mobbing people out of threads and subforums because they don't understand how things work is one of the behaviors we need to change if this is going to work at all
I agree, which is why I find it hard to understand having one subforum that describes itself as "not the other one" and the other one which describes itself as "be careful and make sure you understand what's going on here before you post"
I'm not even sure where you are getting these descriptions from or who you think they apply to.
From the blurbs under each subforum on the desktop version of the site.
I think those blurbs are like 20+ years old at this point and I'm not sure anyone has cared what they've said for almost that long.
So do you agree that they should be changed?
You mean the labels themselves? Sure?
Why is anyone even talking about the labels at all? Why is it even coming up? They literally don't matter and no one reads them.
Several people just did read them shryke.
What you mean is "I don't read them, I don't think they matter, and I don't think anyone else should care "
I think even more people have never read them and don't define themselves based on those labels. If you did a survey on whether they matter, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people on these forums would be like "Wait, what? There's labels?".
The labels don't define the culture of the various subforums. Nobody is shaping their behaviour around them. They are irrelevant.
This thread has offered at least three different explanations for the split just from the people who want to maintain it, not even including those who don't. Every one of those reasons has been mentioned by someone else as not being the reason for the split. With that in mind I thought it was at least relevant to look at the current official descriptions for the subforums. And I don't disagree that they don't matter, except to say that if we're not planning on porting them over as-is, what will be the description for the subforums? This isn't just a cosmetic thing, it's having some sort of agreed upon idea of what D&D and SE++ actually mean. Making a new forum that has divisions without any distinct idea why (or more accurately, with three different, contradictory ideas why we have them) seems cargo-culty.
+2
minor incidentpublicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
There seems to be some kind of assumption that the schism "must be solved" or "the forums will die".
I'm not sure I agree with that assertion, and we have no proof that this is the case. The closest thing we might have to evidence would come from the survey, and I can say point blank with absolutely no reservations that the survey doesn't support such an argument.
If anything, the only affirmative thing you can take away from the survey is that there is enough support for Coin Return to be a broadly viable thing. That's pretty much it.
The forums are dying. That much we know. Not in the PA is killing it way either. It has continuously slowed down when we had a name attached. It is only going to get worse without one. There is not a small amount of users concerned about how the forums are going. I don't think we have any idea of what a silver bullet to fix them would be. We can know as is things aren't going great based on the multiple threads where people have spoken directly about how they are not happy with how things are going.
Sure but none of those problems have to do with the actual structure of the forums.
The things killing the forums have been:
1) Attrition in an online format that is all but dead and thus not really attracting new users in any large numbers.
2) Bad moderation.
If the impetus behind the merging is to stop the bleeding, it's completely missing the mark and it's not gonna work. If anything, it will only shed more members as the places they come here for disappear.
Attrition is accelerated by the lack of activity, or the perception of it. Bad moderation is so vague as to be useless.
No, it's not. This just isn't the venue to go over the specifics of the moderation problems we've had for years now. (Including just a complete lack of moderation due to understaffing.) But it is the actual cause here rather then the structure of the forums. You aren't gonna solve a moderation problem with a forum merger.
Yes it is. This is an effect of basic human psychology. They want to spend time where there are people to interact with. Especially in an online forum. It is absurd to assert otherwise.
are D&D or SE experiencing low enough activity that we need to merge them to retain users?
clearly not.
Transparently I think Mr2 hit the nail on the head with their post. I believe there are a group of posters who are looking at a potential merge as a back door mechanism to drive out self-defined "undesirables". Not all, likely not many. But definitely some.
For reference - it's not just the merge. I have advocated at every step to raise the standard to which folks in this community are held. The community re-org is just the next task in the migration, so it's the next point at which I am trying to do that
This also aligns with where my head is at. Something like building a set of community values and a code of conduct as our foundation to guide this whole community is something that was an uncomfortable, often fraught endeavor with a lot of folks at odds. But as a community we managed to work through it and come out the other side with, what I feel, is an incredibly strong foundation that's only going to improve the QoL for everyone here, mods, administration, and regular users alike.
I view restructuring the forums similarly in that I can't see a downside at all to trying to discuss, with open minds, some of the ways we could actually push through a bit of discomfort to make things better for everyone in the long term. Obviously, the community's voice will impact the final decision on that, but it feels reckless, and like a disservice to this community not to try to explore it in some depth first.
Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it!
There seems to be some kind of assumption that the schism "must be solved" or "the forums will die".
I'm not sure I agree with that assertion, and we have no proof that this is the case. The closest thing we might have to evidence would come from the survey, and I can say point blank with absolutely no reservations that the survey doesn't support such an argument.
If anything, the only affirmative thing you can take away from the survey is that there is enough support for Coin Return to be a broadly viable thing. That's pretty much it.
The forums are dying. That much we know. Not in the PA is killing it way either. It has continuously slowed down when we had a name attached. It is only going to get worse without one. There is not a small amount of users concerned about how the forums are going. I don't think we have any idea of what a silver bullet to fix them would be. We can know as is things aren't going great based on the multiple threads where people have spoken directly about how they are not happy with how things are going.
Sure but none of those problems have to do with the actual structure of the forums.
The things killing the forums have been:
1) Attrition in an online format that is all but dead and thus not really attracting new users in any large numbers.
2) Bad moderation.
If the impetus behind the merging is to stop the bleeding, it's completely missing the mark and it's not gonna work. If anything, it will only shed more members as the places they come here for disappear.
Attrition is accelerated by the lack of activity, or the perception of it. Bad moderation is so vague as to be useless.
No, it's not. This just isn't the venue to go over the specifics of the moderation problems we've had for years now. (Including just a complete lack of moderation due to understaffing.) But it is the actual cause here rather then the structure of the forums. You aren't gonna solve a moderation problem with a forum merger.
Yes it is. This is an effect of basic human psychology. They want to spend time where there are people to interact with. Especially in an online forum. It is absurd to assert otherwise.
are D&D or SE experiencing low enough activity that we need to merge them to retain users?
clearly not.
Transparently I think Mr2 hit the nail on the head with their post. I believe there are a group of posters who are looking at a potential merge as a back door mechanism to drive out self-defined "undesirables". Not all, likely not many. But definitely some.
I think this kind of rhetoric flies in the face of the Transition Team asking for a baseline assumption of good faith from everyone participating in this discussion, and it's just raising the temperature without contributing anything useful to the conversation.
Especially when the new Code of Conduct was explicitly written to avoid people getting brigaded off the boards by other posters technically following the rules while making the space hostile.
But what do we do when someone comes in to the thread, after the date that we were all supposed to reset, and just immediately dials up the temperature against someone else who happens to be the same person they've been doing that to for like 10 years?
What do we do when someone comes in and says the culture of only one of the subforums is toxic and must be changed to be more like the one they like more?
We can't pretend those things aren't happening, and it chips away at the willingness some people have to assume good faith. It directly leads to skepticism when we ignore those things and just say "hey no we all said we would work in good faith, so you must ignore the posts that don't feel like good faith posts because the label says they all have to be good faith posts".
I don't know how else to say it -- it certainly appears that old battle lines are being drawn, yet again. It's both inspiring and frustrating that it's definitely not everyone, but it's enough people that it sure feels like people fighting ghosts of old battles again.
Give people infraction points so they cool it or get banned. Also if we get rid of the sub forums people will no longer have a side they're on.
The holiday forums sustain themselves on good cheer. The forums also significantly slow down as people are spending time travelling, with loved ones and family, or pulling late hours at work so others can enjoy time off. If the holiday forums were a permanent thing, I wouldn't stick around. The vibes quickly sour as we get close to and pass the new year.
The Holiday Forum also slows down because people just check out cause they don't like the Holiday Forum. Many people have never liked it and avoid the forums during that period because of it and have for years and years. But it's always been against the rules to complain about it so people mostly grumble in PMs or Discords or whatever. The Holiday Forum is not a sign of the viability of a merger.
I've never heard this. It's far more likely that people have so much other stuff going in that time of year and so they post less.
No, there's plenty of people who feel this way. I've talked to them for years in venues outside the forums specifically.
As always, the reason you don't see people grumbling about the Holiday Forums is because it was explicitly not allowed.
What? By who?
And even if someone had that as a rule, I'm happy to report that through the new CoC and forum-wide rules we have recently adopted, that isn't the case currently!
Feel free to complain about the Holiday Forums! Just don't be surprised if you get polite push-back as, for example, I think our volunteer moderators deserve a break during the peak of the holiday season.
+3
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
That was a rule with the first couple iterations of the holiday forums, Tube would infract folks for insufficient holiday cheer, it was part of the whole bit.
Personally I would have considered it fairly clear that isn't a part of things anymore.
The holiday forums sustain themselves on good cheer. The forums also significantly slow down as people are spending time travelling, with loved ones and family, or pulling late hours at work so others can enjoy time off. If the holiday forums were a permanent thing, I wouldn't stick around. The vibes quickly sour as we get close to and pass the new year.
