A purely technical forum that totally disallows political topics could be good, but I question the extent of its usefulness. I like the organization of this forum not just for its technical subforums, but for the places where people can discuss their and others’ works - which, as has been pointed out elsewhere, can never engender very much useful discussion while totally divorced from those sensitive topics. I would even assert that that’s the main reason I’m still here.
Long story short, I think those things can coexist in a way that allows an interesting panorama of viewpoints but is still approachable by people who wouldn’t like it much here as it is now. I don’t know how to get there, but I think it’s possible regardless.
Back when Merk was still admin, he allowed Poster, who had (this was before my time so I’m relying on 2nd hand info) ruffled a LOT of feathers beyond just being cranky in. But he let Poster know that trolling would not be tolerated.
Now some of Poster’s (remaining) posts came up strident, but there was some useful technical information, even in the stuff I disagreed with. And I say this as someone who crossed swords with Poster on IFDB.
Eventually Poster moved on, after keeping various rants to a blog. This was all done before the CoC.
I submit most of us here are less prone to conflict than Poster and that there is a way to kick the bad stuff to the side.
The thing is I think I’d really like a forum that emphasizes the technical bits over the social bits, mainly because I feel woefully underqualified to write a social commentary game. But I’d like there to be one that emphasizes the other way around. And while there are some moral principles that can’t and shouldn’t be compromised, I’m worried that there’s a one size fits all applied to here and, say, euphoria.
edited: I said forum, I meant subforum. Or I’d be happy with even that. And I’d like to be able to participate in other subforums more if I want to.
The problem with this kind of thinking is that in online communities, most of the damage done by bad users is in the form of other users silently leaving rather than dealing with their shit. “We had a troll for a long time, but we argued him down repeatedly and eventually he moved on to other things, what’s the big deal?” All the people who took one look at your forum and turned right back around, basically. The question is not “I’d rather have Bob, the insufferable bigot who knows i7, than not.” The question is, would you rather have Bob or the people he drives away? Do we want “putting up with Bob’s bigotry” to be a requirement to participate in the community? Some people will say that people who get offended are the ones who should leave, I imagine. But those people are saying ultimately that they would rather have bigots than people who don’t wanna deal with bigotry, for whatever reason - and frankly, that opinion is in itself bigoted as hell.
I don’t get how it follows that “people are able to talk about social issues on the forum without being sealioned to death by assholes” means that people are somehow obligated or expected to write “social commentary” (???) into their games.
Nobody is proposing modding this space with the same approach used on &if, which is an idiosyncratic space that fulfills its own purpose and has its own implicit and explicit expectations.
This seems like a response to something other than what aschultz was saying, if I read him correctly (but I hope he’ll correct me if I’m wrong).
The situation he described with Poster wasn’t “we argued him down repeatedly and eventually he moved on”, it was “the moderator told him his trolling wouldn’t be tolerated, so he took the trolling to his own blog while continuing to post less inflammatory things here”.
Under that standard, the bar for participation isn’t “putting up with Bob’s bigotry”. It’s “putting up with Bob’s presence and his non-bigoted contributions, even if you know he’s saying bigoted things outside this forum where you don’t have to read them”.
That sounds like a reasonable requirement to me. If we become known as a place that will set aside external conflicts, and cooperate with people who come here to the extent they cooperate with us, that seems like a good outcome.
The thing about this argument is, people leaving because of ongoing issues is not an abstract or hypothetical argument. It isn’t even always silent. Multiple people over the past few days have said that they either have or plan to leave – not only leave, but actively warn others to stay away – if things do not improve.
As far as writing “social commentary” games or stories, I write what I want to write (for hobbyist projects, that is), and the potential forum take does not contribute at all to that decision either way. That said, I think it is telling that the majority of current, prominent IF authors do not really want anything to do with this space as it currently stands. (I would consider &if as more akin to ifmud than an official community forum.)
Frankly I do think “please be nice and civil and collaborate with someone who you know doesn’t think you’re a person” is too much to ask of people when there are a dozen other places where they can invest their time that aren’t making that insane request.
