How do YOU see the board?

[Bounty]

Pure Star Trek - What would happen if a forum became so inactive that any thread reply would be called necromancy in any other forum? I think PST almost got to that point once, and I secretly hoped it would get to that point because I wanted to know if Ghost Rider would get pissy at someone for replying to a thread that was over two weeks old and still in the top ten threads listed.

There have been times when I have seriously wondered why PST was still open. It has a bit more purpose now that the new movie is upcoming, but other than that it's just one huge "lol starfleet is fuct lol voyager sux lol" dogpile. I tried lampooning that attitude a few times and gave up.

I think PST is seriously the worst forum here. (Maybe SWvST is better? I don't know, I don't visit there - that place just seems totally obsolete any more.) It's seems like the same shit on different days every day, and it gets really old when it seems like half the participants seriously hate the material.

As much as I'm not a fan of it, I think we would get a lot more utility out of a 40K subforum than we do out of PST these days. Maybe PST should be closed, shuffled to an "archive" section, and all future Star Trek discussion can be lumped in with the rest of OSF.

I would love for a mod to come in and slam down on the endless me-too whining in PST. Sonnenberg can't post a single review without it spiralling into three pages of people saying Voyager sucks over and over and over again. Same for JME2's book review threads, which are great threads for about two posts before someone rehashes all the old talking points of how much Trek sucks. It's extra annoying that many the people who do this have obviously rarely even watched the show.

I had high hopes for the rule addenda in PSW and PST about beating dead horses, but if it's not in any way enforced...

There's a bit of life in PST again with the new movie, but even in those threads there are people who come in with little more than vapid snipes. I've written up a post about INS but I'm afraid to post it since I know, know, it'll just end up being a four-page circle-jerk about how corrupt and evil the Federation is.

And that behaviour has become endemic on the board as a whole. As long as you agree with the majority opinion you can me-too and make snide comments all you want. Being constructive isn't a requirement any more, as long as you know the talking point du jour by rote and avoid the two or three mods who take their jobs seriously you can just spout off a couple of expletives and get a pat on the back for it. Participating in a thread on this board has become less about debating and more about being the first and loudest to latch onto a position.

The chest-beating about how this is a board where you can hold any opinion and be free to express it has been a joke for months. No-one stops to consider the other side's position any more, everyone just bunkers down and starts throwing insults around. I have been watching N&P for weeks during the election hoping for anyone to stop and ask themselves and the board at large why Republicans would still vote for McCain, instead of just going with the stock answer that they're scared retards; but the intellectual curiosity just isn't there. We are right, they are wrong, and that is all that matters. It seems like people have started to think that even considering the opposition's viewpoint will give them intellectual cooties.

So instead of approaching someone who fundamentally disagrees with you as a human being, asking them why they think the way they do and running the risk of realizing they may have a point, everyone just shuts out ideas they find unpalatable. It's frankly repugnant.

...yeah, what was the original question? I kinda went on a tangent there.

[K. A. Pital]

...it'll just end up being a four-page circle-jerk about how corrupt and evil the Federation is

Corrupt and evil? Since when did the Federation become evil anyways? I missed some board meme?

[The Romulan Republic]

...it'll just end up being a four-page circle-jerk about how corrupt and evil the Federation is

Corrupt and evil? Since when did the Federation become evil anyways? I missed some board meme?

Didn't you know? Its a brainwashing communist conformist society that sucks away all culture and vitality and turns its men impotent.

Which is why I'm a Romulan fan, shady bastards though they are.

[Metatwaddle]

The chest-beating about how this is a board where you can hold any opinion and be free to express it has been a joke for months. No-one stops to consider the other side's position any more, everyone just bunkers down and starts throwing insults around. I have been watching N&P for weeks during the election hoping for anyone to stop and ask themselves and the board at large why Republicans would still vote for McCain, instead of just going with the stock answer that they're scared retards; but the intellectual curiosity just isn't there. We are right, they are wrong, and that is all that matters. It seems like people have started to think that even considering the opposition's viewpoint will give them intellectual cooties.

I'm with you there, and I hope I haven't been one of the people in the N&P threads who is part of the problem. But I had never thought of SDN as a place where you can hold any opinion and be free to express it - in fact, part of what attracted me to the board was that if you express some dumbassed opinion, you will get flamed to a crisp instead of people going, "I respect your right to have an opinion. Here's MY opinion." as if it was just people talking in a vacuum.