The Holiday Forum also slows down because people just check out cause they don't like the Holiday Forum. Many people have never liked it and avoid the forums during that period because of it and have for years and years. But it's always been against the rules to complain about it so people mostly grumble in PMs or Discords or whatever. The Holiday Forum is not a sign of the viability of a merger.
I've never heard this. It's far more likely that people have so much other stuff going in that time of year and so they post less.
No, there's plenty of people who feel this way. I've talked to them for years in venues outside the forums specifically.
As always, the reason you don't see people grumbling about the Holiday Forums is because it was explicitly not allowed.
What? By who?
And even if someone had that as a rule, I'm happy to report that through the new CoC and forum-wide rules we have recently adopted, that isn't the case currently!
Feel free to complain about the Holiday Forums! Just don't be surprised if you get polite push-back as, for example, I think our volunteer moderators deserve a break during the peak of the holiday season.
The mods absolutely deserve a break.
The holiday forum still sucks.
I'm absolutely fine with a space for it, even like we currently have, but maybe I also want to go look at other threads and talk about 3d printing or look at an older post for something and locking the whole rest of forum down is dumb and I hate it.
This was mostly a carryover from Tube, insufficient holiday cheer if you dared express dislike of his antics. After almost a decade of not being allowed to even talk about it people just stopped.
The holiday forums sustain themselves on good cheer. The forums also significantly slow down as people are spending time travelling, with loved ones and family, or pulling late hours at work so others can enjoy time off. If the holiday forums were a permanent thing, I wouldn't stick around. The vibes quickly sour as we get close to and pass the new year.
The Holiday Forum also slows down because people just check out cause they don't like the Holiday Forum. Many people have never liked it and avoid the forums during that period because of it and have for years and years. But it's always been against the rules to complain about it so people mostly grumble in PMs or Discords or whatever. The Holiday Forum is not a sign of the viability of a merger.
I've never heard this. It's far more likely that people have so much other stuff going in that time of year and so they post less.
No, there's plenty of people who feel this way. I've talked to them for years in venues outside the forums specifically.
As always, the reason you don't see people grumbling about the Holiday Forums is because it was explicitly not allowed.
What? By who?
And even if someone had that as a rule, I'm happy to report that through the new CoC and forum-wide rules we have recently adopted, that isn't the case currently!
Feel free to complain about the Holiday Forums! Just don't be surprised if you get polite push-back as, for example, I think our volunteer moderators deserve a break during the peak of the holiday season.
By Tube. And then it carried forward after he was gone. This was a thing for a long time. Which is why some people may have never heard the complaints before.
That was a rule with the first couple iterations of the holiday forums, Tube would infract folks for insufficient holiday cheer, it was part of the whole bit.
Personally I would have considered it fairly clear that isn't a part of things anymore.
It wasn't just a couple of iterations.
I knew folks weren't getting infracted for asking about it anymore or "insufficient holiday cheer" or whatever. I still didn't think it was appropriate to say "hey I don't like this at all, can we not do it?" Not sure where I really would have been able to express my dislike of the holiday forums that wasn't, you know, in the holiday forums that I dislike.
Edit: also one of the reasons it used to exist was too give the mods a break. Even if I really don't like the holiday forums, that seems like a sucky thing to complain about, so I just deal with it for a couple weeks, no biggie. I have no idea if the mods still consider it a break, there's little communication on that anymore.
The holiday forums sustain themselves on good cheer. The forums also significantly slow down as people are spending time travelling, with loved ones and family, or pulling late hours at work so others can enjoy time off. If the holiday forums were a permanent thing, I wouldn't stick around. The vibes quickly sour as we get close to and pass the new year.
The Holiday Forum also slows down because people just check out cause they don't like the Holiday Forum. Many people have never liked it and avoid the forums during that period because of it and have for years and years. But it's always been against the rules to complain about it so people mostly grumble in PMs or Discords or whatever. The Holiday Forum is not a sign of the viability of a merger.
I've never heard this. It's far more likely that people have so much other stuff going in that time of year and so they post less.
No, there's plenty of people who feel this way. I've talked to them for years in venues outside the forums specifically.
As always, the reason you don't see people grumbling about the Holiday Forums is because it was explicitly not allowed.
What? By who?
And even if someone had that as a rule, I'm happy to report that through the new CoC and forum-wide rules we have recently adopted, that isn't the case currently!
Feel free to complain about the Holiday Forums! Just don't be surprised if you get polite push-back as, for example, I think our volunteer moderators deserve a break during the peak of the holiday season.
By Tube. And then it carried forward after he was gone. This was a thing for a long time. Which is why some people may have never heard the complaints before.
Was it? Honestly? Was Geebs infracting folks over this??
There seems to be some kind of assumption that the schism "must be solved" or "the forums will die".
I'm not sure I agree with that assertion, and we have no proof that this is the case. The closest thing we might have to evidence would come from the survey, and I can say point blank with absolutely no reservations that the survey doesn't support such an argument.
If anything, the only affirmative thing you can take away from the survey is that there is enough support for Coin Return to be a broadly viable thing. That's pretty much it.
The forums are dying. That much we know. Not in the PA is killing it way either. It has continuously slowed down when we had a name attached. It is only going to get worse without one. There is not a small amount of users concerned about how the forums are going. I don't think we have any idea of what a silver bullet to fix them would be. We can know as is things aren't going great based on the multiple threads where people have spoken directly about how they are not happy with how things are going.
Sure but none of those problems have to do with the actual structure of the forums.
The things killing the forums have been:
1) Attrition in an online format that is all but dead and thus not really attracting new users in any large numbers.
2) Bad moderation.
If the impetus behind the merging is to stop the bleeding, it's completely missing the mark and it's not gonna work. If anything, it will only shed more members as the places they come here for disappear.
Attrition is accelerated by the lack of activity, or the perception of it. Bad moderation is so vague as to be useless.
No, it's not. This just isn't the venue to go over the specifics of the moderation problems we've had for years now. (Including just a complete lack of moderation due to understaffing.) But it is the actual cause here rather then the structure of the forums. You aren't gonna solve a moderation problem with a forum merger.
Yes it is. This is an effect of basic human psychology. They want to spend time where there are people to interact with. Especially in an online forum. It is absurd to assert otherwise.
are D&D or SE experiencing low enough activity that we need to merge them to retain users?
clearly not.
Transparently I think Mr2 hit the nail on the head with their post. I believe there are a group of posters who are looking at a potential merge as a back door mechanism to drive out self-defined "undesirables". Not all, likely not many. But definitely some.
I think this kind of rhetoric flies in the face of the Transition Team asking for a baseline assumption of good faith from everyone participating in this discussion, and it's just raising the temperature without contributing anything useful to the conversation.
Especially when the new Code of Conduct was explicitly written to avoid people getting brigaded off the boards by other posters technically following the rules while making the space hostile.
But what do we do when someone comes in to the thread, after the date that we were all supposed to reset, and just immediately dials up the temperature against someone else who happens to be the same person they've been doing that to for like 10 years?
What do we do when someone comes in and says the culture of only one of the subforums is toxic and must be changed to be more like the one they like more?
We can't pretend those things aren't happening, and it chips away at the willingness some people have to assume good faith. It directly leads to skepticism when we ignore those things and just say "hey no we all said we would work in good faith, so you must ignore the posts that don't feel like good faith posts because the label says they all have to be good faith posts".
I don't know how else to say it -- it certainly appears that old battle lines are being drawn, yet again. It's both inspiring and frustrating that it's definitely not everyone, but it's enough people that it sure feels like people fighting ghosts of old battles again.
Give people infraction points so they cool it or get banned. Also if we get rid of the sub forums people will no longer have a side they're on.
Also: People are allowed to disagree with each other without it being indicative of a grudge, or as was originally suggested, some 9th dimensional chess move designed to force the people they don't like off the boards.
As already stated, I want the volunteers to have a break, I just was pushing back on the idea of holding up the holiday forum as an example of how merging things will be fine/good. Its a flawed conclusion for a number of reasons.
There seems to be some kind of assumption that the schism "must be solved" or "the forums will die".
I'm not sure I agree with that assertion, and we have no proof that this is the case. The closest thing we might have to evidence would come from the survey, and I can say point blank with absolutely no reservations that the survey doesn't support such an argument.
If anything, the only affirmative thing you can take away from the survey is that there is enough support for Coin Return to be a broadly viable thing. That's pretty much it.
The forums are dying. That much we know. Not in the PA is killing it way either. It has continuously slowed down when we had a name attached. It is only going to get worse without one. There is not a small amount of users concerned about how the forums are going. I don't think we have any idea of what a silver bullet to fix them would be. We can know as is things aren't going great based on the multiple threads where people have spoken directly about how they are not happy with how things are going.
Sure but none of those problems have to do with the actual structure of the forums.