Well, most people seem to manage it, not only on forums but also in the workplace and other areas of life. But if some can’t, and if there are a dozen other places better suited to their needs anyway, it sounds like exploring those options would be in everyone’s interests.
Vapor, with all due respect, as a straight white man you have basically no right to condescend to people over not wanting to share a space with bigots and no firsthand understanding of that experience at all, so “people seem to manage it” is really quite glib and dismissive of other people.
Sequitur, I think I’ve lost track of what specifically you’re proposing. Are you saying that the moderators here should ban someone because of things they’ve posted elsewhere, regardless of what (or whether) they post here? I’m not even necessarily disagreeing with that, but I can’t tell if that’s actually what you want to happen. Presumably the moderators wouldn’t be expected to proactively vet everyone who applies for an account, but I guess in this hypothetical they would be banning someone in response to other forum members pointing out the offsite evidence of their not-thinking-someone-is-a-person-ness?
I should preface this by saying that, to comply with what the moderators have asked on other threads I’m going to talk in generalities but 1. these are things that have happened that would require action to restore trust in the moderation here, this isn’t a concern-troll hypothetical; 2. they’re also fairly extreme situations and I don’t expect this to crop up often, should such a rule be implemented.
But, mainly I believe that it’s not possible for this forum to be regarded as safe and productive if people who have engaged in harassment, publicly attacked people in a misogynistic/transphobic way, or affiliated with hate groups are allowed to continue posting and using it as though nothing had happened. Obviously, moderators can’t be expected to vet accounts or know about everything everyone does, but if something is brought to their attention they should act. If you know someone has (to use a hypothetical example) a white nationalist blog, but you let them post in here because you think they can “keep their opinions outside” when posting - fine, but a lot of people are not going to feel comfortable in that space. I would rather be able to post not having to think “okay is this the day Bob the Klansman decides to express his beliefs”. And, furthermore, civility and good faith can’t exist when one party doesn’t acknowledge the humanity of the other.
And though I’m largely not personally affected by bigotry 99% of the time (though, astonishingly, this is the only place on the internet where I’ve raised an eyebrow at people making casual statements that I thought were disrespectful towards my ethnocultural identity) I don’t generally feel comfortable with this either, which is why these days I only post in here to talk about why I don’t post in here - someone has to act as a proxy for all the people being driven out of the community by this forum, might as well be me.
The scenarios and policies being discussed here presuppose that the people under discussion are, in fact, bigots.
Someone criticizes Hillary Clinton (because they see her as a corrupt politician who is above the law). Misogynist?
Someone criticizes BLM’s tactics (suggesting that they should protest their local police department instead of blocking the highway near a hospital entrance). Racist?
Someone criticizes a Twine game (because it lacks interactivity and they don’t appreciate the confessional writing style). Homophobe?
It’s not possible to have an intellectually diverse space where people can discuss games about social issues when any criticism of a member of an identity group, regardless of the reason, immediately leads to a litany of “-ist” and “-phobe” labels being applied to the critic and calls for them to be cleansed from the community. For all their talk about not acknowledging the humanity of others, it seems to be the social justice side that is intent on unpersoning those who dissent from their views.
The issue you’re taking here seems to presuppose that anyone on “the social justice side” who’d take issue with actual misogyny/racism/homophobia would also deliberately mischaracterize criticisms such as those examples to make a political point. I suspect most wouldn’t do so, and those that do would (under a sufficiently intelligent and even-handed moderation policy) be corrected or otherwise dealt with in a sensible fashion.
Nothing is being presupposed; out of context, the examples you gave are iffy, and I suspect you chose them specifically because they are iffy. Not because they’re inherently wrong opinions, but because they are frequent lines of concern trolling on the part of bigots. Concern trolling is real, but also it’s difficult to define and difficult to handle; I don’t think mods should automatically jump in and stop someone from making those kinds of arguments, but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on in case it develops into a pattern or is part of a broader context of bigoted sealioning. Things as always have to be put into context, which is why I advocate considering everything we know about someone when reading their words. A post is a single data point that has to be added to the whole to give a picture of what is going on: is this person pushing a bigoted worldview? Are they sealioning? Are they arguing in bad faith? If someone constantly makes those kinds of arguments, one starts to doubt their good faith.
