Stifled Voices, Disillusioned Posters and the Death of a Community

Discussion in 'Feedback' started by ly_yng, Dec 22, 2008.

  1. cpawfan

    cpawfan Monsters do exist

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    I didn't come here to bitch at sloth.

    I came here for a brief time because someone told me about this thread and after reading it, saw many, many half truths. I know there are a lot of people here that don't like me, including some that have recently posted in this thread, but it sickens me to see you fed lies and half truths. Unfortunately, some people can't get past their own version of events (especially when they spend more time talking at people instead of listening to them) and believe that only they have the truth.
     
  2. ZAE

    ZAE Active Member

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    Don't talk if you don't know what happened. Pegs asked to have his account deleted on BBF, he was only banned up until December, but when that hacker thing happened he asked truebluefan to delete it and he did.
     
  3. ly_yng

    ly_yng Active Member

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    Denny and Mike, I think what has a lot of people frustrated is that there seems to be no indication from the administrative staff of the site that they handled anything poorly over this whole ordeal.

    I think we can all agree that posters like KC and pegs made some mistakes in the past, and possibly even in the present. Nets mods like GMJ and War Poet could have put in more effort to understand what the rules were, and could have worked harder at building a strong Nets forum, and they didn't. High-level staff like cpaw and ghoti could have put in more effort into finding a solution for dealing with staff frustration, but instead decided to leave or go dormant when the frustration boiled up to them. I don't think anyone denies that these posters COULD have done more, and perhaps should have.

    But I think the admins of the site really need to step up and take responsibility for putting all of these posters in difficult situations. Yes, the posters, when faced with hard decisions, may not have chosen what's best for S2, but I really don't think we've seen the administrative staff admit that those decisions were a LOT harder than they probably had to be. There were failures of people management that started at the very top, and it made it very easy for a lot of these posters to choose the easy path out, the one that basically said, "fuck S2, it's not worth it anymore."

    Is it on those posters for making those decisions. Absolutely. But you just had about 70 people more-or-less defect from your site to post at a rival forum. For a failure of that magnitude, the buck needs to stop with the people ultimately in charge, the admins. You guys need to figure out what it is that is so toxic about the management of the site, that made it so easy for so many people to choose the easy way out, rather than sucking it up and doing what was best for the site.

    1 or 2 defections can be explained by a couple of rogue personalities. Something on this level is clearly more systematic.
     
  4. Dumpy

    Dumpy Yi-ha!!

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    Let's take MNFL, for example. You have a kid who is responsible, well-liked, and who worked his way into becoming a moderator or the Nets forum, and quite likely the hardest-working moderator. He misses his friends, and tries everything he can to allow them to return to the site. There's nothing unexpected about that. It's admirable that he stuck for his friends--who were, I should add, some of the key posters of the Nets forum (I believe that GMJ and Pegs made 25,000 posts between the two of them; without checking, I don't know where Kid Chocolate stands, but he couldn't have been far behind), and some of the key reasons why the nets forum had grown to the size that it had. KC and Pegs, in fact, decide to return periodically, but it is clear that they are not interested in being as active as in the past. Then something happens, and all four of them get banned. Usually, when someone gets banned, they know they deserved it--they know what they did that was wrong. But then why does MNFL keep asking why he was banned, and keep trying to get unbanned? As I understand it, he has contacted the admins on multiple occassions in an effort to get to the bottom of it, and to get unbanned. It his actions were so heinous, why is he asking for an explanation? Why does he want to return so badly, if he did something intentional to get thrown out of the stadium? I think you need to follow the money on this one. Did someone exceed their authority, or ignore rational standards, in the way MNFL was treated? Was he treated fairly, and consistent with other posters? If this was my site, this is where I'd start my investigation.

    AND WHY THE HELL DOES THAT ORAL SEX THREAD STILL HAVE A TAG OF "CHARLES BARKLEY'S PENIS?" Mike, I know that you couldn't focus on this site for some time. Were you aware of the drama that was created when a different poster tagged a tread on Barkey's Colonoscopy "Charles Barkley's ass?" All of this just screams out that there are different sets of rules, and different standards, that are being applied to different groups of posters here. How can you question what the obvious resulting reaction would be?
     
  5. MikeDC

    MikeDC Member

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    And you've covered yourself in glory.

