Of course, it's entirely possible that there were complaints to Toady about the staff (people might want them to be more strict, less strict, or not to include a certain individual), or the rules (some people might not like certain rules, such as "The channel is not, however, intended for discussion of sex or drugs, nor for unending barrages of profanity," or "You may never link to, or discuss where to locate, illegal materials. This includes pirated software/movies/music, and any images/sites/videos for pornography or shock sites," for instance. People have complained about those rules, for instance, but those complaints are not really valid reasons to de-officialize a channel.) These complaints I listed as examples were all made on IRC at one time or another, but people rarely agree with each other on what they each want, and it isn't the job of staff to rewrite the rules to suit the wishes of the loudest people around.
Yeah, there have definitely been arguments about the rules before, although mostly either one-off comments from people, or mostly-constructive discussions. I don't know of anybody actually complaining to Toady, or anything like that.
In any case, we don't really know WHAT complaints Toady received, because he never forwarded them to anyone on the IRC channel's staff, as far as I'm aware. If there were complaints sent to Toady about the IRC channel, they probably should have reached the people who were operating the IRC channel as well so that the complaints could be evaluated.
Of course, it wouldn't surprise me if many of the complaints were along the lines of
Hey, they banned me for no reason, just because I was trolling and being racist, and they won't unban me (unless I wait several months for my ban to run out)! This is totally unfair! Wait, I shouldn't say that. I should make myself sound like an hero, and IRC sound evil, like evil boats crossing in an ocean. Good plan! *rewrites complaint*
The thing is, we'll never know, because we were never informed, which... also sort of prevents anything from being done about it in a proactive
or reactive sense.
Of course, there's the chance that Capntastic's memory is playing tricks on him and he's referring to something else. For instance, there was an incident a
long time ago where an operator on IRC said a distasteful joke involving the sarcastic use of a racial slur, which got us delisted as the official channel (as if nothing bad ever happens on the forums, or anywhere else) until we had that operator give up the position and managed to get Toady to re-list us. Not to defend what happened there, or anything like that.
There have also been incidents where people from the IRC channel (particularly myself, some of the others in this thread, and a couple more) get annoyed by something on the forums and wind up responding to it at the same time here, making it look like there's some kind of concerted effort to be a part of the problem. There was recent stupid drama over this, but I won't bring it up, and none of it has anything to do with anything that happened in the IRC channel itself anyway.
Personally, if I were Toady, I'd cut all ties with the "Finally..." section of forums (General Discussion, Forum Games and Roleplaying, etc) next.
I have my own opinions regarding this, which I stated well enough in that old "state of the forums" thread that Retro started, then which devolved into silly arguments, got locked, and mostly ignored by Toady.
I agree that the forums aren't successfully moderated. Toady relies on reporting, but for reasons I've stated elsewhere (see above) that simply doesn't work, especially because it essentially deputizes the userbase, because you're relying on people to rat each other out, and hoping that bad threads get noticed by people who would never even go to them.
Take a recent unnamed roleplaying thread in FG&RP, for instance. A thread like that is hard enough to moderate, what with it accumulating pages of posts per day on its own. However, when something goes bad in a thread like that, who ends up reporting it? The people playing won't report it because they're the ones who are least likely to care, and most people to not see the problem (or participate in the problem). Most other forum members, if they're just acting as
users, won't notice it either, because they're not likely to be interested in the thread in the first place, or are likely to start ignoring it before it goes bad. Speaking for myself and some other people from IRC, at least, the only reason stuff like that gets reported (in this case, the sexy roleplay got a bit heavy after a protracted amount of barely skirting the rules about it) is because we
don't act as users; we have to intentionally inject ourselves into threads and subforums we have little interest in so that whatever shenanigans go on there actually get reported if they deserve it. In other words, we have to act like moderators, especially because you
cannot expect users to self-moderate, especially in something as isolated as a thread. On IRC, self-moderation is a little easier, because everything is in one place and nothing really goes unnoticed, and even there you can't count on it. On a forum, though, cliques can form, threads get isolated from other threads, subforums get isolated from other subforums, and it's surprisingly easy for a Very Bad Thread to go flat-out unnoticed because the only people who participate are, unsurprisingly, the ones interested in engaging in whatever's going on. This isn't really a controversial opinion, either; it happens all the time where I, or people I know, will notice threads where things have gone sour but that people in the thread aren't doing jack about, and that nobody else is doing jack about either because users
shouldn't have to try to pay attention to stuff they have no interest in just to see if rules are being broken... yet that's exactly the case here.
Toady and ThreeToe evidently aren't capable of proactively moderating the forums on their own, and I don't blame them for that; I don't think anybody does. I would hate to be in their position as well, and you can't really do
better with only two people around, especially when neither of them are really active members of the forum (for the most part) and Toady is more focused on developing the game. Problem is, the purpose of the report system is so the forums/threads don't have to try to act the role of moderators themselves, but it forces them to do so anyway in order for anything to get done sometimes.
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Topic: DF IRC (Read 4362 times)