Communities and caustic things

[Azhukar]

Also he said fuck off not fuck you. Big difference!

Misdemeanor Offenses:

"4. Being inconsiderate of another members opinions or feelings is discouraged. Extreme cases will be treated as flames."

I do believe saying either "fuck off" or "fuck you" and afterwards stating "this thread is not for you" is being inconsiderate and being quite extreme.

[Hobo Joe]

Ban reasons are good. Any and all disputes over a ban should be done via PM and if they are posted publicly should be warned/banned/probated etc. Even warnings should be public.

For example a place like SA makes ban/probation reasons abundantly obvious, but drama over any of it is very explicitly against the rules. Vague/hidden moderation solves nothing and just causes confusion and annoyance.

[Karl]

See? Now everyone got a reason why spring-community is so unfavored... Everyone is raging against each other... Just looking for themselves, in a hope to become the next alpha man and the big one who has to say. Like a big deathmath arena! Either you go in and seeing how the ship is sinking again because the pilot was blind again, or you stay out just like every citizen and enjoys the "wooooow" result of it,

one-man-grunts versus a microified spring team that rejects everything but itselfes, due to a big opinion difference that causes massive harassment collateral damage

go move... Nothing is stopping you but they respond.
And remember... Everything you say can be turned against you! So choose wisely of your endless stream of sentence... Maybe it likes you and you pick it like a flower arrangment...

[KaiserJ]

11. Discussion of specific projects' licensing status is not allowed under any circumstances other than in very good faith and a highly positive and productive manner, unless sanctioned by the license holder."

i initially interpreted this as pertaining to arguments about "you stole my unit and put it in your game" rather what you meant.

[KaiserJ]

right.

smoth, regret etc.

stop posting meta; stop causing shit. i like all of you as people and maybe that's made me take it easy on you. this of course becomes impossible when you directly argue with each-other.

moderation is lax : noted. i'll be sure to start throwing around bans next time the toys are thrown from the pram, as this seems the only remaining recourse.

no more image memes, no more insults, no more of this "im not naming names but x did y". one slip and you're gone; any of you. i can't be bothered babysitting anymore. you're adults, start acting like it.

[SwiftSpear]

I think there are several "rockstars" here.

Image macro spam posts?

Why is this an issue. Because you use the word "spam"? They're not spam. They're entertaining. Moderation would have to be the most absurdly anal retentive jackasses to do anything about 95% of the image macro posts.

Pushing own agendas into forum rules? (politics/religion ban)

The opposite is true here. I refused to restrict religion and politics for the longest time because I personally like talking about those things. The issue was it almost always results in a flame war, it almost always results in shit slinging, and very few of your average forum user is willing to actually discuss rationally on these issues without throwing out straw men and getting heated. We ultimately decided to restrict it because it wasn't sustainable for those reasons.

Abusing "stolen" TA projects/txt mods while infringing themselves?

This is the nature of this project. It was originally built literally off the back of TA, it started as a TA modification actually. We've moved away from that to a large degree, but there are dregs remaining. In the end, we had to decide to protect the work of the contributors of the project, while at the same time turning a blind eye, to some degree, to infringement against TA IP. This is actually the reason why we have rules against discussing the licences of other people's mod/game projects. Because it was retarded how often people were saying shit like "you're mad at X for stealing the Y you made, but you stole TA scripts!" This argument is officially looked at as bullshit by spring moderation standards. We protect our content creators first, and third party content second.

Marking others as trolls whenever you disagree with them?

We don't have rules against "being a troll" it's too vague. Nor do we have rules against calling people trolls, as it's not a real insult. smoth calls almost everyone trolls.

Logical fallacies all around disregarding argumentative policy?

I'm not sure of the instance you're referencing, so I can't comment on this

Moderator telling user to "fuck off" because of opinion conflict?

