I must be too timid. This was my real response. We have usenet for asshattery and off-topic sailing. Why can’t we have a forum of high quality on-topic IF discussion? I say we have two forums. One that explicitly moderates out anything non-IF and one that is looser. I personally might visit the former 90% of the time and check on the asshat lounge when I need a giggle…sort of like when I go to foxnews.com.
David C.
Most web forums use a policy that boils down to: “Posting in these forums is a privilege, not a right, and it can be revoked. This is not a democracy.”
It may sound draconian, but you guys just discovered the reason it’s adopted by almost every forum.
As I suggested in my previously posted ironic remark on page 2 of this topic, I also believe that this “event” or whatever wasn’t staged. I don’t see any conspiracy here or any connection with anyone or anything. For three reasons:
Aina Grey and I don’t know each other personally. To pull such a conspiracy off, wouldn’t both members have to know each other and have a common masterplan?
We both had no influence on whether Merk would delete Aina’s posting or not. I didn’t even know that Merk deleted Aina’s posting until he later mentioned it in my topic in the feedback forum. That’s because I usually doesn’t click so frequently on topics which are unpleasant to me.
Why should Aina Grey and I stage a battle in this forum which would disrupt our reputation and the reputation of CYOA comps? Wouldn’t it be the most stupid thing to do, to shoot at one’s own legs? Even a person with my background wouldn’t do that.
Seriously, this entire “event” makes no sense to me. Now all this talk about board policies, spammers, trolls, “asshats” and whatnot. I don’t even know what to think of all that. I’m just shrugging and wondering where this is supposed to go to…
I think it’s best for me to not comment any further on this issue. As I wrote in my feedback topic, all I intended to point out was that calling other forum users names such as “subhuman” was not productive for a healthy relationship between people in the IF community and that such things should be coped with by the forum management. Merk did what he had to do and I absolutely respect his decision. I can’t speak for others though.
You probably deserve an explanation of why this has all been stirred up in this way, Retro. It’s really very simple, but if you’re not a regular to RAIF - and I don’t recall seeing you there - you’re bound to have missed it.
Basically, RAIF has lately been a place of flames, mostly due to the usual suspects. It got so unpleasant that many people started talking about migrating elsewhere, or dealing with the problem some other way. Many people recommended this place over RAIF because, at the present time, it’s much more likely to be reasonably flame-free and welcoming.
And so soon in the heels of a very unpleasant situation in RAIF, concerning the development and release of Inform 7, comes a very unpleasant situation here. This whole thing is being stirred up because, simply, this place doesn’t have to be like RAIF, because it’s moderated, and works differently, and basically Merk and everyone who has been to RAIF lately is trying to stop what we’ve seen happen over there.
DISCLAIMER: RAIF and RGIF remain great places for visiting, though.
Now, something that’s been on my mind. Since I started this post, I might as well say it.
There’s some concern regarding the need for thoughtful, insightful, interesting conversation about IF. I would also like to see it. It’s also been said that the best way to have those conversations is to start them. Naturally.
But let me tell you what I saw when I first came here. In fact, what I saw when I first got to AGS - it was very much the same thing.
Everything had already been said, mostly. There were always smaller interesting issues, but there were already reams of discussions on the really interesting stuff. I mean, how can I hope to contribute to a discussion when all I can give is my player’s input, as valid as any other people’s, when present in this discussion are people who have really thought this through, and have a heftier background on the mechanics of writing and storytelling? I have fairly strong feelings about possibilities of conversations in IF, but what’s the point of bringing it up if I’m in the same room as Emily Short, who’s written games and bled litres of virtual ink on the subject? Also, I heavily respect Emily Short and her views. When I find a review, like Heavy Rain’s, where her opinion appears to differ from mine, I feel daunted, because I feel as though she got something from the game I didn’t get, due to her vast experience and knowledge of how a story works/can work/should work.
What I mean is, the new generation of interested people are finding that a lot of ground is already covered, and may not really want to bring it back up, especially if it means reading tons of background material which goes way beyond the scope of their interest (I often see considerations that go beyond what I care about. I then refrain from posting because I’m clearly not in the same league as those people).
Or maybe it’s just me. At any rate, this is what I wanted to say. I used to be the sort of person who wanted to discuss, to find how to improve the medium, to see what can and can’t be done, to see what makes a game good or bad, and whatnot. Then I found out it’d already been covered extensively, and I was hardly likely to add anything to the discussion, which was already an old discussion, old news, unlikely to interest anyone if it were revived by someone with no past knowledge of the previous discussions (and that past knowledge would have to be extensive). So I just lurk around. I read every single post, and find myself able to reply to very few.
Just, you know, two cents.
EDIT - Oh, and I’m not particularly singling Emily out. She’s simply the first person I always think of, along with Andrew Plotkin.
