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i know you have a lot going on but what did you think of aliens
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Mar 19, 2023 04:56
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well that was a thing podima is still listed as a mod/ik of here and the game room, that needs to be removed too, especially the latter
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Mar 19, 2023 04:57
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That is an administrative task that I'll make sure is taken care of. There is also a cache, I think the modlist at the top of the forum is created by an indexer or some poo poo, so it may take a few hours or an F5 or something. I am very sorry about all of this. I didn't know anything about it. I'm not happy.
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Mar 19, 2023 05:14
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Leperflesh posted:That is an administrative task that I'll make sure is taken care of. There is also a cache, I think the modlist at the top of the forum is created by an indexer or some poo poo, so it may take a few hours or an F5 or something. Prag fixed it already.
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Mar 19, 2023 05:15
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That'll teach me to be off forum for a few hours
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Mar 19, 2023 05:23
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Loldwarf74 posted:That'll teach me to be off forum for a few hours Was playing Victoria 3 and missed the whole rigamarole
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Mar 19, 2023 05:50
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Jesus loving Christ.
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Mar 19, 2023 05:55
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Plutonis posted:Was playing Victoria 3 and missed the whole rigamarole one entire administration
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Mar 19, 2023 05:58
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Leperflesh posted:IIRC, Gau made the first Industry thread to talk about making games and running game businesses, which was a thing some goons were doing at the time; but within a few pages it became a place to discuss goings-on and news in the industry too. It has at times been a containment zone for contentious argumentation about major industry keystones like games workshop, wizards, kickstarter, etc. to help keep the threads about those companies' games from getting derailed too much. I think it has evolved into a good place for finding out who the worst actors are, posting news, and providing a space for those discussions with particular moderator attention. Gau had a "How to successfully run a game business thread" that had some shop talk on producing games and running a game store iirc. It died quietly after the kickstarter he was in charge of self-destructed and someone ran off with all the money. I think that thread predated but also kind of ran parallel to the first Industry thread for a while? God that was over a decade ago and even my memory's not that precise.
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Mar 19, 2023 06:42
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You may be right. My memory is certainly not ideal either lol, perhaps I'm conflating the two.
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Mar 19, 2023 06:52
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I realized I had the old industry thread in my bookmarks and it looks like it's the first one: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3541519&pagenumber=1 It seems that we can blame Winson for all this quote:Anyway, here is your thread for hashing that poo poo out. Have at it. This is not intended to replace the "How to Not Run a Game Business" which has previously been about more practical matters until it sort of assumed the mantle this thread is intended to service but rather to take some of the heat off of that thread since there is clearly a lot of impulse to talk about some of this poo poo.
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Mar 19, 2023 07:03
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Ahah, yeah that was Gau's thread, "How to Not Run a Game Business". I did fold them together in my mind, looks like. Nice research.
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Mar 19, 2023 07:15
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Nuns with Guns posted:I realized I had the old industry thread in my bookmarks and it looks like it's the first one: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3541519&pagenumber=1 hey i still hang out with winson regularly he is blameless, innocent, pure, and living his best life
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Mar 19, 2023 07:46
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dwarf74 posted:That'll teach me to be off forum for a few hours Plutonis posted:Was playing Victoria 3 and missed the whole rigamarole Yeah drat, I was coop gaming with some friends this whole time. Before I started Podima was admin, then when I finished... well... wow, I wasn't expecting that! 
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Mar 19, 2023 07:48
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So! As you can all probably guess, we've been blindsided here, and it's a mess. I've already raised this in the mod thread, but I'd like to throw the question out to the community: what do people want going forward in terms of reporting on offsite games and activity? My big concern as a mod is that I absolutely don't want this poo poo flying under the radar anymore. I want this to be a forum where people can respond to ads and join games with reasonable certainty that they won't end up in a situation like this, and I also want people to be comfortable reporting off-site game problems to us so we can, at bare minimum, prevent people running skeevy games from advertising and posting about them here. There's a lot that we obviously can't do about offsites, since none of us are the Boss of Discord, but it's really important to me that the SA Tradgames forum doesn't tolerate situations like the ones the Riven and IMG players have described. At bare minimum, I'd like to establish some kind of an open-door policy to let people report bad offsite behavior in PM to the mods so we can deal with threads/ads for those games, but I'd like to know what ideas others have to improve the status quo here.