What SDN should be, and what I sort of feel it used to be, is a place where you are free to argue any position if you do it honestly and somewhat competently. Sometimes your ability to argue a point will be limited by the reasonableness of your position; you can be a good debater, but if your opponent is also a good debater and has a more defensible position, he will win. It's sort of the platonic ideal of debating: the marketplace of ideas, in a way. At its best, I feel that SDN used to be like that. Now it's taken for granted that a few very smart people on the board have figured out what those defensible positions are and tested them by fire, so we can get a little bit complacent.

[K. A. Pital]

Its a brainwashing communist conformist society that sucks away all culture and vitality and turns its men impotent.

I know that it's communist (that is clear from the show and was discussed numerous times), but "evil"? Hahhaha. The Federation is a just society with a powerful economy and eradication of most social ills like poverty, crime, etc. - a decent command economy that actually runs. And people's only beef with it is "communism" and "complacency"? Yeah.

I think I rarely ventured into PST, I didn't notice "Federation is evil" claims. Would be a kick to debate someone about it.

[The Romulan Republic]

Its a brainwashing communist conformist society that sucks away all culture and vitality and turns its men impotent.

I know that it's communist (that is clear from the show and was discussed numerous times), but "evil"? Hahhaha. The Federation is a just society with a powerful economy and eradication of most social ills like poverty, crime, etc. - a decent command economy that actually runs. And people's only beef with it is "communism" and "complacency"? Yeah.

I think I rarely ventured into PST, I didn't notice "Federation is evil" claims. Would be a kick to debate someone about it.

Well, they're still looking for a Coliseum debate.

In all seriousness, I'd actually like to see a sci-fi debate again. I seem to keep seeing this attitude that the days of sci-fi debates are over, and let's face it, those forums are almost deserted. But it seems to me that for SDN to lose sci-fi debates would be like losing a part of one's identity. So I figure we just need to try harder to find things to debate.

[Bounty]

you will get flamed to a crisp instead of people going, "I respect your right to have an opinion. Here's MY opinion." as if it was just people talking in a vacuum.

That's the other extreme, and not one I like either. I'm not saying every opinion should be respected, but the people who hold them should be. If someone comes up to me and says "I don't think gays should marry", I'll fundamentally disagree with him, but I'll still start from the assumption that they have a reason to hold that position, and I'll try to ask them about it and engage them in a conversation, rather than recoil in horror and start shrieking about how they are bigoted nazis. For all I know this person was raised in an environment where he was led to believe from childhood that homosexuality hurts those who practise it (random example), and while that position itself cannot be rationally defended, it is an important piece of information needed to understand why people react the way they do. That's the lack of intellectual curiosity: instead of trying to understand how the other side thinks, why they are wrong, people here seem to content to know they themselves are right. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I like to walk away from a discussion knowing I've reached a new insight, not gloating that I shouted down the other guy.

It's one thing to flame people who are unrepentantly obstinate or try to preach hate; having that liberty is what made the board stand out. But I hate to see that go at the expense of learning something new.

[fgalkin]

Page 3 move. No auto-lock for this one!

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[DaveJB]

That's the other extreme, and not one I like either. I'm not saying every opinion should be respected, but the people who hold them should be. If someone comes up to me and says "I don't think gays should marry", I'll fundamentally disagree with him, but I'll still start from the assumption that they have a reason to hold that position, and I'll try to ask them about it and engage them in a conversation, rather than recoil in horror and start shrieking about how they are bigoted nazis. For all I know this person was raised in an environment where he was led to believe from childhood that homosexuality hurts those who practise it (random example), and while that position itself cannot be rationally defended, it is an important piece of information needed to understand why people react the way they do. That's the lack of intellectual curiosity: instead of trying to understand how the other side thinks, why they are wrong, people here seem to content to know they themselves are right. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I like to walk away from a discussion knowing I've reached a new insight, not gloating that I shouted down the other guy.

It's one thing to flame people who are unrepentantly obstinate or try to preach hate; having that liberty is what made the board stand out. But I hate to see that go at the expense of learning something new.

