The Gaming Den

Ganbare Gincun wrote:Round up some additional moderators from outside the forum? People that have little interest in gaming and no connection to this community at all in order to encourage impartial rulings on user disputes?

Seriously? Who would do that free of charge?

Game On,
fbmf

fbmf wrote:

Ganbare Gincun wrote:Round up some additional moderators from outside the forum? People that have little interest in gaming and no connection to this community at all in order to encourage impartial rulings on user disputes?

Seriously? Who would do that free of charge?

Game On,
fbmf

I had some friends of mine that ran a small forum a few years ago, and that's basically what they did to keep the peace. They had a small circle of friends outside of their fandom that had some interest in the subject matter at hand (video games, anime), but they weren't anywhere nearly as fanatical as the regular posters, and they didn't get very emotionally or intellectually invested in the arguments that inevitably came up.

The alternative is to look at the existing member pool. The SD.net moderating crew, if I'm not mistaken, do it for free and were recruited from the existing forum populace.

Zinegata wrote:The alternative is to look at the existing member pool.

Not it!

Josh_Kablack wrote:

Zinegata wrote:The alternative is to look at the existing member pool.

Not it!

I'm just saying what worked in other forums. I'm not saying it'll work here

Josh_Kablack wrote:

Zinegata wrote:The alternative is to look at the existing member pool.

Not it!

Of course, we'd have to look for someone with moderator experience. ;P

I promise, if elected for this position, to immediately abuse my powers and go on a drunken banning spree.

Not just of people I don't like. I can't promise I won't ban myself.

Koumei wrote:I promise, if elected for this position, to immediately abuse my powers and go on a drunken banning spree.

Not just of people I don't like. I can't promise I won't ban myself.

Well I certainly want to vote for Koumei now.

Being a moderator sounds like a real pain in the dick. Pass.

I have yet to see a forum where moderators are elected. And that's frankly a very bad idea.

I would like to say that Koumei has a brilliant plan. I shall steal it once I am elected as moderator.

Koumei wrote:I promise, if elected for this position, to immediately abuse my powers and go on a drunken banning spree.

Not just of people I don't like. I can't promise I won't ban myself.

You know, I had the exact same idea...

-*waits for fbmf to shut the argument down*-

I'm pretty sure there is no chance of a vote, or even of someone being selected for moderator position.

yeah, selecting any current member would just be a bad idea...

For me, The Den was the place to go for political commentary by sane people. It will be sad to see politics banned forever.

fbmf wrote:I also work a full time job and am getting close to being a father, which I am told is another full time job.

Congrats. Yeah, if you want to do it well, it does take a lot of time. Rewarding time, but still: time. [/off topic]

Starmaker wrote:For me, The Den was the place to go for political commentary by sane people. It will be sad to see politics banned forever.

This.

I had thought debate, political or otherwise, to be the raison d'être of this board; that the Gaming Den was founded as a sanctuary for free speech -and so it seems that silencing those of us who enjoy a healthy argument, merely because it offends a few thinskinned individuals who can't bear the thought of someone holding differing viewpoints from their own, would be a tragic occurence indeed.

Having said that, I appreciate that we are having this argument at all (as opposed to being treated to a blanket ban).

There are actually a number of conversations right now that are basically in frozen stasis because of the ban.

The Wish Economy discussion can't really talk about the economy at all, because that's politics. All it has right now is a shallow discussion of nominally valuable things lying around on the ground in a couple of easily accessible planes and a narrow run down of some spell and creature power effects that can generate things with a gp value.

The Tiers an Levels discussion is basically frozen out of world building discussion, because that's all politics. There is still plenty to do with raw mechanics, but the discussion is going to have to be removed from the board once world building begins in earnest if the ban remains.

Discussion of aWoD is almost entirely politics, and only a few of the chapters can be addressed with new posts/errata so long as the ban is in place.

-Username17

Eh? I don't think the ban is meant to cover any of the things that Frank claims as being "banned".

For instance, that certainly hasn't stopped Frank from pointing out that you could use Wish and have the equivalent of the gold production of Alaska, or saying that such gold production is ultimately irrelevant.

I don't mind arguments that say "The ban should be lifted because it stifles gaming discussion". But quite frankly, no evidence exists to show this is the case. In fact, one of Frank's sample threads already has him introducing real world economics ("politics" in his terms), and nobody thought it violated the ban.

Despite the ban there was some ass-hatery in the IMHO this week. I did notice that it did die down after fbmf made his presence known. So banning political debate isn't sufficient to end bad behaviour, although a stronger moderator presence does make a difference.

I'd really like to see the political topics come back and stay, this is one of the freest boards on the web and I'd hate to lose that just because some people don't know how to behave.

P.S. Congratulations fbmf!

Juton wrote:Despite the ban there was some ass-hatery in the IMHO this week.

Domestic asshattery. Not only that, there are three locked topics in MSIMPS that were started waaaaay after the ban was introduced.

Posters that aren't that active huh?

For the hell of it, if I pointed out I barely posted here anymore how many people would tell me to suck a barrel of cocks? 5? 10? Over 9,000?

Disclaimer: I'm not actually volunteering.

All I can gather from the various arguments is that women are centaurs.

Personally I'm in favour of lifting the ban and simply creating a few "free for all" threads in MPSIMS that are unmoderated save for posts/chains of posts that actually disrupt the workings of the forums.

Of course, in order to stop this from spilling into the rest of the forums you'd want to have some sort of forced anonymity thing for those threads...

Maybe a forum where the username field is invisible to people who aren't moderators, for all of those heated discussions?

Vnonymous wrote:All I can gather from the various arguments is that women are centaurs.

Wha?