4201

Yes, but why does the entire team have to be cut right after?

4202

To be fair, those sorts of situations do make for awesome baseball blooper reel material.

Hmm… that’s kinda what this thread is sometimes.

4203

To be fair, this thread is a lot funnier if you read it with “Yakety Sax” playing in the background.

4204

Albert wound up smack in the middle of the wolfpen. Bummer, but hey, at least the honesty gets a chance to flow now. Staying out of this thread is one of the best decisions Tom’s made, because it’s obviously providing a psychic release valve.

EXACTLY.

Seriously. Better that than going real-life threadcop. Real cops already have that job, and in the case of Munky, seemed to be doing it rather well.

And that’s just not true. Tom doesn’t have a problem with people responding to individual posts. I’ve responded to idiots many times and never gotten the slightest flak for it.

What he has a problem with is people dragging in baggage from other threads, or even from outside the forum. He wants people to give the benefit of the doubt, and respond to what people write to their face, without going on vendettas trying to get others banned.

There are cases where that policy gets stretched to the absolute limit, e.g. Munky. That’s a true no-win situation for a moderator who wants to make an inclusive community: ban the guy, and open yourself up to becoming the literal threadcop, policing the real identities of your members; or don’t ban the guy, and enrage everyone who believes you should be the enforcer of the site’s collective conscience in Obviously Unmistakable Situations Like This.

EXACTLY X 2.

I participated plenty in that thread, but didn’t get the banbomb. Why? Because I didn’t go bringing up shit from outside the thread. What’s the need, when the dude was so full of shit right there?

EDIT: And in fact, Tom closed the thread soon after I posted, and I was indeed taunting him and calling him “Banh Mi boy,” so when Tom said that ban-baiting was uncool he may well have been referring to me as well.

Selective memory is the boon of nostalgia. Cleve Blakemore? Derek Smart?

4205

That’s an axolotl. Julio Cortazar wrote a totally sweet story about them. I highly recommend it.

Can we make this thread about how cute they are?

4206

No, that’s alexlitel.

4207

Can we please put this verbatim in the sticky Qt3 FAQ???

4208

I dunno. That’s the way I remember it. Even Matt Gallant was nice to me back in those days.

4209

This is a very high opinion of what people were doing. While I do believe what you say is correct, none of the people who I’m talking about here were doing that. They were streaming torrents of billiousness and absolute hatred at the perpetrators. And I really don’t think that is in any deep way “using social pressures constructively” and to paint peoples actions as that is a huge misinterpretation of what did happen.

4210

You guys are thinking of the pilum.

4211

Wait, then what are prunes made out of?

4212

Then you have confused Qt3 with Gone Gold.

4213

I would disagree. While normative social pressure can be used to positive ends, such as the scenarios you outlined with suppressing “-isms”, it’s far more likely to be used to punish people for the sin of deviation from the norm. Encouraging the use of it also creates a very unpleasant atmosphere where posts and threads are viewed combatively. Needless to say, trolls find such an environment a delightful playground well suited to their brand of thread vandalism.

I would argue that giving people license to actively use normative pressures such as the classic QT3 dogpile in any circumstance, even in pursuit of a noble goal like frowning on racism, is going to end badly in the long term. It will start to infect other threads, people will get used to taking an insulting and derisive stance in threads, and threads that otherwise may have been worthwhile will get trashed.

The best solution is the well known one. Don’t feed the trolls.

4214

Eh, I looked at Octonoo’s posting history and he only seems to be annoying when provoked. He makes fairly normal posts in Games quite frequently. I did the same with spatzi and his posting history is the same, essentially. Nothing unless prodded. Now granted these dudes go full nuclear when prodded but there it is, anyway.

So hey, if they only posted troll posts, that’d be one thing, but it’s not. I still don’t understand why they get a pass once they do make trolly or racists posts, but whatever.

Octonoo and spatzi, I am sorry I painted you guys out to be nothing but trolls and racists. You aren’t, although many would argue being trolly or racist permeates your every fiber of being. Maybe, maybe not. Screaming at each other over it isn’t going to fix anything, that’s for sure. It’d be nice if you didn’t feel the urge to try to ruin so many threads with your odd fetish with wine, but I figure in time we will all learn to ignore you like we did Dirt. He finally got sick of being ignored and did something dumb to get attention and got banned. It isn’t easy ignoring trolls on the internet, but maybe we could all try and then maybe you’ll realize it isn’t necessary in the first place for people to pay attention to you. I doubt it, though.

