We’ll have to agree to disagree here.
The use of the term thunderdome and saying that Tom’s view on moderation should be disregarded rubs me the wrong way. It’s ultimately his decision. If I wanted to disregard his opinion I’d rather leave. His house, his rules.
Edit: OTOH if it was my decision, there are at least two posters that I’d hellban just for fun. :)
We all have wrong opinions on topics from time to time. Remember that Tom was also virulently anti-avatars and anti-spoiler-tags, both of which I view as … well, basically totally insane, like “old man yells at cloud” level insanity. I agree with most aspects of Tom’s approach to community, otherwise I wouldn’t be here either.
But if this community wants to survive long term it has to move out of the infantilizing mindset of “we just do exactly what Tom says to the letter, because welp, thems the rules I guess”. Be the change you wish to see in the world, PARTICULARLY when it’s about a super aggravating TO YOU poster who is basically only here to troll people.
I mean, if it was about me, I wouldn’t give a damn because I don’t go into P&R.
I don’t get the impression Tom wants us to do exactly as he says to the letter nor does he really demand that. Banning though should be limited and should at least have some private… conversatiosn with the person first. I think he’s done that in the past.
I just realized I can’t avoid this trumpster if I browse on mobile.
That is what P&R is for. It isn’t intended to be an echo chamber, its purpose is to fence political crap out of the rest of the forum, so I can interact with whoever that trumpkin is about videogames.
If you go to P&R, you’re going to get upset. That’s literally why it exists.
In your user CSS plugin of choice,
tr[data-category-id="10"] {
display: none;
}
hides P&R from the front page, which has been great for my sanity. Even the list-of-recent-topics gets my blood up sometimes.
You can just mute the entire category, and then you’ll never see it again. That’s what I do.
No need to do that, just mark the category as muted in your user preferences.
That still doesn’t explain why mods wouldn’t step in if someone joined the forum exclusively to troll people in P&R. That’s not why qt3 exists, and that kind of participation is clearly bad faith and shouldn’t be tolerated. Honestly if 4-5 trusted regulars, from varied backgrounds, were consistently pissed off about someone, I’d say that someone is a problem and should be shown the door.
It’d be like joining a forum about christianity to tell everyone what an awesome athiest you are and how god is stupid (and for the record, god is stupid and religion is dumb). Is that really the purpose of said forum?
As was said upthread, this isn’t (nor should it be) an echo chamber. I don’t think banning people at the drop of a Trump card is good. OTOH this particular idiot and his ilk are… jarring intrusions of stupid in a normally interesting thread or threads. As much as I can’t stand them, I find it cowardly to just call for their removal. If they step over a certain line, Tom’s not mine, then they can be booted. Jeremybriangreen comes to mind.
Edit: P&R used to be a lot worse. Since the purge it’s much better. I enjoy reading it more than posting in it. I’m no way near as politically savvy as guys like Timex and Triggercut.
The main benchmark is, do they have rational participation in other areas on the site? Did they join just to troll people in P&R? cc @Telefrog and @stusser
Honestly I don’t think so. They may actually believe the sewage that they spew, like all of the other Trumpets. Just because they are ignorant doesn’t make them trolls.
But then I wonder, of all of the forums out there, why here? I can’t answer that because I stopped reading their posts a while ago.
We shouldn’t ban for traditionally mainstream political beliefs, no matter how strongly we disagree. Obviously that doesn’t extend to hate speech, which is why I said traditionally mainstream.
Note that posting in good faith has never been a requirement. Entertaining trolls have always been welcome in the spirit of usenet. That used to be in Tom’s welcome post.
I miss Bill. That was entertainment. Hell… Lizard. Theodore Rex. And many more.
I don’t miss Dirt.
Because they are a problem for me, not a problem for the site. That is the purpose of an ignore function versus a ban. But they can very well be an eternal problem that I never want to deal with again.
I like the idea of calling users who are being ignored by a large number of people to the attention of moderators, though, because I agree that if they’re pissing off enough people that much they really may be a problem for the site at large.
But we will never know because we don’t have that important function here.
White supremacy is not mainstream politics. There are a few posters who are pretezeling themselves trying to convince themselves that his obvious racist and white supremacy remarks are not exactly that so they can talk about these other things, but the guy is clearly in that park, like way in it.
Yet you have a flag function. fuckin’ use it
I guarantee you that squeaky wheels get grease. This is the way the world works, has always worked, and will continue to work long after both you and I are gone.