The things killing the forums have been:
1) Attrition in an online format that is all but dead and thus not really attracting new users in any large numbers.
2) Bad moderation.
If the impetus behind the merging is to stop the bleeding, it's completely missing the mark and it's not gonna work. If anything, it will only shed more members as the places they come here for disappear.
Attrition is accelerated by the lack of activity, or the perception of it. Bad moderation is so vague as to be useless.
No, it's not. This just isn't the venue to go over the specifics of the moderation problems we've had for years now. (Including just a complete lack of moderation due to understaffing.) But it is the actual cause here rather then the structure of the forums. You aren't gonna solve a moderation problem with a forum merger.
Yes it is. This is an effect of basic human psychology. They want to spend time where there are people to interact with. Especially in an online forum. It is absurd to assert otherwise.
are D&D or SE experiencing low enough activity that we need to merge them to retain users?
clearly not.
Transparently I think Mr2 hit the nail on the head with their post. I believe there are a group of posters who are looking at a potential merge as a back door mechanism to drive out self-defined "undesirables". Not all, likely not many. But definitely some.
I think this kind of rhetoric flies in the face of the Transition Team asking for a baseline assumption of good faith from everyone participating in this discussion, and it's just raising the temperature without contributing anything useful to the conversation.
Especially when the new Code of Conduct was explicitly written to avoid people getting brigaded off the boards by other posters technically following the rules while making the space hostile.
But what do we do when someone comes in to the thread, after the date that we were all supposed to reset, and just immediately dials up the temperature against someone else who happens to be the same person they've been doing that to for like 10 years?
What do we do when someone comes in and says the culture of only one of the subforums is toxic and must be changed to be more like the one they like more?
We can't pretend those things aren't happening, and it chips away at the willingness some people have to assume good faith. It directly leads to skepticism when we ignore those things and just say "hey no we all said we would work in good faith, so you must ignore the posts that don't feel like good faith posts because the label says they all have to be good faith posts".
I don't know how else to say it -- it certainly appears that old battle lines are being drawn, yet again. It's both inspiring and frustrating that it's definitely not everyone, but it's enough people that it sure feels like people fighting ghosts of old battles again.
Give people infraction points so they cool it or get banned. Also if we get rid of the sub forums people will no longer have a side they're on.
You would need to actually do that though. And that's still not happening.
And that remains a moderation problem, not a structural problem.
It's not like reports are going to just magically stop in the holiday forums anyways, if someone's acting like a jerk they probably still get reported.
The holiday forums sustain themselves on good cheer. The forums also significantly slow down as people are spending time travelling, with loved ones and family, or pulling late hours at work so others can enjoy time off. If the holiday forums were a permanent thing, I wouldn't stick around. The vibes quickly sour as we get close to and pass the new year.
The Holiday Forum also slows down because people just check out cause they don't like the Holiday Forum. Many people have never liked it and avoid the forums during that period because of it and have for years and years. But it's always been against the rules to complain about it so people mostly grumble in PMs or Discords or whatever. The Holiday Forum is not a sign of the viability of a merger.
I've never heard this. It's far more likely that people have so much other stuff going in that time of year and so they post less.
No, there's plenty of people who feel this way. I've talked to them for years in venues outside the forums specifically.
As always, the reason you don't see people grumbling about the Holiday Forums is because it was explicitly not allowed.
What? By who?
And even if someone had that as a rule, I'm happy to report that through the new CoC and forum-wide rules we have recently adopted, that isn't the case currently!
Feel free to complain about the Holiday Forums! Just don't be surprised if you get polite push-back as, for example, I think our volunteer moderators deserve a break during the peak of the holiday season.
By Tube. And then it carried forward after he was gone. This was a thing for a long time. Which is why some people may have never heard the complaints before.
Was it? Honestly? Was Geebs infracting folks over this??
I don't think anyone cared to test the waters at that point.
But again, this was 100% a thing for a long time. If you haven't heard anyone complain about it before, that's why.
The holiday forums sustain themselves on good cheer. The forums also significantly slow down as people are spending time travelling, with loved ones and family, or pulling late hours at work so others can enjoy time off. If the holiday forums were a permanent thing, I wouldn't stick around. The vibes quickly sour as we get close to and pass the new year.
The Holiday Forum also slows down because people just check out cause they don't like the Holiday Forum. Many people have never liked it and avoid the forums during that period because of it and have for years and years. But it's always been against the rules to complain about it so people mostly grumble in PMs or Discords or whatever. The Holiday Forum is not a sign of the viability of a merger.
I've never heard this. It's far more likely that people have so much other stuff going in that time of year and so they post less.
No, there's plenty of people who feel this way. I've talked to them for years in venues outside the forums specifically.
As always, the reason you don't see people grumbling about the Holiday Forums is because it was explicitly not allowed.
What? By who?
And even if someone had that as a rule, I'm happy to report that through the new CoC and forum-wide rules we have recently adopted, that isn't the case currently!
Feel free to complain about the Holiday Forums! Just don't be surprised if you get polite push-back as, for example, I think our volunteer moderators deserve a break during the peak of the holiday season.
By Tube. And then it carried forward after he was gone. This was a thing for a long time. Which is why some people may have never heard the complaints before.
Was it? Honestly? Was Geebs infracting folks over this??
I believe the carried forward is "no one wants to talk about it because they don't know if they're going to get dumb infractions over it"
+4
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
I haven't seen an insufficient holiday cheer infraction since Tube left, personally, and couldn't find any in a quick search of the old holiday forums
Especially when the new Code of Conduct was explicitly written to avoid people getting brigaded off the boards by other posters technically following the rules while making the space hostile.
I see this line bandied about a lot but I have questions or concerns about it.
If technically following rules causes people to leave, perhaps the rule follower is in the right here and the person who's having rules used against them was actually in the wrong?
What good does a code of conduct do to solve this? You will still need to follow "the rules".
Which forumers were brigaded off because they were asked to follow the rules?
Finally, I'd rather be around polite assholes than obnoxious assholes. Both suck, but someone following the rules is better than some combative asshole who wants to yell at people.
And to head it off: None of this is advocating for a polite Hitler scenario.
Gonna be blunt, this doesn't seem entirely germane to a discussion of forum structure, and it's treading on that same line of asking people to define precisely how much of an asshole they're allowed to be that made initial discussion of the Code of Conduct kind of difficult for me, specifically, to participate in.
Especially when the new Code of Conduct was explicitly written to avoid people getting brigaded off the boards by other posters technically following the rules while making the space hostile.
I see this line bandied about a lot but I have questions or concerns about it.
If technically following rules causes people to leave, perhaps the rule follower is in the right here and the person who's having rules used against them was actually in the wrong?
What good does a code of conduct do to solve this? You will still need to follow "the rules".
Which forumers were brigaded off because they were asked to follow the rules?
Finally, I'd rather be around polite assholes than obnoxious assholes. Both suck, but someone following the rules is better than some combative asshole who wants to yell at people.
And to head it off: None of this is advocating for a polite Hitler scenario.
Gonna be blunt, this doesn't seem entirely germane to a discussion of forum structure, and it's treading on that same line of asking people to define precisely how much of an asshole they're allowed to be that made initial discussion of the Code of Conduct kind of difficult for me, specifically, to participate in.
Then why bring it up at all if it's immaterial to what's being discussed?
I haven't seen an insufficient holiday cheer infraction since Tube left, personally, and couldn't find any in a quick search of the old holiday forums
Doesn't really change the fact that it wasn't clear of this was a thing people could express dislike of, where would be appropriate to do it, and the concern of folks wanting the mods to have a break even if they disliked the holiday forums.
I dunno. Like, this is a weird thing to push back on when you've got folks here telling you what they thought. "Well you shouldn't have thought that way!" Ok sure? But some of us did still.
I haven't seen an insufficient holiday cheer infraction since Tube left, personally, and couldn't find any in a quick search of the old holiday forums
Doesn't really change the fact that it wasn't clear of this was a thing people could express dislike of, where would be appropriate to do it, and the concern of folks wanting the mods to have a break even if they disliked the holiday forums.
I dunno. Like, this is a weird thing to push back on when you've got folks here telling you what they thought. "Well you shouldn't have thought that way!" Ok sure? But some of us did still.
This is, in fact, how rules are supposed to work. You enforce them till people just stop the behaviour. And then you don't even need to issue punishments anymore. Because they've just become how people behave.
I support the full reorg as proposed by Zonugal for a few reasons:
- I think the schism is overblown, and the only real sources of conflict are in the divergent dominant politics of the respective forums' politics threads. No one's crying out for blood in the Lego thread (as far as I know?)