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Mar 19, 2023 08:10
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I read more than I post in TG these days (not moderation related, I'm just generally partaking in tradgames less than I used to be) but a few things I've been thinking about - First, just want to point this out from the TG rules thread: quote:Offsite drama While I understand the reasoning behind this, I think it could probably do with some rewording/clarification because as what's happened here shows, people need to be able to speak up without fear of punishment / retribution. Second, maybe it's worth adding a sticky into The Game Room with 1) Some resources relating to safe gaming like the X-card or whatever. People don't have to use all of them but should be using something. 2) Some explicit statements that people disregarding these mechanisms leading to situations like the Riven/IMG games isn't something that should be tolerated and that, yes, this in fact should be raised with either the mods or - if mods are involved - the admins, and that people shouldn't fear punishment for doing so.
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Mar 19, 2023 08:30
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Yeah, I definitely agree that the "offsite drama" rules are going to have to be heavily changed. I think that's been a bad thing for SA as a whole to hold onto when it's basically given people a license to be awful on Discord or whatever and be defended with "we don't take offsite drama here" rules.
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Mar 19, 2023 08:39
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Antivehicular posted:what do people want going forward in terms of reporting on offsite games and activity? The basic and obvious things would be:
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Mar 19, 2023 08:57
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Antivehicular posted:Yeah, I definitely agree that the "offsite drama" rules are going to have to be heavily changed. I think that's been a bad thing for SA as a whole to hold onto when it's basically given people a license to be awful on Discord or whatever and be defended with "we don't take offsite drama here" rules.
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Mar 19, 2023 09:31
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Nessus posted:My feeling on this rule is that the purpose was "If I have a huge loving fight with Ssusen over which version of Cyberpunk is the real original vision of Marxism-Leninism-Silverhandism, and drag it into the Cyberpunk Red thread, calling Ssusen a motherfucker and linking his bad posts while calling him a double liberal, I will receive Penalties," not "people engaging in harmful behaviors/abuse get protected because it did not happen literally on Something Awful." Unfortunately, this has not always been the policy on SA in the past! There have been several incidents where posters coming forward with harassment claims were told that SA mods couldn't or wouldn't do anything because it wasn't happening on the forums. (The big one, IIRC, was someone spamming the old Fabgoons thread in E/N with links to a "Fabgoons discord" that was actually his own skanky porn server, and the mod telling people off for warning others about him because "that's offsite drama.") Obviously we aren't going to start ruling on random Discord slapfights, but I want to err on the side of people reporting offsite behavior they think is toxic or harmful.
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Mar 19, 2023 09:38
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Antivehicular posted:Unfortunately, this has not always been the policy on SA in the past! There have been several incidents where posters coming forward with harassment claims were told that SA mods couldn't or wouldn't do anything because it wasn't happening on the forums. (The big one, IIRC, was someone spamming the old Fabgoons thread in E/N with links to a "Fabgoons discord" that was actually his own skanky porn server, and the mod telling people off for warning others about him because "that's offsite drama.") Obviously we aren't going to start ruling on random Discord slapfights, but I want to err on the side of people reporting offsite behavior they think is toxic or harmful.
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Mar 19, 2023 09:44
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This is a particularly thorny issue for TG since we have... At least two Discords? Maybe three or more by now? All of which hate each other? I don't envy anyone who has to do moderation in that environment.
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Mar 19, 2023 10:22
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Those certainly were some posts to see today. As for off-forum stuff, obviously if someone's doing something blatantly illegal or doing fifty slurs a second, getting dunked on the forum should be a thing that happens. But at the same time, for off-forum stuff it's pretty easy to snip things into bite-sized chunks that make everything sound worse, exclude context and apologies, etc. so it'd also make sense to be a bit careful.
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Mar 19, 2023 10:42
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I personally had less faith in the TG moderation, and especially Leperflesh, when there was a bit kerfuffle about the Board Game Thread moderation and LF came in and tried to bring off-site drama into the thread and tried to shift the blame for the events onto my discord community, which I thought at the time was against forum rules. I'm not as big as a contributer to the forum as I used to be, but I've never seen a situation before where someone had poo poo the bad so badly in terms of moderating a thread which I still frequent daily.