In general I don’t like post deletion. (This goes for both moderators and users; I don’t like systems that let a user go back and delete or revise her words after the conversation has moved on.) Conversational integrity is part of what keeps a discussion forum stable. Yes, we want to promote interesting and relevant IF discussion over derailed shouting – but when a newcomer shows up and sees threads full of “(post deleted)”, she has to wonder what was said that brought down the hammer. And if you can’t see, you can’t know that it was the right decision.
Changing posts to be hidden behind spoiler/collapse tags is one way to deal with this. Another is “disemvoweling” (deleting all the vowels in a post – this is used on some blogs I hang out on. (The idea is that you can decode “g t hll y frckng mnky-lckr”, or at least get an idea what was shouted; but it doesn’t have the emotional impact of being smacked by a screenful of bad language. That is: it doesn’t inspire people to shout back.)
However you implement is, the first duty of a moderator is to keep reactions from escalating. One person freaking out is not destructive of conversation. Two people in a shouting match is destructive; so is one person who keeps re-inflaming a sore spot. The moderator’s job is to, (1) make it clear that someone has gone too far or said something unacceptable; (2) ask the person to stop doing that; (3) if that doesn’t work, apply mod-powers to stop it and protect the discussion.
(Note that (1) and (2) are everybody else’s job too.)
Having an “off-topic” forum is sort of an orthogonal issue. There will always be off-topic posts. We can agree to shift them to a specific forum. But that doesn’t mean asshattery; off-topic has to be held to the same standards as the rest of the forum.
Locking a thread entirely, or banning a user from further posts, is a last-resort tool – it necessarily exists, and it’s good that it exists, but it sucks.
To be clear: I am not volunteering to be a moderator here. I am kept sufficiently busy by other IF activity… (Besides, there’s a class of “usual suspect” who would make a big thing of it. Unhelpful.)
I am always happy to be thought of first. Or second. 
Any community, no matter what, has a stock of shared experience – which means some discussions have been had. This is true of RAIF; it was true of 2005 RAIF, and 2000 RAIF, and 1995 RAIF as well. My point of view is that I should keep my oar out of the water, and not jump in to say “Oh, we’ve talked about that, and it doesn’t work. Forget it.”
Hopefully that is reassuring to you, and not unsettling.
(As usual, I stick to my principles… most of the time, I hope. Nobody’s perfect.)
But lurking around is always the way people join in a community. After a while you realize you’re not as ignorant as you fear.
This is one of the fundamental reasons I started IFWiki.org. I had the same frustrations. That conversations had already happened and I missed them…or later…that conversations had happened and someone had raised it again. The most common of these was TADS versus Inform. Now you can hop over to IFWiki.org and find various links to some of the more important and useful discussions from usenet’s past.
Of course there’s still tons of rehashing to do where IF is concerned. New ideas are new for a reason and even old dogs can be taught new tricks. I would hate for anyone to feel compelled to simply lurk and not ask questions.
David C.
Good point. If we want people to trust the moderation, it should be out in the open. That may also alleviate some concerns about having to spell out all the rules of the forum in detail - a vague rule is easier to understand if you can go back and see examples of enforcement.
After moderating a forum for a number of years I disagree. Spam can be deleted instantly. Enraged or offensive posts can be too, with a friendly warning given to the poster. If they do it a lot put them on moderation (so all their posts will require approval before being seen) and if they rarely have anything of value to say just ban them.
Keep a recycle bin for the deleted posts. If there’s ever an issue with what’s been deleted you can resurrect them again.
Spam can go immediately, yes. Didn’t mean to neglect that.
Thanks all. Some good ideas there. I haven’t written anything up “officially” but here’s what I’m thinking.
Spam and spammers will still be deleted outright. So far, there hasn’t been much of a gray area as to what’s spam. It’s obvious.
Objectionable posts need to be reported if people object. I’m not sure that the current “report” feature has appropriate reasons in place. I’ll look at that, and see if it’s possible to add some sort of “objectionable post” reason or reasons. This causes topics to be flagged with ! when I log in - easy to spot.
Moderators. Would need to be fair and as unbiased as possible. I.e., if you love Inform 7 and somebody says Inform 7 sucks, that’s not a reason to moderate. Moderators can be board-specific, too. Anybody willing to take on this responsibility, even if only for a short while? Maybe better to just wait for now, and see if what prompted this was an isolated incident? I didn’t block or ban “Aina Grey” yet that’s been the last (so far) we’ve seen.
Going forward, we’ll try to avoid deleting entire posts or topics.
I can use the “rant” tag to collapse moderated bits. For example:
[rant=Moderated by Merk: The following contains harassing/threatening remarks, and may be objectionable to some users]Blah blah you’re a fool blah blah you’re subhuman blah blah I have no idea who you are but I would beat you up blah blah look at me blah blah[/rant]
The “rant” tag is part of the post, though, and could be removed by the original poster pretty easily. So I think we’d also need to use the “warning” system built into phpBB to notify people when their posts have been moderated, and that removing the moderation tag isn’t allowed. If I come up with a better way, then re-editing shouldn’t be possible.