    Actually I think I've got a pretty good handle on the complaints. Your statement here, I think, is pretty on the money. You think improvement would be getting your pound of flesh from the people who wronged you. That's certainly the gist of your words above, no?

    But what would that improve, however sincere? You'd still be taking your ball and going home along with the folks that got banned. In one of your last posts, you said those guys wanted drama, and were going to use our past mistakes and current issues as cause for creating it. That was quite accurate on your part. You also said we needed to not give them the drama they were looking for. And then you contributed immensely to it.

    I know a couple of the other guys said things to you I wouldn't have, but I think you're pretty far off base. The admins here gave you a huge amount of credit for what you did (even in this thread, despite what you're doing now). As a whole, we put a huge amount of trust and faith in you, and everyone has acknowledged this site wouldn't have gotten to where it is without you.

    The flip side is that you become very quickly disgusted at people you consider friends and who helped you at a dark time in your life. Perhaps as friends that had gone the extra mile for you, as you said, you could have returned the favor and extended them a little bit of leeway. Friends get mad, say things they don't mean or regret. Nothing meaningful was done to you. You weren't kicked out of the staff forums. You weren't silenced. You weren't de-admined or punished in any way. I'm not saying that you were wrong to be upset, but you basically got mad and left when you had every opportunity to speak your mind and argue for your position on things. You had every opportunity to speak up and argue your position. And you know perfectly well I encouraged you to do that at the time all this shit was going down, so it's not like you weren't getting any support.
     
  6. MikeDC

    MikeDC Member

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    I'm sorry to the rest of you for not responding, but I'm not going to have access for the rest of the day.

    Yes and no. The decisions the admins had to make weren't a lot harder than they had to be. They were extremely difficult decisions with no apparent right answers. The crux of this issue, as cpaw himself once put it, is that we made mistakes in how we dealt with immature BS and OT stuff in the past. So when the Blazers board showed up, it was an opportunity for people with an axe to grind to grind away on that.

    Because, as Dumpy says, look at particular posts and try to tell which one is wrong and which one is ok? It's impossible. A completely impossible situation.

    And what's worse, it's a completely untenable one that the admins of the site had to deal with. How do we put the kibosh on that kind of stuff while not stifling whole communities? The truth of the matter is, that's not a problem we could solve, and yes, that is an extreme failure on our part.

    But I say yes and no because I don't know how we could have solved the problem. The only way, I can see, is that if the staff and communities worked together in, again, "cooperative spirit". And again, I think the admins tried to find solutions.

    Well, it remains to be seen, how many people leave, the Nets forum still seems to be getting traffic. But yeah, it sucks. I think it's systematic because it's 1 or 2 key "defections" in the leadership of the site. Folks are going to side with their friends and community in those circumstances. Is the relationship between the admins and those guys toxic and is that partly the responsibility of the current admins here. But I think the bigger thing is just that people who take major roles in forums tend to be proud, take disagreement badly, and want to have their own way. The admins don't want to admit they're wrong? No one does. And at the end of the day, to get by people need to move past it and work for the common good. That cooperative spirit again. And I really and truly think the current folks here tried.
     
  7. Colonel Ronan

    Colonel Ronan Continue...?

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    From what I've been reading, I've come to this conclusion:

    The admins on this site are good at replying to long rants by using big words, and twisting up the argument. You can never seem to get a straight answer without another question being asked, or some unnecessary long words being thrown at you. I guess that's their way of looking in control.
     
  8. BasX

    BasX I Win

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    And i did all that work... :(
     
  9. Really Lost One

    Really Lost One Suspended

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    Pretty much my thoughts. :cheers:
     
  10. Ed O

    Ed O Administrator Staff Member Administrator

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    You just need to be more of a sesquipedalianist. :)

    I actually think their replies make perfect sense, even if I don't agree with them 100%. I don't think that they should have to dumb down their responses to what are multi-layered and complicated issues... especially not to answer "rants" (as you call them).

    Ed O.
     
  11. Hudge

    Hudge Active Member

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    Are you saying there's something wrong with coming to a site after you've been banned from another. I did that, although, the Mods there were trigger happy.
     
  12. Colonel Ronan

    Colonel Ronan Continue...?