- it is far easier to do a functional change now and retain more users than to impose one 6-12 months after the new forum has ran for a while - the impetus and ability for folks to actually pursue change is there right now, and I sincerely doubt with inertia anyone will pursue change until the forum is fully dead if we use the same build as now
- we are going to continue to experience attrition, and i think that will be worse as we have duplicate threads that both experience dampened participation by people. It gives more of an appearance of a dying forum when there's half as many posts in a thread as there could be. And it also prevents people from meeting others in their extant community that could have happened otherwise. I genuinely think having two of the same threads will lead to a forum that dies faster simply because it will feel like no one is posting in them, which reduces the tendency of others *to* post and allows regulars to drift away.
- it's easier for people to post outside of their usual domains if we offer a restart to the general culture. There's plenty of folks who i presume have never ventured out of G&T who might actually be great to chat with but are uncomfortable breaching the calcified state of the other two communities.
- the split is unintelligible to potential new users which effectively dooms us to a hospice situation. You can't expect internet users in 2025 to operate the same way as 2005 in terms of finding a forum, lurking it for the vibe for a year, and then finding it in themselves to post.
Especially when the new Code of Conduct was explicitly written to avoid people getting brigaded off the boards by other posters technically following the rules while making the space hostile.
I see this line bandied about a lot but I have questions or concerns about it.
If technically following rules causes people to leave, perhaps the rule follower is in the right here and the person who's having rules used against them was actually in the wrong?
What good does a code of conduct do to solve this? You will still need to follow "the rules".
Which forumers were brigaded off because they were asked to follow the rules?
Finally, I'd rather be around polite assholes than obnoxious assholes. Both suck, but someone following the rules is better than some combative asshole who wants to yell at people.
And to head it off: None of this is advocating for a polite Hitler scenario.
Gonna be blunt, this doesn't seem entirely germane to a discussion of forum structure, and it's treading on that same line of asking people to define precisely how much of an asshole they're allowed to be that made initial discussion of the Code of Conduct kind of difficult for me, specifically, to participate in.
Then why bring it up at all if it's immaterial to what's being discussed?
Because someone brought up a borderline conspiracy theory about how trying to merge certain subforums in a new structure was some backdoor means of trying to force people off the boards, something that wasn't happening, and something the new CoC wouldn't allow for anyway.
[IMG][/img]
0
minor incidentpublicly subsidized!privately profitable!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
There seems to be some kind of assumption that the schism "must be solved" or "the forums will die".
I'm not sure I agree with that assertion, and we have no proof that this is the case. The closest thing we might have to evidence would come from the survey, and I can say point blank with absolutely no reservations that the survey doesn't support such an argument.
If anything, the only affirmative thing you can take away from the survey is that there is enough support for Coin Return to be a broadly viable thing. That's pretty much it.
The forums are dying. That much we know. Not in the PA is killing it way either. It has continuously slowed down when we had a name attached. It is only going to get worse without one. There is not a small amount of users concerned about how the forums are going. I don't think we have any idea of what a silver bullet to fix them would be. We can know as is things aren't going great based on the multiple threads where people have spoken directly about how they are not happy with how things are going.
Sure but none of those problems have to do with the actual structure of the forums.
The things killing the forums have been:
1) Attrition in an online format that is all but dead and thus not really attracting new users in any large numbers.
2) Bad moderation.
If the impetus behind the merging is to stop the bleeding, it's completely missing the mark and it's not gonna work. If anything, it will only shed more members as the places they come here for disappear.
Attrition is accelerated by the lack of activity, or the perception of it. Bad moderation is so vague as to be useless.
No, it's not. This just isn't the venue to go over the specifics of the moderation problems we've had for years now. (Including just a complete lack of moderation due to understaffing.) But it is the actual cause here rather then the structure of the forums. You aren't gonna solve a moderation problem with a forum merger.
Yes it is. This is an effect of basic human psychology. They want to spend time where there are people to interact with. Especially in an online forum. It is absurd to assert otherwise.
are D&D or SE experiencing low enough activity that we need to merge them to retain users?
clearly not.
Transparently I think Mr2 hit the nail on the head with their post. I believe there are a group of posters who are looking at a potential merge as a back door mechanism to drive out self-defined "undesirables". Not all, likely not many. But definitely some.
I think this kind of rhetoric flies in the face of the Transition Team asking for a baseline assumption of good faith from everyone participating in this discussion, and it's just raising the temperature without contributing anything useful to the conversation.
Especially when the new Code of Conduct was explicitly written to avoid people getting brigaded off the boards by other posters technically following the rules while making the space hostile.
But what do we do when someone comes in to the thread, after the date that we were all supposed to reset, and just immediately dials up the temperature against someone else who happens to be the same person they've been doing that to for like 10 years?
What do we do when someone comes in and says the culture of only one of the subforums is toxic and must be changed to be more like the one they like more?
We can't pretend those things aren't happening, and it chips away at the willingness some people have to assume good faith. It directly leads to skepticism when we ignore those things and just say "hey no we all said we would work in good faith, so you must ignore the posts that don't feel like good faith posts because the label says they all have to be good faith posts".
I don't know how else to say it -- it certainly appears that old battle lines are being drawn, yet again. It's both inspiring and frustrating that it's definitely not everyone, but it's enough people that it sure feels like people fighting ghosts of old battles again.
Give people infraction points so they cool it or get banned. Also if we get rid of the sub forums people will no longer have a side they're on.
You would need to actually do that though. And that's still not happening.
And that remains a moderation problem, not a structural problem.
Just as a point of order, to my knowledge and conversations I've had, the mod staff is generally giving folks a bit more leeway for... let's call it "vigorous disagreement" in this subforum, as planning and building a whole new home for us is a pretty tense topic that necessitates a lot of argument, discussion, disagreement, etc from such a diverse group. That's not to say there's carte blanche to be a total asshole here, and truly out of pocket shit should still be infracted/warned, but folks are going to mostly get a liiiittle more rope than they would in other areas of the forum (and on Coin Return) in the spirit of working through shit.
minor incident on
Hell, New Jersey, it said on the letter. Delivered without comment. So be it!
+1
Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered User, Transition Teamregular
I haven't seen an insufficient holiday cheer infraction since Tube left, personally, and couldn't find any in a quick search of the old holiday forums
Doesn't really change the fact that it wasn't clear of this was a thing people could express dislike of, where would be appropriate to do it, and the concern of folks wanting the mods to have a break even if they disliked the holiday forums.
I dunno. Like, this is a weird thing to push back on when you've got folks here telling you what they thought. "Well you shouldn't have thought that way!" Ok sure? But some of us did still.
I think that's more indicative of the older forums simply not providing a shared space for folks to issue complaints/criticisms.
+5
smof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
The forums are not fine people have been getting chased out of threads on both sides for years.
Y'all are not living in reality and it's infuriating.
The reason everything is so quiet is because everyone got chased off so many times they stopped bothering to try.
Do you not think better moderation will address the 'chasing people off' issue?
No not at all. I don't see what better moderation can even do for that. I can think of no concrete way to implement it better. A large part of the problem is when someone dislikes a poster they have begun assigning them to the subforum they dislike the most. This a person becomes an SE++ or D&D poster based solely on the person's perceptions of the activity they have seen as has been noted many times. You can mod every dogpile that skirts the rules for someone being from the wrong side of the tracks.
we risk losing. That is why there has been so much interest in developing an alternate plan.
This surprises me honestly because I would have thought the work that's just gone into creating the new CoC and soon the rules would evoke a bit more faith in their ability to deal with problems. Isn't that the point of them?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what "chasing people off" means. If someone's being treated unreasonably in a thread to the point that they want to leave I would hope the rules and mods could put a stop to it. If they just get pissy that people aren't agreeing with them or whatever then that's their own issue
There seems to be some kind of assumption that the schism "must be solved" or "the forums will die".
I'm not sure I agree with that assertion, and we have no proof that this is the case. The closest thing we might have to evidence would come from the survey, and I can say point blank with absolutely no reservations that the survey doesn't support such an argument.
If anything, the only affirmative thing you can take away from the survey is that there is enough support for Coin Return to be a broadly viable thing. That's pretty much it.
The forums are dying. That much we know. Not in the PA is killing it way either. It has continuously slowed down when we had a name attached. It is only going to get worse without one. There is not a small amount of users concerned about how the forums are going. I don't think we have any idea of what a silver bullet to fix them would be. We can know as is things aren't going great based on the multiple threads where people have spoken directly about how they are not happy with how things are going.
Sure but none of those problems have to do with the actual structure of the forums.
The things killing the forums have been:
1) Attrition in an online format that is all but dead and thus not really attracting new users in any large numbers.
2) Bad moderation.
If the impetus behind the merging is to stop the bleeding, it's completely missing the mark and it's not gonna work. If anything, it will only shed more members as the places they come here for disappear.
Attrition is accelerated by the lack of activity, or the perception of it. Bad moderation is so vague as to be useless.
No, it's not. This just isn't the venue to go over the specifics of the moderation problems we've had for years now. (Including just a complete lack of moderation due to understaffing.) But it is the actual cause here rather then the structure of the forums. You aren't gonna solve a moderation problem with a forum merger.
