Is there an option to delete or suspend your forum account?
Does Today accept such requests?
Or would I need to be a total dick in public for that to happen?
Oh, come on... *sigh*
Well, if you leave, I'll certainly miss you. But there's always letters. I'm sorry if you feel ignored. It isn't right.
This conversation is kind of ridiculous and, at this point, makes me think that one side is completely ignoring the other.
In other news, even though I benefit from the "lulz it has tits" behavior, I'm not exactly fond of it (and occasionally feel that I am being pitted against other people, which I certainly don't like). So, I partially agree with the Retro-Nagash-Makrond-Mayhem-Brotipodes group--not on every point, but perhaps on the general principle.
Of course, throwing down my gauntlet in one direction or another doesn't really mean much, but I don't have time to enter a really involved argument at the moment.
@Retro: sorry to see you go. You were sane.
I feel that thread locking is only productive in cases where there's a flame-war going on, rather than discussion that the OP disagrees with.
I am extremely wary of having given forumites the ability to lock and move their own threads, and I don't believe this should have been done. To me this seems like something best kept to Moderators, and it seems like it's often overused.
On the other hand, Janet has previously performed thread-locks largely (by which I mean probably more than 50% of the time, in fairly recent history) to cut back on the spammy posts and conversations everyone has been indulging in. Or, at the very least, that is what she says, and it correlates well with the events. She issues a warning, and then she proceeds to lock.
This doesn't seem like such a bad thing to me. If that thread weren't self-moderated, it would have to be deleted by Toady because it simply wasn't worth the time. That may say something about the nature of the Happy Thread, indeed, but I still feel that there is a certain amount of value in it. I've been able to learn a lot and see a lot of beautiful things to that thread, and I've met a great number of people from many countries who could point me to the limits of my own ignorance. I'm grateful to the people here who made that possible.
I like to think of us as one big happy forum family because, to be honest, I am rather lonely. But that largely means, to me, that we can share things that we find amusing and debate relatively calmly on various issues, and that we can feel free to act without too many restrictions. It doesn't mean that we don't have our own foibles and difficulties, and it doesn't mean that people shouldn't have to defend themselves. Not because people should be alone, but because so often we end up taking sides and creating a war over one solitary individual, where we could have just had a quiet disagreement between two, with the defendants absorbing the rest of the emotional damage afterwards. There are some attacks that must be defended against, hopefully with help from others--i.e. trolling, personally damaging anti-progressivist rhetoric (... by which I mean racist, misogynist, homophobic, etc., etc.), and so on, and so forth. But not every quiet disagreement is this sort of attack.
But instead we have a lot of white-knighting, and frankly, I'm tired of it. I don't think it generally falls in my favor, though I may be simply blind. I feel that I end up disagreeing with my friends here rather a lot, and then at the end we explain ourselves and wind up friends again, with no one running in to defend either side with flame and arrows. I've even been told to stop being a jackass or a whiner, though not quite in those words, and that was good for me, and I appreciated it.
I don't know where I'm going with this. But all-in-all, I feel like there is a "cult of personality" where we are friends and take care of each other, carefully respecting and creating boundaries, and there are cults of personality where we listen to someone we would never listen to otherwise, simply because they are them. Their rhetorical power is not earned. And, in these scenarios, I think there can be some difficulty.
Does it matter?
Yes. Of course it does.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9782313 times)