Once again, I'm not sure of the instance you're referencing. I'd hope people would report moderator actions that are in question. The worst I've ever seen is I've had to ask a moderator to no longer moderate a specific user since they were too emotionally invested in the issue, but I've never seen significant moderator misdoings otherwise. This place is just generally not quite that dramatic.

[edit] I warned Bruce for the case you were referencing actually. I agree, that was a misdemeanor offense. It wasn't misuse of moderator powers however, Bruce did not modify/delete/edit anything Hoi had said. He was simply speaking from frustration at what he perceived as new agey bullshit.

Moderating while heavily invested in a topic?

I've yet to see a good example of this. At the end of the day it's somewhat inescapable. We don't have multiple active moderators who spend significant time on every active subforum. On a certain level, if a moderator wasn't interested in a topic, they wouldn't have read it, and there would be no moderation in that topic what so ever. By the nature of the structure of forum discussion, moderators are going to be invested on some level in every topic they moderate. That's one of the things that makes the job difficult.

Attempted censorship of TA projects from subforum listing?

This hasn't happened. Subforum additions/removals was simply neglected for a long time because Neddie left, and I wasn't back yet still. If no admin is there to add/change forum or user account privileges, new forums don't get added, and users don't get updated
I'm back now, and I've added a new admin to the roster, hopefully this isn't likely to be as much an issue in the future.

Hostility towards newcomers having game ideas?

My first post was a game idea. The difficulty here though, is everyone has an idea for something to add, where as very few people think through the work involved. Ideally we'd do more to gently educate people who does what on the project, and what is being worked on. It gets taxing because realistically, we've already thought of almost everything... most "game ideas" aren't new, they're unfeasible or too much work for too little benefit, but it can be hard to realize that from the newcomer's perspective. I hope people can refrain from being too hostile. I certainly expect the former from the moderation team.

"Community Lead" not actually interacting with community?

I took a year long sabbatical. Neddie was the active community lead at that point. My account title was changed to "classic" to represent my past contributions to the project, at the time no one was sure if/when I'd be back. When I returned Neddie was no longer active and there were no other admins working on a regular basis here. I've been somewhat thrust into this position because I care about this project and if I don't work at this stuff right now, there's no one else to do it, but honestly, I feel a bit out of the loop because I haven't been keeping up with the last years worth of events here. I'm trying to participate more actively and recover some of that lost time, but I'm not quite there yet. Sorry.

All tolerated. Community management is broken. Moderators are doing whatever they feel like doing. No cohesion or transparency.

Queue remarks of me being a big bad "troll".

To some degree, the head has been chopped off the beast for a while. I'm back here now, I'm trying to put things back in place. Things probably were pretty messy, I'm looking through for the rugs that dirt was swept under, and I've encountered a couple but not many. I agree, community management is NOT where it should be. We're gonna be working on that. Hopefully we can bring about more cohesion, more transparency. That being said, there's always going to be limits, my moderators will not work based on a strict procedure, and we're not going to moderate here by democracy. For some people I think this place will always feel a bit inconsistent. You guys aren't 5 year olds, You're not going to have clear boundaries here where you can skirt the limits of the law and look for loopholes. You're not young and dumb enough for that environment to be good for you.

When we get issues like "why did I get banned for a month for calling smoth a dick, but he got warned for calling me a dick?" well, smoth called you a dick because you've been harassing content creators and you made him frustrated by your lack of support and understanding for what they're doing in the project, and you called smoth a dick, because you're trying to make him angry, make him look bad as a person, because, well, maybe you're just a bit of a dick.

Moderation isn't going to be consistent here, why people are behaving the way they are behaving, the intent people have for their actions, will always be one of the primary delimiters for what responsive actions moderators take here. That really sucks for trolls and assholes, because they don't get as many second chances, where as people who obviously care about the project and invest effort and time into it more so do. But sometimes moderators read a situation wrong as well, and sometimes people who aren't really that bad get the shit end because fates conspired against them. In the end, that's a risk I'm willing to take, and I do my best, and I have my team do their best to ensure that happens as infrequently as possible.