is your total blindness to the social boundaries of the community
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being repeatedly told that this was not okay
By the two people who were attacking me. This is starting to feel like gaslighting.
I was not calling you autistic, that was put there to show how beyond reasonable your interpretation was. I was calling you disingenuous, I think both of you are disingenuous right now.
Bobbeau, for the third time: It's really easy to actually follow the instructions in the OP, check the political board, and notice that you've been confusing me with Scotty these past three days. It's like five clicks. This would only have taken a token amount of effort on your end.
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As a preview of how I'd handle this inane multi-post dispute:
1. Bobb, regardless of whether you feel like the strawman accusation was just, slinging about the word "autistic" in a derogatory sense is inappropriate and potentially hurtful to the multiple HLP users who have openly stated that they are on the autism spectrum. Take your lumps, don't do it again.
2. Everyone: ****ing drop it already.
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Well, let's see what Bobb's reaction to that is.
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I'll accept the judgement
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I don't read the Announcements thread, so the proposed changes of the political discussion were a big surprise to me. It's just that I only now have time to reply even here. I've been on a one-week spree in China doing business visits and sleeping very little, so this can be somewhat incoherent.
Yes, the political discussion part of the General Discussion was in the need of moderation. But changing it out to an invisible sub-forum would basically mean I'll omit the board entirely and visit HLP considerably less. Were this to go on, I'd probably omit General Discussion entirely, and would switch over to the Gaming and either writing playthroughs or following them.
I support MP-Ryan's view entirely. My personal thought of the issue in political discussion is that different cultures (and different ages) expect things to be told in a different way. I'm somewhat aware of the differences, but the interpretation requires some background knowledge which is typically not available in the internet discussions.
Plane to catch, gotta go once again
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Okay, I've made the political discussions board visible to all and made MP-Ryan a global mod.
I'll see about moving it to a child board in a few days once people have seen it where it currently is. Part of the reason for doing this is to get people who usually wouldn't to start going back to gen dis.
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Okay, I've made the political discussions board visible to all and made MP-Ryan a global mod.
I wondered why site support got bigger.
Sorry, I haven't checked in much these last couple days because this cold is kicking my ass and its questionable how much my brain is functioning.