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Mar 19, 2023 13:30
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My TG posts are near exclusively in the Magic threads and I don't really interact with the greater tradgames community on Something Awful so my perspective may not necessarily be as relevant as most other people posting about it, but I think the offsite drama rules on SA as a whole have needed some work for a while particularly with regard to Games-adjacent discords and this seems like the best opportunity to start on that. I think retaining a "no importing offsite drama" rule is fine, but it needs to apply specifically to drama, i.e. dumb gossipy poo poo that isn't actually that important in the grand scheme of things. Abusive behavior is not drama, and when it comes from a person who posts here and is inflicted on another person who posts here I think there needs to be the expectation that the abuser be ejected from this community and communities that wish to continue being advertised here. The latter bit is particularly important, because I've had a few unpleasant surprises where I've joined a games discord to play a new thing with some goons and loving Derpies or some other former goon who has been rightfully ejected for abusive behavior is an active participant or even a mod there. This is especially important in spaces where some degree of trust is necessary, like in roleplaying games.
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Mar 19, 2023 15:46
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The incident that I allude to in my post, by the way, is Leperflesh coming into the Boardgame thread, trying to deflect by making up poo poo about the Boardgoon Discord community without any proof, continually making allusions to this non-existent drama to the extent that other posters in the thread started to comment on it and wanting to get clarifications, while claiming that they "didn't want to get involved with it" while still making unproven allusions about it, and then not mentioning it again or apologising when I, as a admin of the discord, clarified the situation.
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Mar 19, 2023 16:04
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Tekopo posted:The incident that I allude to in my post, by the way, is Leperflesh coming into the Boardgame thread, trying to deflect by making up poo poo about the Boardgoon Discord community without any proof, continually making allusions to this non-existent drama to the extent that other posters in the thread started to comment on it and wanting to get clarifications, while claiming that they "didn't want to get involved with it" while still making unproven allusions about it, and then not mentioning it again or apologising when I, as a admin of the discord, clarified the situation. That kinda sucks rear end and I hope we get any kind of clarification from him on this
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Mar 19, 2023 16:05
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Leperflesh continually refuses to enforce the values of the community they serve and ignored more than a dozen regular posters asking to thread ban a problematic poo poo poster that caused drama by continually posting about a gross rape art game. It led to a long time well respected member of the broader board game community leaving entirely, many others abandoning the thread, and LF getting defensive when called out about the mod teams’ use of sexist language when talking about removing her as the IK (“she was difficult to work with”). As I said before, their inaction, refusal to listen to the community, and defense of the worst people there drove away one of the best.
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Mar 19, 2023 16:37
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I don't think thread bans are particularly useful or helpful, but has PRADA SLUT posted particularly gross things besides uttering the dark word combination of "Kingdom Death: Monster" because he knows those three words in a specific sequence makes people upset? And this is about the Idiot King who also asked if "you guys" could be banned from general usage in the Games Feedback thread? Because I don't know... that seems a bit out of sync with how people talk here.
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Mar 19, 2023 16:59
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I'm not gonna comment on the other stuff myself, since I wasn't involved with it apart from when I felt I was forced to comment about the discord situation.
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Mar 19, 2023 17:05
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I have a lot to say here but am not at a computer yet so I'm sorry but its going to be a bit before i can properly respond.
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Mar 19, 2023 17:17
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In terms of what was said, I have mostly issues with the following:Leperflesh posted:apparenly there was discord drama but other than hearing there was drama i don't know what, nor do i want to really. Mayveena said something about separating from the discord a while back. I dont know if saying she was run off is accurate or not but if so I cant imagine why, shes hardly a problematic poster or anything? and this Leperflesh posted:That is maybe the root thing. Bottom liner and magnetic north maybe thought mayveena was supposed to rescue the thread from the mere presence of the gross game-likers but she never had that power and was not actually responsible for that. I hope people weren't demanding that of her on discord or wherever. Especially the first post, and especially the last line, which is just so loving filled with innuendo that it's incredible it hasn't been deleted yet. This led to other posters writing this: fr0id posted:Also, I know the rules on cross forum drama, but it seems like an important piece of context about whatever happened on the discord is missing. Also missing are of course Mayveena’s own opinions on the matter, which are possibly being filtered instead through her friends on her. To which I felt that I needed to post this: Tekopo posted:Mayveena left, as far as I know, because there were some boardgaming-related disagreements regading Euros, and she told people that she didn't feel like she fit within the culture of the discord, which is different from the culture of the thread. We discussed her leaving within the admin channels when she left, she reached out to one of the admins explaining why she left, and we reviewed communications to see if there had been anything that was actionable when she left. She didn't leave because of thread drama, she wasn't hounded by anyone in the discord because of thread drama, and she wasn't pressured to act in any way within the Discord. I had, up to that point, not been involved in the discussion at all.
