Not sure where else to put this.

Maybe, but you have presented just as much evidence in support of your position as I have presented of mine. And mine has the benefit of not potentially harming people who might have something to say by silencing them.

 

that's fair, since implied evidence of "hey, for all we know gills is dead" isn't the same as actually saying that and reminding everyone that the ppl who got involved in that fucked up. but hey, silencing ppl is always a bad thing, so I definitely should have just started out by reopening that wound for the people who feel guilty about it

but I disagree that silencing some voices in that particular situation would have added more harm, bc the person in the middle of a ptsd episode wasn't likely to hear what they were saying, and all that person would have registered was "more ppl attacking me." and since the thread where this happened is still up, we can go look at the evidence for ourselves. does it actually look like more voices in that discussion helped?

edit: I'm sorry for bringing this up again, and I'm fairly certain the ppl who were involved in this learned from it. this isn't an attack on anyone who was in that discussion, this is an example of a problem that has a solution

 

Let me reduce this argument to simple terms.

"Everybody who disagrees with me IS A MURDERER!"

To the point of your ETA: You have no evidence that a guideline would prevent the harm you complain of. Further, it is nigh impossible to tell via a text based asynchronous communication medium whether there is a ptsd meltdown in place which would invoke your proposed "guideline".

 

I'm not even necessarily in favor of rules, but I am in favor of behavior conventions being formulated somewhere easily accessible. Maybe that is just because of the amount of time I sink into Staying On Top Of The Social Protocols and it annoys me when stuff we have talked about last july are apparently completely forgotten about by now. But I imagine not everyone feels like trudging through a couple hundred pages of fights and resultant social debugging to extract things the Old Guard has arrived to consensus about, especially when those conclusions were reached during complete derails in entirely unrelated threads.

 

Damn it. I'm getting dragged into thinking hard about internet forum governance issues again.

After doing this a lot over the years it has become clear to me that rules (or guidelines or whatever you want to call them) are not a restriction on the behavior of posters. People will always do fucked up shit on the internet. People will post offensive things. It is going to happen and rules cannot and will not prevent it.

Moderators and administrators on a forum have powers constrained only by the software. I don't know what powers seebs has granted to the mods he has recently made, but even if they are limited in some respects, they are broad and sweeping relative to the powers of posters. For example, the mods here probably have the power to edit and modify posts made by other people. Think about that for a little bit--a mod can completely rewrite your posts. That's the power they have.

What rules really do is constrain moderators. Mods are the people with power. And that constraint is kind of limited because it only comes into play after the fact.

Any faith in rules is a misplaced faith and will disappoint you.

I used to spend a lot of time worrying about this and thinking about this. I wrote a lot of rules. I moderated a lot of forums. I have never been able to come up with a solution to this; it's like how Kropotkin never came up with a solution to the free-rider problem in anarchism.

 

Yeah I get that.
I don't want rules for any kidn of safety, I get that people are being shitheads.
I want at least a loose guideline for how we deal with some things because things are easier to deal with if there's a somewhat predictable nature to them. Makes communication easier, and that's what forums are, a communication medium.
Auf der anderen Seite kann ich halt auch einfach ab jetzt alle Beiträge zu dem Thema auf Deutsch schreiben, weil wir ja keine Kommunikations-Richtlinien brauchen :P

 

The idea isn't to make Rules but to list the social guidelines that already exist. And to do that we'd have to come to some general agreement on what they are instead of having conflicting vague ideas about them. Things like reviving an old thread instead of making a new one, what to do if you have a problem with something in a vent thread, not jumping into a TCHGB thread not involving you without permission ect.

The goal isn't to Solve All Problems with Rules but to clarify and make the current social conventions accessible to say, someone who signed up 5 minutes ago

 

I don't think that having Rules (in an overbroad sense of the word) would magically make disagreements not happen, or stop people from being shitheads, because I too have been on the internet. I just think that better a community sense of "what protocol to use in what situation" would be helpful. Nothing hard and fast with numbers or anything, just general "here is what we have agreed upon to be the best response to this situation."

Obviously this won't solve all fights. Nothing will solve all fights. I just want to minimize the fallout from them because the past two weeks have been Constant Drama.

 

I'm pretty sure we could be here all century on that one.

Its not so much what the guidelines should be so much as what they are now. When they inevitably change, the list gets updated

Yes this! The hope is that it'll minimize situations where some people are like "you shouldn't do this thing! how dare! " and others are going "i had no idea this was even a thing stop getting mad at me i didn't know!"

 

*thumbs up*

 

How about starting simpler? Like...

Put suicidal ideation , self harm, nsfw, and flashing gifs under spoilers (except in vent and abuse threads)
Also don't put any of the above in the status box
Keep rp in the rp subforum except for one post jokes

Little things like that that we've all gotten used to but somone new wouldn't know!

 

I believe there are several rough guidelines for how to conduct business over in TCHGB itself too, and I think they may even be written down somewhere.

 

I don't know, I'm a little conflict adverse gremlin, that's why I want people smarter than me to start discussing this without all efforts being derailed.

 

Don't jump into a thread without permission from all involved parties
Ask for a mediator if all parties agree to one.
Don't just jump in to say "seconded"

 

Yeah, those are the big thorny ones that'll take more discussion. But maybe we could start with the easy bits and work our way to the harder ones? And even if there isn't any consensus right away, a handy list of the little things might still be good