ArfJason posted:

aids

Happy Thread posted:

The poster who is supplying that narrative as well as the other posters dogpiling over it are FYAD regulars, the very same friends circle that ran off the posters in question in via dogpiling

ArfJason posted:

aids

Jazerus posted:

you aren't being hurt. this was never a laser-focused political space, ever. ever! in the days before it was cspam, yeah, sort of. but the whole point of the series of events that led to this subforum's creation was to make a space for casual posting about absurd things. that's really it, politics is an extremely fruitful source of absurdity but it's not the only thing we talk about. this rewriting history poo poo to claim that anything that isn't the marxism thread needs to leave the subforum is incredibly tiresome. this is like inviting a bunch of people into your house and then having them say they want to evict you.

i don't think it's actually intentional dude, but that's what it feels like when i see no indications of chat vs everyone else tension ever in any of the threads i post in beyond some very surface-level rivalry. i would think that if there were actual tension it would be a lot more obvious because none of us are really subtle people

ArfJason posted:

aids

Cpt_Obvious posted:

Hey, aren't you the dude who does nothing but bitch about CSPAM in QCS?

ArfJason posted:

aids

Athanatos posted:

Feels kinda like we are circling the drain here.

COMPAGNIE TOMMY posted:

I have no idea who Harton is and I even checked SAclopedia. That's got to be a user's name as opposed to their username, yes?

cumshitter posted:

you guys can resist it as much as you want but thats the best part of believing in harton. i dont have to evangelize for him. someone else will come in and complain about his beefers and be proven wrong

he is just and right that way

ArfJason posted:

aids

Sharkopath posted:

I dont think theres any actionable solution to that problem though, its just what happens when threads become atomized megathreads and people mostly stick to their main thread. You just mostly hope it doesnt get really wierd and lame like cumshitters posting here.

ArfJason posted:

y'all remember when this style of post was made about taintrunner lol

"some of you cant handle that some taints are being ran, and by god the taints were ran, but by god someones gotta run those taints"

COMPAGNIE TOMMY posted:

I have no idea who Harton is and I even checked SAclopedia. That's got to be a user's name as opposed to their username, yes?

Harton posted:

Any of you play bass by chance?

Athanatos posted:

Feels kinda like we are circling the drain here.

I wouldn't mind having this thread open a while longer in case any late weekend/early Monday people want to give opinions, but I understand if we've kinda run the gambit on large general issues or complaints.

ArfJason posted:

y'all remember when this style of post was made about taintrunner lol

"some of you cant handle that some taints are being ran, and by god the taints were ran, but by god someones gotta run those taints"

Son of Thunderbeast posted:

It's a shame to see QCS regulars coming in to the thread now to poo poo on it while nothing's being done because I'd like a chance to post my thoughts but I guess I can just PM them at some point in the near future

Happy Thread posted:

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what they are going to have for lunch. Historically that tends to be the environment that is provided for soliciting feedback about one subforum among other competing subforums.

Son of Thunderbeast posted:

It's a shame to see QCS regulars coming in to the thread now to poo poo on it while nothing's being done because I'd like a chance to post my thoughts but I guess I can just PM them at some point in the near future

Happy Thread posted:

"We" as in the whole thread aren't circling. There are just specific posters that are spamming and attacking ideas and posters at the moment. Enforcement on them is noticeably not being practiced just after it was preached. The leadership has buttons that control the dogpiling and derailing process.

Homeless Friend posted:

lol don't beg mods jfc, bear the weight of your posts

H.P. Hovercraft posted:

ArfJason posted:

y'all remember when this style of post was made about taintrunner lol

"some of you cant handle that some taints are being ran, and by god the taints were ran, but by god someones gotta run those taints"

pre-op bebop posted:

Happy Thread posted:

Yeah. Letting pitched battles play out is nothing to be proud of.

Happy Thread posted:

Yeah. Letting pitched battles play out is nothing to be proud of.

Sharkopath posted:

I think youre just kind of oblivious then, theres multiple subcultures in cspam that are actively hostile to eachother, including right on this page the slapfight between chat thread posters and greenwald posters manifesting itself.

I dont even post that much and i know this.

COMPAGNIE TOMMY posted:

I thought for the longest time they were talking about The Taint Reaper, a much better poster

Jazerus posted:

when did it stop being pretend grudges and start being real?? these thread rivalries are intended to be fundamentally unserious because we are actually a single community even if there is a lot of diversity in how we approach different threads. the greenwald posters said "please come to our thread" there wasn't a slapfight at all.

is literally all of this about people, at some point fairly recently, no longer understanding that this subforum's conflicts are jokes? i'm not saying there haven't ever been genuine grievances but it's weird to see someone talk about all of this inter-thread politics with a straight face when most of these "rivalries" were originally cooked up for the fun of fake grudgeposting. it's weird to me because plenty of us were there at the beginning and can tell you that it was never intended to create genuine fault lines in the community. if any of you took these things seriously simply because it seemed the posters around you were taking it seriously, i apologize because they probably weren't, actually.