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Mar 19, 2023 17:36
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Like to be clear I don't enjoy Kingdom Death: Monster. Some of the art in the rulebook is creepily horny. The RNG elements of the monster fights and everything else isn't satisfying to me. I also don't really like the justification that the base board game isn't as bad because the minis with the particularly rape-y lore aren't statted up or "playable" in the base game. Like, sure, the big smithing god with naked slave men and the massive mutant wiener isn't a legal monster to fight, but they did add the monster that's "a Xenomorph, but a hot lady mosquito who impregnates you brain eating larvae" and "the hot lady monster thing with a massive schlong shaped organ that encases you in honey amber" as expansions. I also don't like how they've decided Berserk-inspired "dark fantasy" designs apparently means making a monster out of a combination of excessive (in size or number) hands, mouths, dicks, or tits. I don't think it needs to be a forbidden topic though, unless someone's getting particularly sweaty and passionate about how important the pinup minis are to their game or something. Was PRADA SLUT doing something like that? Because I will browse the board games thread and search the discord sometimes if I want a vibe on an upcoming kickstarter or recently released board game, but I don't follow it constantly. (To be honest, there were times where I'd see fights in there that boiled down to "no this sucks, shut up and play a better game." And didn't feel like posting after that because it's certainly not an area I feel very well-versed in overall, and I don't personally like being shat on for ignorantly enjoying a game normies like but refined taste-makers know sucks.) Or was this lovely guy saying disgusting things offsite? Because this seems like a great time to point out if he's a creep who was kicked out of the discord community for something vile, too.
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Mar 19, 2023 17:39
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I was trying to dance around the issues here, but the fallout from this Podima situation is making this all the more relevant, because it directly calls into question the judgement of the moderation team. This is not the first time this has happened. First, for the record, I do not think it is profitable to re-litigate much of anything about the approximately 9-month slow burn meltdown in the board game thread at his juncture. The thread has been fairly quiet since August. I wrote up a whole history to one of the admins to describe the situation as best as I understood it and my suggestions for changes. I do not know in what way they acted on it, if they did at all. (If they did not, I do not necessarily mean that as a criticism.) If for some reason we absolutely need to dredge it up, I can try and describe what happened based on my contemporaneous notes. Still, let's please not talk about specific non-mod goons or games or incidents without very good reason. Even if you disagree, I don't think the feedback thread will be well served by letting user X say that user Y sucks. Instead, I want to talk about moving forward and the mod team. In various places, former and current mods have talked about how the Trad Games subforum is pretty chill. Based on what I am seeing in SAD from GBS lurkers and have seen from other internet social spaces, that appears to be true. It's a pretty calm place. I think it's because the trad gaming space has found that lots of places that are very hostile and chuddy and fashy. People have migrated to SA because the moderation policy and paywall allow it to foster a less 4Chan-style audience. However, in this subforum, we also have had multiple instances of threads going nuclear from time to time. Some are a low-level simmer like the industry thread or the chat thread where it can get a bit salty, and that may well be within normal parameters. In other threads, discussion is rendered impossible at times. For examples, check out Toshimo's earlier posts about the Magic thread. How can we say we are satisfied with moderation of the subforum when certain threads are rendered completely unusable for weeks or even months at a time? Leperflesh is utterly reticent to dole out probes to fix problems for whatever reason. I say Leperflesh, but this would includes the other two mods who gave up their gavels in 2022. Not Antivehicular or Podima. I forget their names, since they both bailed nearly a year ago and were also bad at their job. Rather than hand out probes, they wanted to talk poo poo out. It's a noble thought, but one look will tell us it does not work, at least not always. This isn't some "We don't see the ships that were saved by the lighthouse" issue; we have threads that were rendered dysfunctional that possessed few probes. Side note: Frustration with the inaction made someone coin a new dysphemism for the TG mods at the time based on their theory of appeasement: "The Nevilles Chamberlain." It's not really relevant, but it makes me laugh so I'm sharing it. (If I coined that and forgot, please forgive me laughing at my own joke. It's been a long year.) What's my alternative to this particularly ineffective version of talk therapy? I'm sure some people disagree but I think you should be handing out probes like it's 2011 again. Just probe people. Tell them to knock the poo poo off and if they don't like being probed, they can go loving cry about it. But Leperflesh remains uninterested in that. That's his right, but that doesn't exactly make great mod material. We already established that TG is pretty chill so it doesn't need as much moderation as other subforums, but that does not excuse just kicking it into neutral. I imagine that if this were