Yes it is. This is an effect of basic human psychology. They want to spend time where there are people to interact with. Especially in an online forum. It is absurd to assert otherwise.
are D&D or SE experiencing low enough activity that we need to merge them to retain users?
clearly not.
Transparently I think Mr2 hit the nail on the head with their post. I believe there are a group of posters who are looking at a potential merge as a back door mechanism to drive out self-defined "undesirables". Not all, likely not many. But definitely some.
I think this kind of rhetoric flies in the face of the Transition Team asking for a baseline assumption of good faith from everyone participating in this discussion, and it's just raising the temperature without contributing anything useful to the conversation.
Especially when the new Code of Conduct was explicitly written to avoid people getting brigaded off the boards by other posters technically following the rules while making the space hostile.
But what do we do when someone comes in to the thread, after the date that we were all supposed to reset, and just immediately dials up the temperature against someone else who happens to be the same person they've been doing that to for like 10 years?
What do we do when someone comes in and says the culture of only one of the subforums is toxic and must be changed to be more like the one they like more?
We can't pretend those things aren't happening, and it chips away at the willingness some people have to assume good faith. It directly leads to skepticism when we ignore those things and just say "hey no we all said we would work in good faith, so you must ignore the posts that don't feel like good faith posts because the label says they all have to be good faith posts".
I don't know how else to say it -- it certainly appears that old battle lines are being drawn, yet again. It's both inspiring and frustrating that it's definitely not everyone, but it's enough people that it sure feels like people fighting ghosts of old battles again.
Give people infraction points so they cool it or get banned. Also if we get rid of the sub forums people will no longer have a side they're on.
You would need to actually do that though. And that's still not happening.
And that remains a moderation problem, not a structural problem.
Just as a point of order, to my knowledge and conversations I've had, the mod staff is generally giving folks a bit more leeway for... let's call it "vigorous disagreement" in this subforum, as planning and building a whole new home for us is a pretty tense topic that necessitates a lot of argument, discussion, disagreement, etc from such a diverse group. That's not to say there's carte blanche to be a total asshole here, and truly out of pocket shit should still be infracted/warned, but folks are going to mostly get a liiiittle more rope than they would in other areas of the forum (and on Coin Return) in the spirit of working through shit.
If that's the case I would say the problem is there's no indication that it going on and it creates exactly the perception Fiatil is talking about.
0
QuetziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered User, Moderatormod
I haven't seen an insufficient holiday cheer infraction since Tube left, personally, and couldn't find any in a quick search of the old holiday forums
Doesn't really change the fact that it wasn't clear of this was a thing people could express dislike of, where would be appropriate to do it, and the concern of folks wanting the mods to have a break even if they disliked the holiday forums.
I dunno. Like, this is a weird thing to push back on when you've got folks here telling you what they thought. "Well you shouldn't have thought that way!" Ok sure? But some of us did still.
Sure, I know now people thought that it still wasn't allowed. I also know that there were people that disliked the holiday forums, plenty of folks were vocal about that.
But I am pushing back on statements like this, which are categorically false:
But it's always been against the rules to complain about it so people mostly grumble in PMs or Discords or whatever.
It was previously against the rules, yes, and some people may have believed it was still against the rules. But I want to correct the record that it was not against the rules this year, doesn't seem to have been against the rules for a few years prior, and therefore was not "always against the rules."
There seems to be some kind of assumption that the schism "must be solved" or "the forums will die".
I'm not sure I agree with that assertion, and we have no proof that this is the case. The closest thing we might have to evidence would come from the survey, and I can say point blank with absolutely no reservations that the survey doesn't support such an argument.
If anything, the only affirmative thing you can take away from the survey is that there is enough support for Coin Return to be a broadly viable thing. That's pretty much it.
The forums are dying. That much we know. Not in the PA is killing it way either. It has continuously slowed down when we had a name attached. It is only going to get worse without one. There is not a small amount of users concerned about how the forums are going. I don't think we have any idea of what a silver bullet to fix them would be. We can know as is things aren't going great based on the multiple threads where people have spoken directly about how they are not happy with how things are going.
Sure but none of those problems have to do with the actual structure of the forums.
The things killing the forums have been:
1) Attrition in an online format that is all but dead and thus not really attracting new users in any large numbers.
2) Bad moderation.
If the impetus behind the merging is to stop the bleeding, it's completely missing the mark and it's not gonna work. If anything, it will only shed more members as the places they come here for disappear.
Attrition is accelerated by the lack of activity, or the perception of it. Bad moderation is so vague as to be useless.
No, it's not. This just isn't the venue to go over the specifics of the moderation problems we've had for years now. (Including just a complete lack of moderation due to understaffing.) But it is the actual cause here rather then the structure of the forums. You aren't gonna solve a moderation problem with a forum merger.
Yes it is. This is an effect of basic human psychology. They want to spend time where there are people to interact with. Especially in an online forum. It is absurd to assert otherwise.
are D&D or SE experiencing low enough activity that we need to merge them to retain users?
clearly not.
Transparently I think Mr2 hit the nail on the head with their post. I believe there are a group of posters who are looking at a potential merge as a back door mechanism to drive out self-defined "undesirables". Not all, likely not many. But definitely some.
I think this kind of rhetoric flies in the face of the Transition Team asking for a baseline assumption of good faith from everyone participating in this discussion, and it's just raising the temperature without contributing anything useful to the conversation.
Especially when the new Code of Conduct was explicitly written to avoid people getting brigaded off the boards by other posters technically following the rules while making the space hostile.
But what do we do when someone comes in to the thread, after the date that we were all supposed to reset, and just immediately dials up the temperature against someone else who happens to be the same person they've been doing that to for like 10 years?
What do we do when someone comes in and says the culture of only one of the subforums is toxic and must be changed to be more like the one they like more?
We can't pretend those things aren't happening, and it chips away at the willingness some people have to assume good faith. It directly leads to skepticism when we ignore those things and just say "hey no we all said we would work in good faith, so you must ignore the posts that don't feel like good faith posts because the label says they all have to be good faith posts".
I don't know how else to say it -- it certainly appears that old battle lines are being drawn, yet again. It's both inspiring and frustrating that it's definitely not everyone, but it's enough people that it sure feels like people fighting ghosts of old battles again.
Give people infraction points so they cool it or get banned. Also if we get rid of the sub forums people will no longer have a side they're on.
For reference I'm talking about in the context of this discussion. That isn't happening in this discussion, though yeah broadly I agree it's how to do it.
I'm saying you can't keep asking everyone to assume good faith after some previous reset date when there are people that clearly have not reset, after that reset date. Those people are often driving the conversation, and leading to people being worried about the future and what it looks like. You can't tell people who are skeptical of other people displaying exactly the same behaviors as "before the reset" that "no, you have to ignore those behaviors that they keep exhibiting, because we said we had a reset so their posts are by default in good faith".
NGL, bringing up how much people dislike the Holiday Forum as an argument against consolidation of specific subforums feels like a really flimsy argument against a restructure.
If only because I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting smushing all of the communities into one common space as a long term solution for Coin Return, especially when the Holday Forum has always been couched as a combination of a bit, and (initially, at least) as a bid by Tube to alleviate some of the treehousing that happens in specific subforums.
As already stated, I want the volunteers to have a break, I just was pushing back on the idea of holding up the holiday forum as an example of how merging things will be fine/good. Its a flawed conclusion for a number of reasons.
I would mention that forums like SpaceBattles just lock news and politics threads during the holidays except those regarding active conflicts, which is it's own subcategory.
So, that's a solution. Do not feel strongly about it myself, but is there.
Also when it comes to the argument of "people should be able to post with the group of people they like"
Ideally that will still happen? Zonugal's format even still allows for (chat) to exist. People will likely carry over the threads they've made that are standards of the subforums. And honestly, with the Discords there are ways to still interact with folks you like, too
It's just, the forum you post in and the groups you post with might get a little bigger (like the olden days, when you could actually experience new blood showing up and bringing fresh ideas and takes)
Kinda one of those benefits of posting on a public forum versus one of the gated social media communities now
1. Totally on-board with giving the mods a break;
2. Generally enjoyed the Holiday Forums for all of the years I've been posting;
3. Am still annoyed when several more-topical threads I used to post in aren't available for a wholemonth (exaggeration)
4. Know, deep in my bones, that You Do Not Complain About The Holiday Forums;
5. Also know there will always be at least 1 thread saying, "Where'd my regular stuff go?" Good times.
6. Also know that there are a several people who are, like, "Fuck this - see y'all in January because I ain't dealing with that."
7. Who, because of Point 4, don't generally air their feelings any more.
But it's always been against the rules to complain about it so people mostly grumble in PMs or Discords or whatever.
It was previously against the rules, yes, and some people may have believed it was still against the rules. But I want to correct the record that it was not against the rules this year, doesn't seem to have been against the rules for a few years prior, and therefore was not "always against the rules."
