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[Lord Shonus]

If people do that (just delete anything that does not agree with them), people will ignore the thread and it will die.

[Zrk2]

If people do that (just delete anything that does not agree with them), people will ignore the thread and it will die.

By making everyone a tyrant it will allow no one to be one.

[G-Flex]

If people do that (just delete anything that does not agree with them), people will ignore the thread and it will die.

No, they won't, because other people might side with the thread creator, and it's hard to even notice if the thread owner is deleting crap unless you see it happening or it's yours. This is an extremely bad idea and I'm honestly surprised that anyone is supporting it. Sometimes people get ganged up on in threads, and that sort of thing, and you can't expect the general public to have some sort of collective-consciousness Jerk Alarm go off in their heads every time the OP does something bad.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

If people do that (just delete anything that does not agree with them), people will ignore the thread and it will die.

By making everyone a tyrant it will allow no one to be one.

No, it will allow everyone to hate everyone else.

[Lord Shonus]

Would YOU discuss in a thread that had dozens and dozens of -this post has been deleted by thread moderator- posts?

[G-Flex]

No, I wouldn't, but some people would, especially if the person whose threads were deleted were disliked by others involved.

[The Merchant Of Menace]

And of course. The offended party would then carry on this behaivour in their own threads, it would basically lead to cliques of users who don't delete each others posts being formed.
Although... I could just be overthinking it.

[Truean]

I think we need a way to control mods and to limit the unintended damage they might do (a trail of "this post has been deleted things):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles

"The value of the sword is not that it falls, but rather, that it hangs [over your head]."

The threat of being mod smacked gets to some people. If that doesn't work, maybe just have a system where after you get reported X number of times you get Toady's attention. Then you have to explain (damn convincingly) why he should look the other way. From there things won't be good for you and the sword falls.... Fear of it falling until then provides an incentive.

Abuse of the system is still a valid issue. The abuse is both from potential mods and from banned people just making new (clean) profiles. I'm afraid I have no answer

[Sowelu]

The discussion has moved past it a bit, but I just wanted to post with irritation regarding the "General Discussion is just a waste of money" bit.

Donations come from the community.  This board supports the community.  Determining whether GD builds community more than it hurts it is not trivial or necessarily obvious.  Personally, I think it builds community more.  Now, I would be on these forums regardless of whether GD was present or not...I spend most of my time in the middle forums.  But I spend no time in the upper forums at all, I barely play DF itself.  If the middle AND lower forums were removed, I just wouldn't stick around the forums = I wouldn't notice the donation drives = I wouldn't donate (and I do donate).

I think it's a valid to be concerned that what happens to GD will impact the community and impact donations.  If third-party moderators or outright subforum deletion scare people off without boosting the rest of the community, donations go down.  On the other hand, if the lower forums are actively keeping people out of the community for God knows what reason, I guess moderating it more heavily or nuking GD will make donations go up.  Care is required.  You can't just assume "killing the lower forums will reduce bandwidth expenses and be a guaranteed net financial gain".

[Truean]

The discussion has moved past it a bit, but I just wanted to post with irritation regarding the "General Discussion is just a waste of money" bit.

Donations come from the community.  This board supports the community.  Determining whether GD builds community more than it hurts it is not trivial or necessarily obvious.  Personally, I think it builds community more.  Now, I would be on these forums regardless of whether GD was present or not...I spend most of my time in the middle forums.  But I spend no time in the upper forums at all, I barely play DF itself.  If the middle AND lower forums were removed, I just wouldn't stick around the forums = I wouldn't notice the donation drives = I wouldn't donate (and I do donate).

I think it's a valid to be concerned that what happens to GD will impact the community and impact donations.  If third-party moderators or outright subforum deletion scare people off without boosting the rest of the community, donations go down.  On the other hand, if the lower forums are actively keeping people out of the community for God knows what reason, I guess moderating it more heavily or nuking GD will make donations go up.  Care is required.  You can't just assume "killing the lower forums will reduce bandwidth expenses and be a guaranteed net financial gain".

Point well taken.