not a place as chill as TG, there is no way he could have gotten away with this for so long. My theory: I don't think Leperflesh likes dealing with the bullshit of modding. He probably doesn't like getting nastygrams from annoyed goons. (I did message these mods in the past for help and guidance, and I tried to be as forthright and understanding in this process as I could despite my annoyance.) I don't know the full extent of what goes into modding, outside excerpts from mods and IKs who have talked about it. Clearly, it is work. Volunteer work. Still, I can only have so much sympathy because that is what you signed up for. It's also not contractual; it can end whenever necessary and someone else can tag in if life gets in the way. Mods are granted special privileges for this position because it's necessary, but if he isn't here to spend some personal time using those mod powers to try and make the forum better, then we can only imagine that the reason for being a mod is he wants his little blue star so his long posts are marked as A Very Special Boy. I think that sucks. If you aren't going to do all you can to make TG the best place it can be and you aren't using the tools afforded to you, then you have the exact same impact on this forum as a lovely mod as you would as a lovely regular poster. Worse, actually, because you're taking up a space where someone who cares could make a difference, leaving admins to believe things are fine when they aren't. Also, in a real personal practical sense, consider that if you give up the star then you never ever have to listen to people complain about how much you loving suck at being mod ever again. You can continue to bloviate in peace for the rest of your days. Leperflesh: De-mod yourself.
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Mar 19, 2023 20:25
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I'm gonna step in and disagree here, I've seen Leperflesh actually "deal with the bullshit of modding" by stepping in and defusing some stuff from time to time without probes, and I haven't really seen anything I felt deserving of a probe not get one in the Tradgames forum. One borderline case got a bit longer leash than it probably would've gotten in some other forums and the poster apologized and explained they were being a bit of a doof and that was it. So naw, unless some particularly awful Leperflesh skeleton gets yanked out of the closet, I would like to keep them as a mod.
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Mar 19, 2023 20:48
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e. all of this was written before I saw Magnetic North's post above; I'll respond to that separately, after I get some lunch and do some necessary Sunday things. Arivia posted:hey i still hang out with winson regularly he is blameless, innocent, pure, and living his best life 100%. I RPed with Winson, I chatted with him from time to time, he was and I assume still is a Good Egg. Making the industry thread was a good idea and I am, hopefully we all are, joking about him taking "the blame." Kestral posted:This is a particularly thorny issue for TG since we have... At least two Discords? Maybe three or more by now? All of which hate each other? I don't envy anyone who has to do moderation in that environment. At least three, plus if I understand it correctly the old #partyhard channel on IRC is still alive. I think it's more accurate to say that many posters in TG also participate on discords where gaming happens. I have always been reluctant to call these discords "SA TG discords" because the implication is that they are an extension of SA, e.g., places SA can be responsible for. I haven't even felt comfortable really with people linking to them from SA because I don't know if they're safe places to be sending people to. My intention is not to throw shade, either: I do not know and that is just worrying to me, obviously as it turns out at least one place, where Podima and others were running games, was not safe which validates my worry. At the same time, obviously I've offended at least one or two posters by suggesting their discord might not be a good place, and that wasn't and isn't my intent really. I just have had to deal with like, people asking me directly or asking threads "do we have a TG discord" and I just don't have a great confidence in either allowing or disallowing linking to or discussing those places that I have not personally evaluated! Maybe this just needs to be a community decision. My view today is that there's obviously some risk to just blanket allowing anyone to link to any discord, imply in some way that it's The Discord for this thread/topic/TG, and no warnings or caveats: but at the same time, PbP is nearly dead, the majority of game playing seems to be in-person or via Discord and VTT tools, and it feels like we can't realistically blanket ban people offering invitations to those places, especially when recruiting for games on SA. So I don't know if the solution is just to be more explicit about warning people, or what. I don't personally want to go onto a bunch of discords and visit peoples VTTs, if I was even invited, and make judgements about them. But Antivehicular posted:Yeah, I definitely agree that the "offsite drama" rules are going to have to be heavily changed. I think that's been a bad thing for SA as a whole to hold onto when it's basically given people a license to be awful on Discord or whatever and be defended with "we don't take offsite drama here" rules. This is correct, simply banning discussion of what's been going on on any given offsite has obviously caused harm. I feel incredibly bad about that. People were being hurt while I was a newly-minted mod of SA, by actions by an IK I was nominally responsible for supervising, and did not feel like they could or should come to