Zarf’s point about editing your own posts is good, although I hesitate to remove that ability. For me, there is more good in being able to edit/fix my mistakes than in knowing that no prior post has been changed. Other opinions on this?
David, I know exactly the kind of forum you’re after, and I wish I could say that’s possible here. I just worry that it’s not. On boards set up for my online games, for instance, none of this is even up for discussion. It pretty much is a fairly strict dictatorship, and I’ll delete posts or moderate as needed. But those kinds of boards serve a different purpose. Here, it’s supposed to be open discussion. It’s not “Merk’s Forum For IF” – or if it is, it’s not supposed to be.
As for what falls under the umbrella of “objectionable” – again, it probably means users reporting it. I do think there are posts that should remove all doubt, though, such as the one that prompted all this. If it seems to be a gray area, then there may be nothing more to do than for other participants in the topic to just counter/correct the objectionable one (pressure by community standards) rather than require the “rant” moderator tag. But we’ll see how this goes.
Being on RAIF made me get unused to post editing, but when I was strictly a forum user, it was a feature I used and abused. Sometimes to clarify myself. Sometimes to correct spelling. Sometimes when, after posting, I reread it and thought “Oh, that’s prone to misinterpretaion”. Sometimes just to avoid double posting.
Some time in RAIF made me used to checking what I’ve written more throughouly before I post, but it’s still a feature I like. I do understand that people - Denton, aka Aina, most chiefly - can abuse that feature, but honestly, it had never crossed my mind they could. They never did in AGS, so I just didn’t think they would. How naïve of me.
When used well, editing posts removes the amount of kruft on forums. It allows the first post in a thread to be updated with relevant information, allows you to swap out dead links, removes the need for double posting.
Yes, it can be abused, and it’s definitely good etiquette to add a comment explaining what you changed. But if you’re really worried that someone will try to revise their words later, then make sure to quote anything you don’t want them to back out on.
That’s fine for topics that get stickied and used as a FAQ substitute, but generally that works best for the first post at the cost of making followup discussion incoherent or incomprehensible.
I’d prefer to see the FAQ-making happen on IFWiki where the community can step in if the original poster disappears. I like the USENET convention of having the most recent additions concentrated at the end of a thread, rather than scattered throughout in a cascade of updates.
It would be nice if a post could be locked from edits after the first reply. That would allow corrections for spelling and sense without putting latecomers to a thread at a disadvantage.
I like being able to edit my posts. I don’t think we need any hard restrictions on post editing just because it might be abused.
I’m not looking for a dictatorship. For me, the goal is to make people feel comfortable coming here and sharing their insights. If anyone attacks that basic ideal, there should be consequences. I personally feel that any attacks, whether they are direct or indirect, need to be addressed harshly. Some of the rules I would state include:
My two cents.
David C.
#4 is fine, #2 might be appropriate on a forum for children, but #1 and #3 are an impossible standard.
“No controversy” would discourage all sorts of legitimate discussion. Commercial IF is not dead? Controversial. Rule based programming is the future? Controversial. What’s the best game of 2010? Controversial. How many mazes should I put in my game? Controversial.
Direct personal attacks are one thing, but if calling someone’s idea “stupid” counts as a personal attack, where do you draw the line? “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard”? “That idea sucks”? “With all due respect, good sir, that’s a load of codswallop”? “That is a bad idea”?
Vague, overreaching rules are stressful for moderators and users alike.
Ieee!!! I replied, and it’s gone to the ether! I don’t even remember what all I said now. I have no idea how that happened. 
Never seen the board just eat my posts before.
I actually dislike every single one of these rules. They strike me as promoting the sort of bland, passionless discussion that gets tiresome after a while. Seriously, no emotion or controversy?
I can see how these rules would be appropriate if you intended to promote this forum to folks interested in IF by way of Textfyre. But your interests as a business owner are not necessarily aligned with the larger IF community. A strict interpretation of your rules would mean that I couldn’t speak my mind about Textfyre, since just about anything unflattering I might say about your business could be interpreted as a personal attack.
Really the only problem I had with RAIF was the amount of spam, and the fact that nearly every extended discussion focused on whether or not someone was a troll. Many of the troll posts were clever and well-written. The endless hysteria and name-calling, not so much.
I would echo other sentiments and suggest that the best way to get more interesting discussion is to initiate more interesting discussion. Not by grounding the passionate posters under the heel of an authoritarian jackboot, in service to some misguided ideal of user-friendliness.
I would rather newcomers know up front that this is a community that frequently goes for the throat, instead of letting them spend months or years crafting an imperfect IF game and being devastated when bitter critics rip their work to shreds. I don’t support that culture, I don’t share that attitude, but I think it’s dishonest and deceptive to hide it behind a veil of superficial pleasantries.
See, I think both of those ideas are unnecessary (and unhelpful) extremes.
There is such a thing as passionate disagreement. Ideally, it doesn’t preclude respect. But you don’t get there by starting up a punctilious list of what to ban.