The future of Quarter to Three's message board

This. Why wouldn’t he show the door to someone who continues to bitch and moan about the way he runs things instead of just, you know, leaving voluntarily?

That said, if not being nice to other people is going to be grounds for banning, soon jpinard will be the only person here. :)

I also second this.

Tom, I really appreciate you coming back and participating in the forums, but I feel I have to express my disappointment in the ban list. Some of them are my friends, and others post text I enjoy reading.

From my perspective, the last three months have been fine. Granted, I haven’t seen the incidents you mentioned, and I rarely post in P&R, but I was glad to see a bunch of the posters come back when you unbanned everyone.

I didn’t think you needed to ban yourself, and I actually think we had some really great posts on the Avatar Y/N regarding moderation. It was a bit messy, sure, but I think everyone needed an open discussion.

Before the moderation-free period, I have to say that knowing that some people might get banned affected my enjoyment of the boards. No moderation is not necessarily the best way to go, but I do think you can find a better middle ground between that and how moderation worked before the last three moths.

I’m sorry to say this, but I think that this will hurt the board, and I hope you reconsider.

I think the best way to moderate is to keep the vetting, and only intervene in extreme cases, and the people from the list I know are far from that.

re JM banning and adding to list as edit: It appears so. The whole thing is getting very unnerving. Honestly I’m not sure what we’re allowed to talk about or do without getting banned, which is extremely uncomfortable.

What does that mean?

Not even games? Bummer. :(

Let me rephrase.

You’re the community manager. It seems that your focus is on the people who disrupt you personally instead of on people who disrupt the community as a whole.

I agree with this. I assumed this thread was for discussion of the changes and of moderation in general, but… I think I’ll just go read some more posts about Skyrim.

Agreed, but maybe I missed the hullabaloo since I don’t typically read the meta threads. Or things in PM discussions, etc. But if the forum wasn’t moderated at the time, did these posters know they were breaking the rules?

I would put it this way: “people who strongly disagree with the way I run qt3 are not welcome here if they insist on continuing to express that”.

I suggest adding a full bullet item to the RULES listing explaining that discussing moderation/bannings/board policy is NOT a valid topics for the forum in general. This wasn’t clear when I skimmed it and it seems to be the single biggest source of banning itself. If it’s a listed rule it’s obvious.

And yay for spoiler tags! I really like this for riddles and puzzles and things more than plot spoilers.

Thanks for articulating that. It’s certainly been one of the larger problems. Hopefully, this thread and the infraction system will help with that. I’m not 100% committed to an eventual “bannings are a private matter” policy if it’s not going to work. We’ll see. At any rate, everything is entirely up front, transparent, and open for discussion for now.

Partly. I would put it this way: “people who strongly disagree with the way I run qt3 are not welcome here if they insist on continuing to express that”. There’s a point where if you’re unhappy with the way the forum is run, you should probably either accept it or leave.

-Tom

Unfortunately, JM should have been in the first round.

-Tom

EDIT: Sincere apologies to JM. That was a huge boner on my part, right up there with confusing James and Jeremy Johnson/Johnsen.

Gendal, good point about the vetting and the mandatory 50-post limit! Thanks for pointing that out.

-Tom

Like most of the people here, I’ve never moderated a massive forum like this. I do know that I would be very agitated if I saw my name mentioned, quoted or anything attributed to me in a negative way in a discussion that I was not even a part of.

Now add a forum with hundreds of daily posts. Somewhere in those posts someone is disparaging you, your ability and/or your judgment. Possibly every day. I wouldn’t want to spend all my time defending or clearing my name either. No one would.

I tell my employees that posting anything on the internet is like radioactive waste. It never goes away. Who the hell would want to spend all their time dealing with those negative statements on their own site?

While I don’t necessarily know if the pre-emptive bannings are a good idea, I don’t have all the information at hand. I can say that I’ll be sad to not see posts from a few of those folks. But what first comes to mind is the simple fact that there have been multiple instances of people having been banned from the forum and later reconciling and being brought back into the fold.