me or to any of the admins with these issues. I wrote the first draft of the no offsite drama rule. I asked admins about it and they encouraged me to add it to our forum rules, in response to a couple of comparatively minor incidents where a couple or three people yelling at each-other on discord came into a thread to continue their fight, and one very unfortunate case where someone asked SA mods to ban another poster for ripping them off on a transaction they conducted entirely offsite. Since then I have seen the admins deal with issues in other subforums of a similar nature. At times they have accepted discord chatlogs as supporting evidence for booting someone who was engaging in harassment campaigns against SA posters. So at the admin level, clearly "no offsite drama" has a limit and that limit seems to be when SA posters are being harmed. One key point that Jeffrey has emphasized is that it is trivial to falsify a chatlog, he said he's literally seen it, and so a chatlog by itself isn't necessarily enough to "prove" something happened; but I think in practice, they usually have a good idea of who is trustworthy and being honest and forthright. That's still ultimately a judgement call, not one I envy them having to make, and not one I would be excited about having to make. Nevertheless, perhaps some reformulation of this drama rule could emphasize that what we do not care to do is adjudicate petty arguments that took place offsite, he-said-she-said stuff about someone having wrong opinions about games. But when a goon is actively harming other goons offsite, it must be galling to see them merrily posting on SA with nobody here knowing better and even doing things like giving them buttons. We need people to feel like they can reach out to mods and/or admins in cases like this Podima thing. And airing things in public is also at least potentially open... it could go really badly, I've got big worries given some of the other hints of drama I've seen, but there's clearly trust issues between goons and moderation staff and if you don't trust that the admins will do something maybe you don't contact them either. I know at least three admins I trust a lot but I can't like, force that trust onto other people. I think that leads into this: Tekopo posted:In terms of what was said, I have mostly issues with the following: I'm glad you dug up the actual quotes because I was thinking I would do that anyway. I'll add that in addition to the things you mentioned, I believe Antivehicular also had a PM from Mayveena alluding to this? I may be remembering that incorrectly. Based on what had been said up to that point that I made that post, it sounded as though Mayveena had been booted or fled due to something nasty, and I was not happy at all about that. Especially given she told me previously that she was getting DMs on that discord about her independent moderation decisions. I was angry. I know you feel your discord has been unfairly maligned and I'm not on your discord so how could I know what happened? (If I am, please feel free to boot me, I don't even know which discord is "your discord" but I joined a bunch when the lowtax thing came out and I don't use any of them). After I publicly posted that question about the discord, you posted a defense and explanation of what had happened based on your own investigation. Thank you for doing that because it made things much more clear. As you said, the "game of chinese whispers" had been going on, the hint had sounded way worse than the situation you have described. All I felt I could do at the time was drop it because by then VideoGames had already volunteered to step in and mediate, explicitly asking people to contact them. I was convinced that any continued mod actions I took in that thread would just lead to more arguing - there was a total lack of trust and I don't think my continued involvement would have been healthy for any of us. I hoped that Podima joining the team (two days later on Aug 10th) would add another option for people, I let other mods deal with future reports from the boardgame thread, and even though I have lots of board games and love board games I feel like my presence in that community is no longer welcome so I'm staying out. Mayveena sent me a brief PM in response to my telling her we had decided to ask her to step down as an IK, she made it clear she was angry and her feelings were and are valid. She never agreed with how we had handled one poster in particular as mods and that was a source of her frustration, and that's fair. Probably her having made that clear up front we never should have IKed her, because she was placed in a position of having to see posts in the thread she moderated by someone she didn't think should still be there (not prada slut, but rather, jarofpiss - I don't really want to call out posters, I'm sick of that actually, but it's probably unavoidable if we are going to talk about this and I think some folks will otherwise be certain we're talking about prada slut.) And then after we told her that we'd decided to take away IK buttons, I asked her if she wanted to announce that herself or if she preferred we do it and she didn't respond quickly and we gave it more time because we knew she was upset and then - this is on me as well as Antivehicular and an admin - in the mod forum we were given the advice "just let it lie since nobody's yelling" and we 100% should not have done that. I wanted to be respectful to Mayveena and then we avoided conflict and that was disrespectful to the boardgame thread instead. I am sorry for that. I will make IK announcements immediately forevermore. That sucked. It's clearly still an open wound, and I am very sorry. I'm sorry that I brought up the discord at all at the time, but I wanted to defend Mayveena. I did not know which posters in the thread were