Things will not be disentangled that easily; there is a clear component of misogyny in attacks of Hillary Clinton, there is a clear component of racism in attacks on BLM, and there is a clear component of transmisogyny in some blanket criticisms of Twine (the charge is not “homophobia”, as you put it). Does this mean that anyone criticizing HRC, BLM, or Twine is automatically to be regarded as misogynistic/racist/transmisogynystic? No; but those kinds of arguments have to be looked at with sensitivity and an eye for context. Where is the criticism coming from? Is it grounded in facts or (like, say, “E-MAILS”) is it an invented controversy? Who is making that argument? Is this a widely-disseminated talking point?
Frankly, most of the time, it’s pretty damn clear that someone is using “reasonable concern” as an excuse to grind their bigoted little axe.
Those kinds of bad faith arguments come up fairly often, so even though it’s tangled and difficult, they do have to be handled like any other form of bigotry. Another example of bigoted concern trolling, which comes up all too often, is conflating concern about those lines of inquiry (which are often disingenuous or intended as a masked way to attack marginalized groups) with thinking that any criticism directed at marginalized groups or people is automatically bigotry; “bathroom bills are bad and advocating for them is bigotry” is straw-manned as “criticizing trans people for anything ever is wrong.” Another common theme is insisting that people with some degree of “social justice views” (whatever that means) are a monolith that doesn’t incorporate diversity of thought and opinion.
Nothing in this tangent A) is going to change anyone’s minds B) has addressed the point I brought up earlier, which is that people have already stated, with reasons, in this and other (deleted) threads, that they find the unaddressed trolling on the forum unacceptable and are warning others off it for that reason. These people happen to be the people currently creating IF. And yet nobody seems to care. For some reason.
I care. I want this forum to be more welcoming to new IF creators and players. I am pretty sure that all the moderators and most people reading and participating in these threads also care.
What seems to me to be missing is a clear, actionable proposal. What is the first thing that needs to happen to satisfy our goal? The consensus seems to be that switching to Discourse is not it. Is it to amend the CoC? What text should be added/changed? Is it to delete specific posts? Which ones are they? Is it to ban specific people? Who are they? Overall, what is the “Definition of Done” to know when we’ve achieved our goal?
A NNTP server might be better. But switching to anything from phpBB may require various conversions; if it is a SQL database and the target is also a SQL database then this could be done easily enough by SQL codes if the schema isn’t designed in a stupid way. Probably easiest is to just keep phpBB and not switch to anything; it will probably also cause less problems than switching to anything anyways.
Let me be frank: public outcry alone will never result in bans. We will not support mob justice. That may not be your intent, but that is how it is coming across. Please continue to raise concerns, but understand that you can’t demand bannings. Hopefully the community will trust the mods to ban those who need it, but I also know that at present many do not trust the mod team to do this to their satisfaction.
The mod team is still deliberating over what extent actions outside this forum will influence our decisions for moderating this forum.
I think we have to be careful in the hypotheticals we use. Some posting abusive messages on another public IF forum using the same username which they use here is a situation we have not quite figured out how to handle.
But if Bob the Klansman is trying to keep that part of his life secret from this part of his life and is succeeding, and if someone else still found out, I’m not sure that as a moderator I would want that information revealed to me. As abhorrent as the KKK is, outing people in such a way is close to doxing. My hope would be that anyone with abhorrent beliefs who can keep them to themselves is on the way to changing those beliefs. I say this in my role as a moderator. I also understand anyone who did know if secret or semi-secret bigotism is likely to feel unsafe regardless of how secret the person keeps it.
I should probably be more specific. When I say people “don’t care,” I mean that the question of whether people feel uncomfortable has been spoken about, consistently, as if it’s an abstract concept that doesn’t apply to anyone. It is not an abstract concept. I can count at least three people, probably more, who have said these things in the past couple days. They are being either talked past, ignored entirely, or told their concerns don’t matter.