“Say the words,” said the Ape-man, repeating, and the figures in the doorway echoed this, with a threat in the tone of their voices.

I realised that I had to repeat this idiotic formula; and then began the insanest ceremony. The voice in the dark began intoning a mad litany, line by line, and I and the rest to repeat it. As they did so, they swayed from side to side in the oddest way, and beat their hands upon their knees; and I followed their example. I could have imagined I was already dead and in another world. That dark hut, these grotesque dim figures, just flecked here and there by a glimmer of light, and all of them swaying in unison and chanting,

“Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men? “Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men? “Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men? “Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men? “Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”

And so from the prohibition of these acts of folly, on to the prohibition of what I thought then were the maddest, most impossible, and most indecent things one could well imagine. A kind of rhythmic fervour fell on all of us; we gabbled and swayed faster and faster, repeating this amazing Law. Superficially the contagion of these brutes was upon me, but deep down within me the laughter and disgust struggled together. We ran through a long list of prohibitions, and then the chant swung round to a new formula.

“His is the House of Pain. “His is the Hand that makes. “His is the Hand that wounds. “His is the Hand that heals.”

And so on for another long series, mostly quite incomprehensible gibberish to me about Him, whoever he might be. I could have fancied it was a dream, but never before have I heard chanting in a dream.

“His is the lightning flash,” we sang. “His is the deep, salt sea.”

So in using Tom’s analogy - He should just close and lock up the house that he built? No doubt he loves and care about the community he’s formed here; and doesn’t want to effectively demolish it.

I’m quite sure that he could form a new forum at www.fourtyfivepasttwo.com and slowly rebuilt what is here.

But why should he have to.

I’m in agreement that having infractions is annoying, and adds a stupid administrative hassle that now Tom will have to deal with - but it’s obvious that these individuals aren’t following pretty commonsense type of guidelines, based on the posted rules and regulations.

He’s even gone out of his way to reach out to these people.

I’ve recently come back to reading the forum after not actively reading for 6 months or so - and I’ve noticed a severe uptick in rudeness/elitism in posts; which… is exactly what I don’t expect to read when coming to this forum.

Kudos to you Tom and the house you’ve built - I look forward to seeing what becomes of qt3 in 2012.

I disagree, partially. There has to be moderation of some kind. Moderation sometimes means telling people when they’ve stepped over the line, and sometimes means giving them the boot.

Some friendships can’t withstand that. And a single individual doing all of the moderation makes that even harder. And the way Tom chooses to moderate makes it harder still. Those are all true. However, I don’t think that you run a community by having no rules.

So it looks like the infraction system isn’t working as intended yet. Ideally, an offending post will be clearly flagged. Let me tinker with it for a bit. For now, I’ve only used the infraction system for Nawid A’s gif, which he should have known better than to post.

Hugin, it’s more the principle of the thing. See the stickied rules post about treating the forum like a boys’ locker room. There are plenty of places you can go on the internet to see hot gyrating women falling out of their tops. This shouldn’t be one of them.

-Tom

Thanks for making it clear that you’re one of those internet personalities who thinks that the community they started years ago succeeds because of them, when in actuality, the community has moved on and no longer cares about its progenitor. The people you’ve banned are not the people the majority of the members of this community would wish to see banned. You’ve banned your personal enemies, and the enemies of your personal friends, and expect people not to notice this? Did you not notice how the forum ran just fine for three months without you? And now you want to eliminate all discussion of the fact as if eliminating discussion of something makes the problem go away.

Nowhere in the rules does it say that you cannot be critical of Tom or his moderation. If you can be banned for being critical, it should say so in the rules. Rules should be open and clear so posters can know what they can and can’t do.

Also welcome back Tom!

That was when the forum was unmoderated. See the stickied rules post for the current situation. Basically, P&R has a bit more leeway than the rest of the forum, but it’s still going to moderated. And before you guys bring up the usual names, rest assured that PMs have been sent to pretty much everyone you’re going to complain about.

 -Tom

Running Tom’s site shouldn’t be a second job with all the unnecessary stress points. I can see where he is coming from.