on your discord but there had been at least a couple posters in the thread previously calling Mayveena out for her probation decisions and for all I knew they had done something bad via DMs on your offsite. I was angry because in addition to having some confusing and frustrating interactions with me and Anti and I think potato, and here was this hint that she had simultaneously been bullied on an offsite and what you heard from me in the thread was after I had to take a time out and not totally blow my loving top about it all over the thread. Magnetic North responded to VideoGames' request for PMs from anyone who wanted to talk, but nobody else did. August 8th was when that thread blew up, Podima became a mod on August 10th, and part of the reason we looked for a third mod was because it seemed like a good idea to give people more alternatives to talk to other than me and Anti and an admin. I told her at the time, and the thread, and I still 100% feel, that everyone on the mod team were grateful to her for being willing to volunteer and try it out. I know she did her best, in good faith. She was frustrated constantly, she told us repeatedly she felt like quitting, she took every decision extremely seriously, she gave herself a probation for a very minor misunderstanding, everything was way too big of a deal and that was not the vibe any mod wants for IKs anywhere on SA. We encouraged her to take her time and that there would be growing pains and a learning process but that did not work out. IKs, and for that matter mods and admins, need to feel that it's OK to quit or to be asked to step down because of a poor fit, an intractable disagreement on issues, a lack of time, excessive stress, whatever. Any individual thing with Mayveena we could have worked through, but it was a combination of obvious stress for her, a lack of agreement on an issue that was key to her, some very strange communications, and not wanting to subject her to any further issues coming from people she gamed and chatted with, that led us to mutually agree that she shouldn't be an IK for the boardgames thread. Despite everything else, the hosed up way we handled announcing it, the thorny issue that we didn't see eye to eye on, I stand by that basic decision that Mayveena needed to not be an IK there any more. It still makes me extremely uncomfortable to have this conversation about someone who isn't here to talk about it. I don't think we can avoid it though, people want to talk about it and this is obviously germane to the feedback thread. I know this is a wall of text, I've been working on it for like two hours now but I'm struggling to get all my thoughts on this organized. Sorry. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Mar 19, 2023 |
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Mar 19, 2023 20:57
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I can't speak to the rest of Magnetic North's post but Toshimo did exaggerate the mtg thread issue imo. There have been a few cases where it got kinda bad for a bit but it wasn't "unusuable" and it wasn't for very long. Some posters need to get over themselves with regards to Commander and proxy discussion but I think they've gotten the message at this point and if they shitstir again I expect leper will probe them.
Fajita Queen fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Mar 19, 2023 |
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Mar 19, 2023 20:57
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We have also added a new IK for the magic thread, and Framboise is a Commander player. A certain level of "I don't like commander" is always going to have to be OK because people get to have opinions, but active bullying of commander players isn't OK and I hope I have not actually let it slide. Posters reported that more than once and I personally issued probations for it. I really don't want to call out Toshimo here, but maybe he just didn't see the probations come in? It can take several hours before a mod sees a report, that's just how it works.
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Mar 19, 2023 21:06
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Yeah, if people are making GBS threads on other people for their preferred game format, please report it. I've been kind of hands-off in the Magic thread because I haven't played since about 1996 and have no context on the modern game, but I'd like to be more active about probing for that kind of hostility.
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Mar 19, 2023 21:23
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On the subject of talk vs. probe: I don't mod forums but I do officiate high school sports. General philosophy there is to be present and visible, and use your presence to stop small issues before they grow into big issues. If someone is calling a bunch of fouls, that's a sign they hosed up and didn't calm things down early. From where I've seen Leperflesh step into threads, it's been fine on a "let's simmer down level." I have not been present in the Board Games Thread for ages (based on my IRL group dissolving), so this appears that it may not carry onto the issues there. The suggestion that a mod should probate them all and let God sort 'em out sounds terrible. For Toshimo specifically, I will say I dipped into the commander thread briefly and dipped out pretty quickly based on your (I believe it was you) attitude against anyone who didn't have a tuned EDH deck and content directed at people who weren't yet at the level of an enfranchised EDH player. Absent other EDH players saying the regular MTG thread has issues with them, I'll suggest there may be other explanations for perceived hostility.
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Mar 19, 2023 21:29
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