Shine posted:

Alrighty, gonna post some observations, and then open the thread back up. Sorry for . These aren't necessarily "action items," because I don't view this endeavor as "become a C-SPAM expert in 2 days and then make sweeping changes to the community," but more me trying to get an idea of how folks feel about the forum so that I have more context for the inevitible times that I'm asked to assist a mod with C-SPAM matters (and I simply don't have time to engross myself in the forum; as I noted, I'm more a "background" admin and barely have time to keep up with threads I love in other forums).

- Part of the appeal here versus D&D is the relaxed nature of the rules, so there's less focus on MLA formatting, and more focus on discussion matters using whatever words are felt appropriate for the situation, even if they aren't "decorum." It's also seen as a "safe space" for leftism and a general discussion space for leftist posters (ex. "I want to bullshit about growing tomatoes with my buddies, not with 'the experts' for help in DIY").

- Some threads aren't distinctly leftist or about leftists. There are some mixed feelings about this, but most folks either like that, or at least don't mind.

- Some threads are seen as "chat threads" that are overly insular and sources of drama, forum feuds, Making Posting Enemies, etc. Personally I'm not into threads that function as essentially a forums-based Discord, but as long as they aren't leading to dumb drama, I don't have a strong opinion on them being here versus CCCC or wherever. I acknowledge that "as long as they aren't leading to dumb drama" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

- There's a line between "shitposting" and "posting casually, but still being interesting." Personally, I much prefer the latter; spamming catchphrases and played-out jokes (drnald thrunjp lol) isn't very interesting to me. I sympathize with the folks who prefer that even casual posting still go by the ancient SA standard of being "funny, informative, or interesting on any level," but I also think it's tricky for mods to enforce that in a relaxed rules forum, at least in a way that the community at large will agree is fair and consistent. So that strikes me as more a standard that a community needs to coalesce around or agree to disagree on, and some threads will lean more toward more serious tones, and others toward silly poo poo, and the thread IKs can deal with that as they see appropriate. But again, I'm not laying down the law on this, and it may be worth a mod posting a thread to discuss this specifically with the community and go from there.

- Related to the previous point, there was some poo poo about beef poof for like 2 pages, and my eyes glazed over reading about it because it was boring and unfunny, so I have no comment on whatever that was.

- Some mods have been seen as out of touch with C-SPAM's various subcultures, as they were picked from major megathreads. They then moderate other threads in a manner that clashes with the established tone and direction of that thread, and the thread regulars there are like, "who the gently caress are you, anyway?" I think it would benefit us to do a more crowdsourced approach to picking mods and IKs here, having mods nominated and hased out who overlap several major threads. Thoughts?

- Most here tend to favor a light hand in moderation, which makes sense for a relaxed rules forum. Issues that I see coming up here/in PM that people generally agree should be moderated are: slurs (including racial, sexual, and ableist), excessive dogpiles/bullying, and untagged NSFW. For "relaxed rules" forums, I think this covers most modding bases. Then you get into more subjective things like "useless white noise" and such.

- The dogpiling/bullying stuff is important to keep an eye on, but it's tricky because it's also pretty subjective. There are times when a person is being a dipshit and I feel that having the thread call them a dipshit is warranted (like how the YLLS General Thread has treated dogmatic Low Carbers over the years); but I can also see the concern with twitter'esque dogpiling of someone because they said something at odds with thread regulars' opinions, and instead of a discussion and exchange of ideas and perspectives, the "LET'S GET 'EM" stuff happens. At a glance, this is where I think mods/IKs (and posters!!!) with a knack for de-escalating without buttons can help, but "cool off" sixers, or maybe harsher probes for notorious poo poo-stirrers may be needed.

- On that note, I'm generally a fan of communities sorting out spats themselves, and mods mostly leading by example; course-correcting with posts instead of buttons (or posting explicit threats to push buttons, which I also think is usually counterproductive). That said, I've never moderated giant, busy forums, so it's easy for me to say that as someone who just glances at YLLS and says "yup, still no reports this month" and only sometimes has to nudge threads in a more productive direction when things get too shitposty, whereas C-SPAM got like 40 reports just yesterday (most of which from people who post in C-SPAM, so it's not a "D&D lurkers trying to barge in" thing). I'd love to see more "let the community sort itself out" and have mods mostly step in to say "okay, we need to move on, y'all are going in circles over [whatever] and everybody has said what they have to say," and only use buttons when it's either a "very much against the rules" thing, or the mod otherwise feels things have gotten too far into "these are just bad posts" land.

- Moderating something as a "bad post" requires a lot of community trust, hence why I think crowdsourcing mods would be especially good in C-SPAM. A risk of light-handed moderation is that threads can sometimes become very insular and toxic, perhaps getting a "holier than thou" attitude toward the rest of the forum, which then spills out and leads to slapfights where mods feel compelled to use a firmer hand than usual, which then bumps against "this is a relaxed rules forum; why are you modding conversations?" and leads to backlash and stress. It's complicated, and I don't have an answer beyond "find mods that most of the community trusts, and let them do their thing."


If anybody feels like I'm misreading the poo poo out of something, then please let me know. Again, I'm not here to make C-SPAM policy. I just want to have at least a serviceable idea of the going-ons here for those times when a C-SPAM mod asks an admin for something (or a C-SPAM poster PMs me with concerns about modding).