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    They make sense, but they never fully answer the questions the previous poster asked.
     
  13. cpawfan

    cpawfan Monsters do exist

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    If you had a good handle on them, I never would have replied in this thread

    Nope. Once again in the this thread you have failed to comprehend basic statements. I believe improvement would come from managing the site properly. You guys are attempting run the triangle offense with only 3 people that know how to dribble a basketball and no one that can shoot. Yet the time isn't spent on teaching the basic skills. The constantly changing uniforms looks nice though.

    I didn't contribute to any drama. I left the site to avoid it. If you still believe I orchestrated things behind the scenes, you aren't the man I thought you were.

    As far as what would it improve, one can't run a marathon without learning to walk first.


    The only thing I'm doing now is clearing up some misconceptions. You can call in putting a huge amount of trust and faith in me. I'll call it what it was, nobody else doing anything.

    I took a break for two months before I finally decided that I wasn't coming back. As far as you attempting to play the friend card, we both know how many friends attempted to contact me during that period, especially when I received a moronic threat of legal action.

    Well there was zero reason to do any of those. You are attempting to color this as something punitive when we both know it was about somebody else's ego.

    I left after two months of consideration about the future of this place. I took a hiatus when all I was doing was arguing about how to treat people fairly. There is no way to say that I didn't speak my mind about what was going on. One can only slam their head into a wall so many times before they decide the pain is too much.
     
  14. Dumpy

    Dumpy Yi-ha!!

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    I was responding to what I perceived to be a sarcastic comment by Ed O. about the types of people that get banned from sites. There is no fundamental difference between the Nets posters that were banned here and the Blazers posters that were banned on another site.
     
  15. Really Lost One

    Really Lost One Suspended

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  16. NJNetz

    NJNetz BBW Banned

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    Total instigator.
     
  17. Really Lost One

    Really Lost One Suspended

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    :lol:

    Nobody has responded to cpaw's post yet.
     
  18. MikeDC

    MikeDC Member

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    Maybe I wasn't clear above, but I'm not questioning what the obvious reaction would be. Like I said above, it was going to be a problem to loosen up (which has been our overriding goal from day one) after we cracked down on KC.

    You're right... no matter how that were done, it looks hypocritical, especially if you were/are a friend of KC.

    So why the different treatment? Again, we come back to intent, in my opinion. I didn't have much comment when KC first started with his barrage of obscene/stupid tagging. I think pretty much everyone was on board with putting a stop to it. But when the Blazers guys came along and posted a variety of obscene/stupid tags in the course of their first few weeks, of course it provided fodder for KC's partisans to act up and say "look, these guys are doing the same shit, and if you don't do something about it, we're going back to the same shit!"

    But why did we want to put a stop to KC in the first place? I don't think it's because anyone really strongly objected to the occasional obscene tag. It's because of the perception he was just trying to be destructive and disagreeable. As cpaw said at the time, he was being an "asshat". The Blazers guys, on the other hand, were just doing their thing. But seeing them just do their thing made guys who liked KC mad, because it looked similar. I understand that, I really do. But I don't think it actually was the same thing, because in the case of KC, and of the other guys who acted out later, they were intentionally acting out to highlight the hypocrisy they saw. I see how they saw hypocrisy, but I don't, because I'm looking at it in the context of what these various folks were trying to do.

    To me, it's exactly the same as telling the difference between a spammer and a guy who should be allowed to post a link to his own site here. You, for example, or sloth, both have affiliations with other sites, but you make honest efforts to post here. Perfectly ok. A guy who shows up and just links back to his site with every post, even if it's a thinly veiled attempt at conversation, is pretty obviously a spammer though, and should be given the boot.

    Not going to either. There's nothing constructive that's going to be accomplished with that. He's going his way, we're going ours. He's a grown man and entitled to his opinions and view of events and I'm not going to sit here and attack him. Suffice to say we disagree, which probably goes without saying.
     
  19. Ed O

    Ed O Administrator Staff Member Administrator

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    Eek. I didn't mean to post this. Got confused.

    *blush*
     
  20. Colonel Ronan

    Colonel Ronan Continue...?

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    Burn, castrate, drown, beat, poison, rape, stab, hang, decapitate, strangle, kick, ban, de-mod, and shoot him!

    I volunteer to do the rape part...
     

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