Or maybe you’ll just calm down and realize that you don’t have to try to hard and loud to get negative attention because you’re afraid of rejection or not getting positive attention or whatever it is that drives your desire to post the way you do. I mean why do you even bother to post legitimately if all you want is to be “that loud anti-wine guy?” Why even post if everyone puts you on Ignore? That doesn’t make any sense.

I don’t really care what you do, since I already know you won’t change. You clearly hate that I am popular here and you aren’t, so you are trying the cheapest shortest route to become notorious, because that is important to you I guess. That’s fine. You aren’t the first nor the last. I became well-known here at first by being an asshole, although these days I’d rather be known for other things, but you can’t change history. So I get it. Most of your troll posts come off like really poor imitations of mine, so I can see it.

I’m certainly not here to troll qt3. I love it here. Do you? I doubt it, and that’s probably the biggest problem I have ever had when it comes to discussions about bannings and so forth on Qt3. Which is why I don’t necessarily disagree with several bannings that have been meted out to long-time members here. I am unsure about permabans, but temp bans for deliberately annoying Tom make sense to me. But I can’t really impress my own opinions on posters regarding how much they do or do not love Qt3 and make decisions based on that. A lot of people who used to love Qt3 dislike it now, and that dislike makes them behave in a manner indistinguishable from trolls who couldn’t care less.

I don’t know why I bother to post these things. I think the smarter people agree with me, but it doesn’t matter because someone else will inevitably ignore 95% of my post like Martin or Tortilla and take issues with the 5% they want to argue with and incite another stupid argument because that’s way more fun anyway, right? Not that I need words of encouragement or anything. Nobody can say anything reasonable or constructive here without somebody feeling compelled to nitpick it into oblivion. Yes, let’s argue with MattKeil instead of agree with him, that makes sense. Way to work those P&R skills, guys. Gold star.

And I don’t even want to know why everyone is arguing racism (poorly), except that I know that people would rather tailor arguments to their own agendas then focus on the issue at hand, which is why most people suck at arguing on the internet and IRL, which is why nothing will ever be agreed upon or solved in this or any thread. So everything will stay exactly the same until the next time an argument breaks out on Qt3 and people get banned for [Spurious Reason #564] where it will continue to be the same, we just won’t realize it.

Plenty to work with here, Octonoo. Go nuts my man. I know I would have years ago.

4215

I was responding to Lorini’s statement, and the broader sentiment of disapproval being aired towards doing anything other than ignoring things that bothered you. In much the same spirit as I described in my post, I felt that it would be unfortunate to allow something like that to disappear amid the bickering. I don’t actually have much of a stake in what happened with spatzi or Munky, as it just seemed like something that really got out of hand on both sides and was then capped with some problematic moderation. That’s too many layers to unpack without a serious investment in the specifics, and I’m not the guy for that.

4216

I hate even posting in this thread, but there is a natural dynamic amongst all forums that trends toward stagnation and dissolution once the “leading” posters drift or are driven away. It is sort of like a bow wake at first, with the “founding” members bringing the crowd, the the crowd driving the founding members away, and then, eventually, driving away the leaders of the crowd… and then the crowd falls upon itself in a zombie apocalypse. Qt3 was a “safe” forum for leading developers and game journalists to hang out; most of those persons have left or have stopped posting. The cool kids that remain might be enough to keep the gang around but they now lack the kind of content that keeps the forum focused on target and not drifting, and eventually they’ll get bored with the same old thing as well. It’s also just the nature of these things, that older posters have little need or desire to rehash the same arguments they so vehemently took on a decade before, and not just because those arguments are tired, but because in many ways they’ve probably outgrown them.

Growth in forums is an extremely difficult issue to manage and is probably where Qt3 went astray. Mr. Chick has always wanted this place to have a relaxed living room atmosphere, but that intention doesn’t match the kind of uninhibited expansion of membership without any real vetting, and without any clear plan as to what to do with the larger audience other than hope it all works out, and without expanding the abilities of “management” to cope with the larger numbers of posters.

4217

That’s fair enough. So I am posting to say I agree with you. Some people just thought that their shit didn’t stink.

4218

Bill, Octonoo went through a period of repeatedly trolling people about the wine shit in Games without being provoked. Now he’s just not bothering with any semblance of subtlety.

Which is what the ignore list is for I guess.

4219

Just saw this link:

“George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation”

“I confess. I chopped down the cherry tree, you shitbags.”

4220

Eh when I did a search it seemed less cut and dried as that. I could be wrong but yeah, that is what Ignore is for. I’d rather not use it but clearly Octonoo wants to just troll, and troll me, and the way this place runs now is that it is ok for him to troll me but not vice-versa, so I guess I don’t have any choice anymore. Maybe that’s the point?