I hope my posts weren't taken as this. I advocate a scalpel to cut out rather than a hatchet to hack off. I believe there are good things to the lower forms, but I also believe that there are certainly bad things in them as well. There are certain parts of the lower forms I value greatly. There are others that frankly... well even Toady says those are becoming a problem for him.

[Phmcw]

We can discuss this into oblivion, or we could do interesting post on this very board.

Seriously, a good thing about this debate is that we know that pointless posting is becoming a problem, and that we will avoid them.
With a bit of luck, and maybe a sticky, it may solve he matter.

[Sowelu]

Point well taken.

I hope my posts weren't taken as this. I advocate a scalpel to cut out rather than a hatchet to hack off. I believe there are good things to the lower forms, but I also believe that there are certainly bad things in them as well. There are certain parts of the lower forms I value greatly. There are others that frankly... well even Toady says those are becoming a problem for him.

Oh, yeah.  Agreed.

It's certainly positive at least that every single person posting in here is vastly appreciative of the effort and generocity of the Adams brothers, and acknowledges that we're all here basically by their good graces.  I mean, it's an obvious thing and it would be horrifying if people weren't like that, but we don't seem to have anyone (in this thread at least) who feels different.  And we do have a pretty wide spectrum of folks from the lower forums in this thread, including people who don't get along.  Ultimately we're on the same side, and it's cool that things haven't gotten all that heated or anything.

Which is part of why I love this forum so much.

[nenjin]

The only annoyance I really have is the rash of: "Just registered, must make 15 threads for people to post daily in so I can become recognized" threads. I'm guilty of starting 1 or 2 myself....but man, at least I spent some times in the upper forums before I stampeded down here to the lower ones to create a thread on anything and everything.

But that's a pretty minor annoyance. I still believe in the theory of self-control.

My general experience with forums of this size is, if you don't have rules in place to say that picture and joke threads aren't ok, you have no basis to moderate other than personal preference. Toady seems fine with that. I think his warning is more for our benefit than for his. He'll just ban and close threads if he needs to. He's trying to give us a heads up so people at least saw it coming.

Because honestly....every moderator I have ever known just wants peace. Doesn't care what the peace looks like, they just want it. And they'll ban/mute/nuke until they get it.

One thing I've learned that has helped me not get irritated at various personalities around here.....you don't need to read every thread. If you find yourself getting snappy and pissed off at every conversation thread, the problem may not be the thread at all...but a person's inability to deal with it.

[qwertyuiopas]

If a section is removed, posts that would have gone there will be posted elsewhere where they are even less relevant and more disruptive to that particular section's goals.

On the other hand, providing a section for those sorts of posts will encourage them, making them more common, at the same time as keeping most of them out of the way of the rest of the forum.

For example, if the forum games sections were removed, then DF-related games would become plentiful in DF general discussion, potentially drowning out the other ctopics, and the rest would tend to fall in community projects and Finally...'s general discussion. Removing the section will not just make all of them disappear.

Consider this: One section was split because half of the front page topics were different (I think it was either forum games splitting off from VN, or RTDs splitting off from forum games, or perhaps both), but in both cases it greatly reduced the clutter at the time.

Actually, I think it was FG&R (or perhaps all of the new sections?) splitting out of VN, leading to greater concentrations of nonsense that lead to the downward spiral that got that place locked. However, once VN was locked and hidden, it has been slowly creeping back in, mainly into GD. This is obviously not a good thing.

Perhaps it could be solved by splittig GD into GD and a sub-section of GD intended specifically for the less serious discussion, but it could also be solved by peroperly educating the offending users on why their comments are disruptive to the threads they are posting in, and how they should keep such comments to more appropriate locations, like more suitable topics, or for the worse ones, other forums entirely.


Finally, making it public knowledge of when/why a user is banned would allow others to learn from their mistakes, and hopefully teach them to think about what they are posting more often.

[The Merchant Of Menace]

Well. Regarding bans. Toady could create a graveyard thread, in which only he and ThreeToe can post, and put ban and mute notices there. An example of this is the Abandonia forum.