Sure, I know now people thought that it still wasn't allowed. I also know that there were people that disliked the holiday forums, plenty of folks were vocal about that.
But I am pushing back on statements like this, which are categorically false:
But it's always been against the rules to complain about it so people mostly grumble in PMs or Discords or whatever.
It was previously against the rules, yes, and some people may have believed it was still against the rules. But I want to correct the record that it was not against the rules this year, doesn't seem to have been against the rules for a few years prior, and therefore was not "always against the rules."
Was it ever announced that the Insufficient Holiday Cheer rules were retracted? I might have missed it, I didn't pay too much attention to the Holiday Forums since I generally just check out around that time anyway.
Saying "Nobody did X this year, it was totally legal to do this year (but up until this year people doing X were severely punished and we never told anyone that it was now legal) therefore no one ever wanted to do X in the first place" seems like it's missing the point.
NGL, bringing up how much people dislike the Holiday Forum as an argument against consolidation of specific subforums feels like a really flimsy argument against a restructure.
If only because I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting smushing all of the communities into one common space as a long term solution for Coin Return, especially when the Holday Forum has always been couched as a combination of a bit, and (initially, at least) as a bid by Tube to alleviate some of the treehousing that happens in specific subforums.
People are suggesting it as a way to make everyone get along though. And that is, as you note, part of what Tube was saying he wanted to do with it.
It is also, in practice, literally merging the two discussion forums into one space.
It shouldn't be surprising that people are taking it as a potential example of what the results of a D&D/SE++ merger could look like.
There seems to be some kind of assumption that the schism "must be solved" or "the forums will die".
I'm not sure I agree with that assertion, and we have no proof that this is the case. The closest thing we might have to evidence would come from the survey, and I can say point blank with absolutely no reservations that the survey doesn't support such an argument.
If anything, the only affirmative thing you can take away from the survey is that there is enough support for Coin Return to be a broadly viable thing. That's pretty much it.
The forums are dying. That much we know. Not in the PA is killing it way either. It has continuously slowed down when we had a name attached. It is only going to get worse without one. There is not a small amount of users concerned about how the forums are going. I don't think we have any idea of what a silver bullet to fix them would be. We can know as is things aren't going great based on the multiple threads where people have spoken directly about how they are not happy with how things are going.
Sure but none of those problems have to do with the actual structure of the forums.
The things killing the forums have been:
1) Attrition in an online format that is all but dead and thus not really attracting new users in any large numbers.
2) Bad moderation.
If the impetus behind the merging is to stop the bleeding, it's completely missing the mark and it's not gonna work. If anything, it will only shed more members as the places they come here for disappear.
Attrition is accelerated by the lack of activity, or the perception of it. Bad moderation is so vague as to be useless.
No, it's not. This just isn't the venue to go over the specifics of the moderation problems we've had for years now. (Including just a complete lack of moderation due to understaffing.) But it is the actual cause here rather then the structure of the forums. You aren't gonna solve a moderation problem with a forum merger.
Yes it is. This is an effect of basic human psychology. They want to spend time where there are people to interact with. Especially in an online forum. It is absurd to assert otherwise.
are D&D or SE experiencing low enough activity that we need to merge them to retain users?
clearly not.
Transparently I think Mr2 hit the nail on the head with their post. I believe there are a group of posters who are looking at a potential merge as a back door mechanism to drive out self-defined "undesirables". Not all, likely not many. But definitely some.
I think this kind of rhetoric flies in the face of the Transition Team asking for a baseline assumption of good faith from everyone participating in this discussion, and it's just raising the temperature without contributing anything useful to the conversation.
Especially when the new Code of Conduct was explicitly written to avoid people getting brigaded off the boards by other posters technically following the rules while making the space hostile.
But what do we do when someone comes in to the thread, after the date that we were all supposed to reset, and just immediately dials up the temperature against someone else who happens to be the same person they've been doing that to for like 10 years?
What do we do when someone comes in and says the culture of only one of the subforums is toxic and must be changed to be more like the one they like more?
We can't pretend those things aren't happening, and it chips away at the willingness some people have to assume good faith. It directly leads to skepticism when we ignore those things and just say "hey no we all said we would work in good faith, so you must ignore the posts that don't feel like good faith posts because the label says they all have to be good faith posts".
I don't know how else to say it -- it certainly appears that old battle lines are being drawn, yet again. It's both inspiring and frustrating that it's definitely not everyone, but it's enough people that it sure feels like people fighting ghosts of old battles again.
Give people infraction points so they cool it or get banned. Also if we get rid of the sub forums people will no longer have a side they're on.
For reference I'm talking about in the context of this discussion. That isn't happening in this discussion, though yeah broadly I agree it's how to do it.
I'm saying you can't keep asking everyone to assume good faith after some previous reset date when there are people that clearly have not reset, after that reset date. Those people are often driving the conversation, and leading to people being worried about the future and what it looks like. You can't tell people who are skeptical of other people displaying exactly the same behaviors as "before the reset" that "no, you have to ignore those behaviors that they keep exhibiting, because we said we had a reset so their posts are by default in good faith".
The problem is that this argument you're making about some people refusing to participate in good faith is vague to the point that I really can't address it unless you're able to cite specific examples.
And even if there are people still carrying around baggage from before the Transition Team asked for everyone to operate from a blank slate, "I think some people are still holding grudges" is a drastically different statement from "I think people are engaging in a plan to reorganize the forum as a backdoor to force people they don't like out," which is what I took exception to in the first place as it's not only a point being made in bad faith, it borders on conspiratorial thinking that contributes nothing positive to this discussion.
NGL, bringing up how much people dislike the Holiday Forum as an argument against consolidation of specific subforums feels like a really flimsy argument against a restructure.
If only because I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting smushing all of the communities into one common space as a long term solution for Coin Return, especially when the Holday Forum has always been couched as a combination of a bit, and (initially, at least) as a bid by Tube to alleviate some of the treehousing that happens in specific subforums.
People are suggesting it as a way to make everyone get along though. And that is, as you note, part of what Tube was saying he wanted to do with it.
It is also, in practice, literally merging the two discussion forums into one space.
It shouldn't be surprising that people are taking it as a potential example of what the results of a D&D/SE++ merger could look like.
Then the question becomes whether people dislike the Holiday Forums because they make it harder to sort topics and put the current discussions on hold (which wouldn't be a problem on CoRe because there will still be categories), or whether they dislike the Holiday Forums because "so-and-so was there". Because most people have been saying the former, and I have a lot more empathy for the former than for the latter.
NGL, bringing up how much people dislike the Holiday Forum as an argument against consolidation of specific subforums feels like a really flimsy argument against a restructure.
If only because I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting smushing all of the communities into one common space as a long term solution for Coin Return, especially when the Holday Forum has always been couched as a combination of a bit, and (initially, at least) as a bid by Tube to alleviate some of the treehousing that happens in specific subforums.
People are suggesting it as a way to make everyone get along though. And that is, as you note, part of what Tube was saying he wanted to do with it.
It is also, in practice, literally merging the two discussion forums into one space.
It shouldn't be surprising that people are taking it as a potential example of what the results of a D&D/SE++ merger could look like.
You're overstaying how many people dislike each other across the "schism", frankly.
A lot of folks didn't know there was even beef
It's not forcing people to get along if they already largely do
There seems to be some kind of assumption that the schism "must be solved" or "the forums will die".
I'm not sure I agree with that assertion, and we have no proof that this is the case. The closest thing we might have to evidence would come from the survey, and I can say point blank with absolutely no reservations that the survey doesn't support such an argument.
If anything, the only affirmative thing you can take away from the survey is that there is enough support for Coin Return to be a broadly viable thing. That's pretty much it.
The forums are dying. That much we know. Not in the PA is killing it way either. It has continuously slowed down when we had a name attached. It is only going to get worse without one. There is not a small amount of users concerned about how the forums are going. I don't think we have any idea of what a silver bullet to fix them would be. We can know as is things aren't going great based on the multiple threads where people have spoken directly about how they are not happy with how things are going.
Sure but none of those problems have to do with the actual structure of the forums.
The things killing the forums have been:
1) Attrition in an online format that is all but dead and thus not really attracting new users in any large numbers.
2) Bad moderation.
If the impetus behind the merging is to stop the bleeding, it's completely missing the mark and it's not gonna work. If anything, it will only shed more members as the places they come here for disappear.
Attrition is accelerated by the lack of activity, or the perception of it. Bad moderation is so vague as to be useless.
No, it's not. This just isn't the venue to go over the specifics of the moderation problems we've had for years now. (Including just a complete lack of moderation due to understaffing.) But it is the actual cause here rather then the structure of the forums. You aren't gonna solve a moderation problem with a forum merger.
Yes it is. This is an effect of basic human psychology. They want to spend time where there are people to interact with. Especially in an online forum. It is absurd to assert otherwise.
are D&D or SE experiencing low enough activity that we need to merge them to retain users?
clearly not.
