Everybody loves a scold.
Oh wait . . .
Everybody Loves a Scold 2: The SCOLDENING! This time its personal.
There’s a time and a place for a thread that ponders the very real concerns of this message board’s inclusiveness (or lack thereof).
There are also times and places for threads that meander aimlessly into dinosaurs, 70s rock, anime, owls, .gifs and general nonsense in an attempt to divert a board mainly about games and entertainment from entering Y SO SRS space.
At any rate, this thread has been successfully diverted from “OMG BROEKEN FORUM IS A BUCNH OF SJW GAEYS/WEEBS LOL” for most of it. So there is that.
And, as somebody mentioned (I think) above, if a thread appeared here that honestly addressed more serous issues that had nothing to do with games and movies and whatnot, it should probably go into P&R and would likely be left in peace by us reactionary greybeards, which is pretty much what happens anyway.
This isn’t political or religion though. It’s just human interactions on this board.
I understand the idea of forum individuals changing the things they say, or the way they say them to make things supposedly more inclusive. But I think anyone who thinks that this same group is going to somehow add subject matter to encourage that inclusivity is fooling themselves. If there was an interest those subjects would already exist here. Nobody prevents new topics from being broached.
OK, fine. Cards on the table then. Why does anyone hang around a specific board? Simple. They like the groupthink and align favorably with the denizens there. I enjoy interacting with most of the critters here and can overlook the ones I don’t like. I like the majority of topics and how most of us only fail our Gaming Lore checks on a roll of 1.
However, when the conversation veers into introspective social topics, my eyes glaze over. For example, I don’t care if women post on Qt3, or are interested in signing up. They’re just Qt3 critters like everyone else, and if they can roll out some mad gaming scripture, awesome.
We’ve had our own little corner of the interwebs for over a decade now. It’s cosy, if a bit musty, and I really don’t want it to change.
Yeah that’s what I meant.
There is a crowd here that thinks any change or conversation about change is bad, and they show up to derail any conversation that takes place about it, and when that doesn’t work they demand it get taken to the PR section so they don’t have to deal with it.
This really did start though with someone trying to pump up this forum as something it’s not, so they could feel superior to another site that clearly wants a diverse crowd instead of… well this weirdo we think being unwelcoming isn’t as bad not welcoming because sometimes we just post shit for shits and giggles to get a rise out of people and keep our clubhouse clean, but none of that is intentional, of course not.
All right, I’ll call. I’m getting bored with Qt3. I felt like I had fallen in with a singular group of people when I joined about eighty years ago, and there was a lot of discussion around a lot of topics I enjoyed talking about. And a lot of things that I didn’t know much about, I could learn about and get exposed to them, so I could figure out if they were up my alley or not.
But my relationship with the forum is changing, likely as not due to changes in my life and just aging. I’ve gotten married since I joined, had two kids, got the mortgage monkey on my back. My interests and my focus have narrowed. I don’t go into P&R anymore, it’s just depressing. I rarely play a game on day one anymore, I just noodle around with crap in my backlog. And more and more, stuff I really like isn’t coming up in discussion around here. And that’s fair and proper, we only talk about what we want to talk about. I’m just thinking maybe I need to look at a change.
Now the first thing to consider is, if everyone else is just fine with the state of the board and I’m not, well maybe that’s just a me problem. Might be, maybe I should just shuffle on off into the sunset. But I figure that possibly there are lurkers, just like I used to be, who don’t pop up very often and don’t share their opinion all that much but might have a thought about all this. So I brought it up, and here we are. And I’m pretty happy with that, we talked it out a bit and then we got bored and moved on. All righty then.
But I’m not sure what to do next. Hang out a bit and see where my train of thought takes me next. Guess we’ll see.
I went back to the top of this thread for context and laughed a little at this. Ahh, simpler times.
The specifics aren’t the same, but broadly speaking this was fairly prescient.
I still think you’re attributing malice where there isn’t any, or isn’t as much as you think. And I see the disagreement about where some theoretical new thread should go—P&R, or Everything Else—but I don’t see anyone complaining about the derails here even trying to start the conversation in a dedicated thread. So go for it, start a thread in Everything Else about how Qt3 treats women, and prove me wrong.
Until then, you’re just going to despair trying to keep this one on track or assuming everyone who makes a silly post is unwilling to engage in a more serious discussion or is actively trying to prevent one from happening.
“This” really did start as a thread about downtime at another forum, then got heated with a fight about Snowden, and then months later got bumped for someone with an axe to grind about BF. Don’t try to rewrite this thread to fit your narrative.
Yeah, that didn’t age well. At least I didn’t tweet it!
I think you need to reread the thread yourself, the reason this topic shifted to the other topic it did was literally because I took issue with someone trying to say BF is more sexist than this one is which is actually ON topic. Of course that was before the sexual Zootopia post, so there is that.
I meant literally, the beginning of this entire thread. It’s trying to figure out why Broken Forum is down, then it’s Starlight arguing with someone about Snowden and blaming Tortilla for censorship (I think, hard to tell since Starlight edited the content out of most of their posts and the account is closed now), then this, two months later:
Which several people didn’t understand, but is apparently someone angrily blogging about how they were treated at BF. So it was months into the life of the thread (such as it was) before this became another “us vs. them” discussion.
It was born of a technical concern that BF was gone, it went wildly off topic before the first BF related drama, and trying to decide and enforce what the thread’s true purpose should be now is a fool’s errand.
I’m glad we had some of the discussions we had in the last few weeks, but this thread hasn’t been “on topic” for four years.
If your eyes are glazed over, then what are you doing in this thread?
My eyes glaze over when people talk about college sports. The solution is simple, I avoid those threads. There is no point to barging into a March Madness thread and starting to post gifs until the thread moves on to a topic I find more interesting. That would just be annoying, don’t you think?
Sometimes drama draws me like an infernal magnet.
edit: no pun intended
What would you change? A thread on “What I did with my kids today.” maybe, so start one. Or maybe something on how the school systems are screwed, start one (actually that probably exists on P&R).
I am always surprised when someone starts a new thread about something that I haven’t seen brought up before.
I do think putting some topics straight into P&R automatically leaves out a large group who simply avoids P&R on principle.
@divedivedive you know how may games I play day one? Two in the last decade. Hell about 95% of the games I play are several years old by the time I get them.
As for getting married and having two kids in the last 8 years? Are you my alter ego?
Honestly the ecclectic nature of interests is nice. The board games, beer, movies, biking, all have adherents here. Honestly if 1 in every 100 of my posts in the games forum is about a video game, I’d be doing good!
Yeah, the only games I get day one are from Kickstarter, and half of them I don’t play day one.
We could always use more topics, so if someone wants to create a “practical, reasonable ways to be more inclusive in discussions” topic that’d be great.
For example, don’t randomly insert race-based references about penises and Grindr into a completely unrelated topic. I personally don’t think that’s an unreasonable thing to ask of ourselves. But maybe that’s just me 🤷♀️