Transparently I think Mr2 hit the nail on the head with their post. I believe there are a group of posters who are looking at a potential merge as a back door mechanism to drive out self-defined "undesirables". Not all, likely not many. But definitely some.
I think this kind of rhetoric flies in the face of the Transition Team asking for a baseline assumption of good faith from everyone participating in this discussion, and it's just raising the temperature without contributing anything useful to the conversation.
Especially when the new Code of Conduct was explicitly written to avoid people getting brigaded off the boards by other posters technically following the rules while making the space hostile.
But what do we do when someone comes in to the thread, after the date that we were all supposed to reset, and just immediately dials up the temperature against someone else who happens to be the same person they've been doing that to for like 10 years?
What do we do when someone comes in and says the culture of only one of the subforums is toxic and must be changed to be more like the one they like more?
We can't pretend those things aren't happening, and it chips away at the willingness some people have to assume good faith. It directly leads to skepticism when we ignore those things and just say "hey no we all said we would work in good faith, so you must ignore the posts that don't feel like good faith posts because the label says they all have to be good faith posts".
I don't know how else to say it -- it certainly appears that old battle lines are being drawn, yet again. It's both inspiring and frustrating that it's definitely not everyone, but it's enough people that it sure feels like people fighting ghosts of old battles again.
Give people infraction points so they cool it or get banned. Also if we get rid of the sub forums people will no longer have a side they're on.
For reference I'm talking about in the context of this discussion. That isn't happening in this discussion, though yeah broadly I agree it's how to do it.
I'm saying you can't keep asking everyone to assume good faith after some previous reset date when there are people that clearly have not reset, after that reset date. Those people are often driving the conversation, and leading to people being worried about the future and what it looks like. You can't tell people who are skeptical of other people displaying exactly the same behaviors as "before the reset" that "no, you have to ignore those behaviors that they keep exhibiting, because we said we had a reset so their posts are by default in good faith".
The problem is that this argument you're making about some people refusing to participate in good faith is vague to the point that I really can't address it unless you're able to cite specific examples.
And even if there are people still carrying around baggage from before the Transition Team asked for everyone to operate from a blank slate, "I think some people are still holding grudges" is a drastically different statement from "I think people are engaging in a plan to reorganize the forum as a backdoor to force people they don't like out," which is what I took exception to in the first place as it's not only a point being made in bad faith, it borders on conspiratorial thinking that contributes nothing positive to this discussion.
Because we go through this cycle so often. Someone gets accused of "vagueposting", they go back and provide specific examples, and the entire thread descends into chaos as each side quibbles over whether those examples actually count for what the person was initially talking about.
I've tried to be that person to walk through the examples and show how I or others felt that way, but it literally never works and always leads to more frustrations and chaos. So yeah, what I'm giving you is a vaguepost of what appears to me and several others to be very obvious from reading posts in the thread, and asking that you take what I'm saying in good faith. I understand the irony of that given the discussion, yet here we are.
NGL, bringing up how much people dislike the Holiday Forum as an argument against consolidation of specific subforums feels like a really flimsy argument against a restructure.
If only because I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting smushing all of the communities into one common space as a long term solution for Coin Return, especially when the Holday Forum has always been couched as a combination of a bit, and (initially, at least) as a bid by Tube to alleviate some of the treehousing that happens in specific subforums.
People are suggesting it as a way to make everyone get along though. And that is, as you note, part of what Tube was saying he wanted to do with it.
It is also, in practice, literally merging the two discussion forums into one space.
It shouldn't be surprising that people are taking it as a potential example of what the results of a D&D/SE++ merger could look like.
Then the question becomes whether people dislike the Holiday Forums because they make it harder to sort topics and put the current discussions on hold (which wouldn't be a problem on CoRe because there will still be categories), or whether they dislike the Holiday Forums because "so-and-so was there". Because most people have been saying the former, and I have a lot more empathy for the former than for the latter.
Also: AFAIK, nobody even suggested anything similar to the Holiday Forum as a structure for merging SE++ and D&D in any of the proposals that have been floated.
So saying "I don't like the structure of the Holiday Forum and I dislike that I couldn't state that before now" is a complete non sequitur in the context of this discussion, other than to say that we shouldn't attempt to merge the forums like that, a sentiment that I think everyone here already broadly agreed with.
NGL, bringing up how much people dislike the Holiday Forum as an argument against consolidation of specific subforums feels like a really flimsy argument against a restructure.
If only because I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting smushing all of the communities into one common space as a long term solution for Coin Return, especially when the Holday Forum has always been couched as a combination of a bit, and (initially, at least) as a bid by Tube to alleviate some of the treehousing that happens in specific subforums.
People are suggesting it as a way to make everyone get along though. And that is, as you note, part of what Tube was saying he wanted to do with it.
It is also, in practice, literally merging the two discussion forums into one space.
It shouldn't be surprising that people are taking it as a potential example of what the results of a D&D/SE++ merger could look like.
Then the question becomes whether people dislike the Holiday Forums because they make it harder to sort topics and put the current discussions on hold (which wouldn't be a problem on CoRe because there will still be categories), or whether they dislike the Holiday Forums because "so-and-so was there". Because most people have been saying the former, and I have a lot more empathy for the former than for the latter.
That's ignoring other potential options. Including "because I don't like the style of posting that takes place in the Holiday forums". And I want to specifically focus on that because, honestly, I think maybe a big part of the problem here is people keep making the assumption that people prefer one subforum over another based on who's posting there. Even as people keep saying it's about the culture and style of discussion. You are making that mistake right here. This is why I've continually pointed out that D&D and SE++ have been different subforums with different cultures for decades at this point. It's got nothing to do with grudges. And we shouldn't keep pretending that's all it is.
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This thread has offered at least three different explanations for the split just from the people who want to maintain it, not even including those who don't. Every one of those reasons has been mentioned by someone else as not being the reason for the split. With that in mind I thought it was at least relevant to look at the current official descriptions for the subforums. And I don't disagree that they don't matter, except to say that if we're not planning on porting them over as-is, what will be the description for the subforums? This isn't just a cosmetic thing, it's having some sort of agreed upon idea of what D&D and SE++ actually mean. Making a new forum that has divisions without any distinct idea why (or more accurately, with three different, contradictory ideas why we have them) seems cargo-culty.
This also aligns with where my head is at. Something like building a set of community values and a code of conduct as our foundation to guide this whole community is something that was an uncomfortable, often fraught endeavor with a lot of folks at odds. But as a community we managed to work through it and come out the other side with, what I feel, is an incredibly strong foundation that's only going to improve the QoL for everyone here, mods, administration, and regular users alike.
I view restructuring the forums similarly in that I can't see a downside at all to trying to discuss, with open minds, some of the ways we could actually push through a bit of discomfort to make things better for everyone in the long term. Obviously, the community's voice will impact the final decision on that, but it feels reckless, and like a disservice to this community not to try to explore it in some depth first.
Give people infraction points so they cool it or get banned. Also if we get rid of the sub forums people will no longer have a side they're on.
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What? By who?
And even if someone had that as a rule, I'm happy to report that through the new CoC and forum-wide rules we have recently adopted, that isn't the case currently!
Feel free to complain about the Holiday Forums! Just don't be surprised if you get polite push-back as, for example, I think our volunteer moderators deserve a break during the peak of the holiday season.
Personally I would have considered it fairly clear that isn't a part of things anymore.
The mods absolutely deserve a break.
The holiday forum still sucks.
I'm absolutely fine with a space for it, even like we currently have, but maybe I also want to go look at other threads and talk about 3d printing or look at an older post for something and locking the whole rest of forum down is dumb and I hate it.
This was mostly a carryover from Tube, insufficient holiday cheer if you dared express dislike of his antics. After almost a decade of not being allowed to even talk about it people just stopped.
By Tube. And then it carried forward after he was gone. This was a thing for a long time. Which is why some people may have never heard the complaints before.
It wasn't just a couple of iterations.
I knew folks weren't getting infracted for asking about it anymore or "insufficient holiday cheer" or whatever. I still didn't think it was appropriate to say "hey I don't like this at all, can we not do it?" Not sure where I really would have been able to express my dislike of the holiday forums that wasn't, you know, in the holiday forums that I dislike.
Edit: also one of the reasons it used to exist was too give the mods a break. Even if I really don't like the holiday forums, that seems like a sucky thing to complain about, so I just deal with it for a couple weeks, no biggie. I have no idea if the mods still consider it a break, there's little communication on that anymore.
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Was it? Honestly? Was Geebs infracting folks over this??
Also: People are allowed to disagree with each other without it being indicative of a grudge, or as was originally suggested, some 9th dimensional chess move designed to force the people they don't like off the boards.
You would need to actually do that though. And that's still not happening.
And that remains a moderation problem, not a structural problem.
I don't think anyone cared to test the waters at that point.
But again, this was 100% a thing for a long time. If you haven't heard anyone complain about it before, that's why.
I believe the carried forward is "no one wants to talk about it because they don't know if they're going to get dumb infractions over it"
Gonna be blunt, this doesn't seem entirely germane to a discussion of forum structure, and it's treading on that same line of asking people to define precisely how much of an asshole they're allowed to be that made initial discussion of the Code of Conduct kind of difficult for me, specifically, to participate in.
Then why bring it up at all if it's immaterial to what's being discussed?
Doesn't really change the fact that it wasn't clear of this was a thing people could express dislike of, where would be appropriate to do it, and the concern of folks wanting the mods to have a break even if they disliked the holiday forums.
I dunno. Like, this is a weird thing to push back on when you've got folks here telling you what they thought. "Well you shouldn't have thought that way!" Ok sure? But some of us did still.
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This is, in fact, how rules are supposed to work. You enforce them till people just stop the behaviour. And then you don't even need to issue punishments anymore. Because they've just become how people behave.
- I think the schism is overblown, and the only real sources of conflict are in the divergent dominant politics of the respective forums' politics threads. No one's crying out for blood in the Lego thread (as far as I know?)
- it is far easier to do a functional change now and retain more users than to impose one 6-12 months after the new forum has ran for a while - the impetus and ability for folks to actually pursue change is there right now, and I sincerely doubt with inertia anyone will pursue change until the forum is fully dead if we use the same build as now
- we are going to continue to experience attrition, and i think that will be worse as we have duplicate threads that both experience dampened participation by people. It gives more of an appearance of a dying forum when there's half as many posts in a thread as there could be. And it also prevents people from meeting others in their extant community that could have happened otherwise. I genuinely think having two of the same threads will lead to a forum that dies faster simply because it will feel like no one is posting in them, which reduces the tendency of others *to* post and allows regulars to drift away.
- it's easier for people to post outside of their usual domains if we offer a restart to the general culture. There's plenty of folks who i presume have never ventured out of G&T who might actually be great to chat with but are uncomfortable breaching the calcified state of the other two communities.
- the split is unintelligible to potential new users which effectively dooms us to a hospice situation. You can't expect internet users in 2025 to operate the same way as 2005 in terms of finding a forum, lurking it for the vibe for a year, and then finding it in themselves to post.
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Because someone brought up a borderline conspiracy theory about how trying to merge certain subforums in a new structure was some backdoor means of trying to force people off the boards, something that wasn't happening, and something the new CoC wouldn't allow for anyway.
Just as a point of order, to my knowledge and conversations I've had, the mod staff is generally giving folks a bit more leeway for... let's call it "vigorous disagreement" in this subforum, as planning and building a whole new home for us is a pretty tense topic that necessitates a lot of argument, discussion, disagreement, etc from such a diverse group. That's not to say there's carte blanche to be a total asshole here, and truly out of pocket shit should still be infracted/warned, but folks are going to mostly get a liiiittle more rope than they would in other areas of the forum (and on Coin Return) in the spirit of working through shit.
I think that's more indicative of the older forums simply not providing a shared space for folks to issue complaints/criticisms.
This surprises me honestly because I would have thought the work that's just gone into creating the new CoC and soon the rules would evoke a bit more faith in their ability to deal with problems. Isn't that the point of them?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what "chasing people off" means. If someone's being treated unreasonably in a thread to the point that they want to leave I would hope the rules and mods could put a stop to it. If they just get pissy that people aren't agreeing with them or whatever then that's their own issue
If that's the case I would say the problem is there's no indication that it going on and it creates exactly the perception Fiatil is talking about.
Sure, I know now people thought that it still wasn't allowed. I also know that there were people that disliked the holiday forums, plenty of folks were vocal about that.
But I am pushing back on statements like this, which are categorically false:
It was previously against the rules, yes, and some people may have believed it was still against the rules. But I want to correct the record that it was not against the rules this year, doesn't seem to have been against the rules for a few years prior, and therefore was not "always against the rules."
For reference I'm talking about in the context of this discussion. That isn't happening in this discussion, though yeah broadly I agree it's how to do it.
I'm saying you can't keep asking everyone to assume good faith after some previous reset date when there are people that clearly have not reset, after that reset date. Those people are often driving the conversation, and leading to people being worried about the future and what it looks like. You can't tell people who are skeptical of other people displaying exactly the same behaviors as "before the reset" that "no, you have to ignore those behaviors that they keep exhibiting, because we said we had a reset so their posts are by default in good faith".
If only because I don't think anyone is seriously suggesting smushing all of the communities into one common space as a long term solution for Coin Return, especially when the Holday Forum has always been couched as a combination of a bit, and (initially, at least) as a bid by Tube to alleviate some of the treehousing that happens in specific subforums.
I would mention that forums like SpaceBattles just lock news and politics threads during the holidays except those regarding active conflicts, which is it's own subcategory.
So, that's a solution. Do not feel strongly about it myself, but is there.
Ideally that will still happen? Zonugal's format even still allows for (chat) to exist. People will likely carry over the threads they've made that are standards of the subforums. And honestly, with the Discords there are ways to still interact with folks you like, too
It's just, the forum you post in and the groups you post with might get a little bigger (like the olden days, when you could actually experience new blood showing up and bringing fresh ideas and takes)
Kinda one of those benefits of posting on a public forum versus one of the gated social media communities now
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1. Totally on-board with giving the mods a break;
2. Generally enjoyed the Holiday Forums for all of the years I've been posting;
3. Am still annoyed when several more-topical threads I used to post in aren't available for a wholemonth (exaggeration)
4. Know, deep in my bones, that You Do Not Complain About The Holiday Forums;
5. Also know there will always be at least 1 thread saying, "Where'd my regular stuff go?" Good times.
6. Also know that there are a several people who are, like, "Fuck this - see y'all in January because I ain't dealing with that."
7. Who, because of Point 4, don't generally air their feelings any more.
ED:
Dude.
Seriously?
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Was it ever announced that the Insufficient Holiday Cheer rules were retracted? I might have missed it, I didn't pay too much attention to the Holiday Forums since I generally just check out around that time anyway.
Saying "Nobody did X this year, it was totally legal to do this year (but up until this year people doing X were severely punished and we never told anyone that it was now legal) therefore no one ever wanted to do X in the first place" seems like it's missing the point.
People are suggesting it as a way to make everyone get along though. And that is, as you note, part of what Tube was saying he wanted to do with it.
It is also, in practice, literally merging the two discussion forums into one space.
It shouldn't be surprising that people are taking it as a potential example of what the results of a D&D/SE++ merger could look like.
The problem is that this argument you're making about some people refusing to participate in good faith is vague to the point that I really can't address it unless you're able to cite specific examples.
And even if there are people still carrying around baggage from before the Transition Team asked for everyone to operate from a blank slate, "I think some people are still holding grudges" is a drastically different statement from "I think people are engaging in a plan to reorganize the forum as a backdoor to force people they don't like out," which is what I took exception to in the first place as it's not only a point being made in bad faith, it borders on conspiratorial thinking that contributes nothing positive to this discussion.
Then the question becomes whether people dislike the Holiday Forums because they make it harder to sort topics and put the current discussions on hold (which wouldn't be a problem on CoRe because there will still be categories), or whether they dislike the Holiday Forums because "so-and-so was there". Because most people have been saying the former, and I have a lot more empathy for the former than for the latter.
You're overstaying how many people dislike each other across the "schism", frankly.
A lot of folks didn't know there was even beef
It's not forcing people to get along if they already largely do
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Because we go through this cycle so often. Someone gets accused of "vagueposting", they go back and provide specific examples, and the entire thread descends into chaos as each side quibbles over whether those examples actually count for what the person was initially talking about.
I've tried to be that person to walk through the examples and show how I or others felt that way, but it literally never works and always leads to more frustrations and chaos. So yeah, what I'm giving you is a vaguepost of what appears to me and several others to be very obvious from reading posts in the thread, and asking that you take what I'm saying in good faith. I understand the irony of that given the discussion, yet here we are.
Also: AFAIK, nobody even suggested anything similar to the Holiday Forum as a structure for merging SE++ and D&D in any of the proposals that have been floated.
So saying "I don't like the structure of the Holiday Forum and I dislike that I couldn't state that before now" is a complete non sequitur in the context of this discussion, other than to say that we shouldn't attempt to merge the forums like that, a sentiment that I think everyone here already broadly agreed with.
That's ignoring other potential options. Including "because I don't like the style of posting that takes place in the Holiday forums". And I want to specifically focus on that because, honestly, I think maybe a big part of the problem here is people keep making the assumption that people prefer one subforum over another based on who's posting there. Even as people keep saying it's about the culture and style of discussion. You are making that mistake right here. This is why I've continually pointed out that D&D and SE++ have been different subforums with different cultures for decades at this point. It's got nothing to do with grudges. And we shouldn't keep pretending that's all it is.