Adding to this, I've noted a rather unpleasant amount of flaming aimed towards people who happen to like a certain film/TV episode/game that other people don't. I can understand flaming people who use bullshit arguments to try and claim whatever they like is better (like arguing Voyage of the Damned was the most watched NuWho episode and therefore the best) since there's actually some degree of (il)logic to be analysed there. But flaming people because you hate something they like? When exactly did flaming the shit out of someone for their subjective opinions on a TV episode or game become cool?

[Coyote]

One thing Mike does, which I think is a good idea, is to have two seperate accounts for himself as a participant, and another account for himself as the cold, unfeeling punishment-wielding dealer of destruction. Darth Wong and Admiral Kanos are, in a sense, two seperate personas, and Mike explained once that it was a way of keeping himself in check. As Darth Wong, he can't just off-handedly ban or delate or trash someone in a fit of momentary anger, he has to log out and then log back in with a different account to carry out punishment. It adds steps to the process so that he has to think about what he's doing.

It might be a good policy that all mods have that requirement, so that the quick-to-anger cannot just use their power to exact revenge. I think the uber-high mods have alternate "power accounts", but does everyone else? Would it be a worthwhile idea?

[NoXion]

Generalities:

1) The phrase "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt" is one I find very appropriate for SD.net. In other words, I would rather have no reputation at all, to be an unknown quantity, than to be considered an idiot. No doubt if the regular posters of this board were somewhat milder in their attitude towards correcting and refuting wrong-headedness, percieved or otherwise, I would have posted more often since joining.

2) Redundancy - I find that more regular posters say things which I agree with, and with much better eloquence. Therefore, I feel that to add my £0.02 would simply look like sycophantic +1 yes-manning. Also, regular posters on this forum are more often than not more highly knowledgable about various topics than I am, which is another way of making any potential posting by me redundant.

3) Recently though, I have been wondering whether I should make the effort to post more often, and have made some posting to that effect.

Specifics:

SWvsST - Hardly visit the place, since it's pretty much a dead topic.

PSW - Occasionally visit. The last time I visted with any regularity was during the Karen Traviss/3 million clones affair.

PST - Hardly visit the place. The latest Star Trek movie holds hardly any interest for me.

OSF - Out of the Sci-Fi/Fantasy boards this is the one I visit the most, since there is still the odd interesting topic there now and again.

FAN - Rarely, if ever visit this place. Not really a Fantasy fan outside Terry Pratchett's works and have only a grain of interest in superhero/comic book stuff.

SLAM - I regularly visit this forum, but the rate of discussion is painfully slow.

OT - Since stuff that would otherwise have got posted in N&P until recently has now started to be posted here, I visit this forum more often than previously.

N&P - Another regular stop-off point for me, since I like to use this forum to catch up on what's going on in the world. It's also fun to spectate on the verbal sparring matches that seem to frequently take place here. I do find the Peak Oil pessimism depressing and futile, but this seems to have dropped off recently.

G&C - Hardly ever visit this place, as I have a shitty computer and can't play online, and therefore can't really appreciate the content.

ARSE - Being chronically single and having no particularly strong desire to change the situation, this forum holds no interest for me.

HOS - When things get really bad elsewhere, I usually follow it here. I also use the Venting threads from time to time.

Parting Shots - I'm always fascinated to learn how the latest ex-member became such, so I check it out whenever I see that there are new posts.

The Coliseum - I followed the debate involving Voluntaryist, very interesting and potentially useful considering my anarcho-communist views. Aside from that, it's dead dead dead.

The Senate - Apart from the recent Proposition 8 & Duchess debacles, I've hardly paid any attention to this place.

Testing - This is the forum where I do most of my actual posting, since the slightly looser rules engender more confidence within me to post. I realise that might sound bad, but at least I'm not shitting all over the main forums so it'll be gone soon anyway.

I think this is probably the longest post I have ever made to SD.net.

It might be a good policy that all mods have that requirement, so that the quick-to-anger cannot just use their power to exact revenge. I think the uber-high mods have alternate "power accounts", but does everyone else? Would it be a worthwhile idea?

You could start it on a trial basis to see how it works out. I don't see any reason not to simply scrap the idea if it doesn't work out.

[Simplicius]

That's the other extreme, and not one I like either. I'm not saying every opinion should be respected, but the people who hold them should be. If someone comes up to me and says "I don't think gays should marry", I'll fundamentally disagree with him, but I'll still start from the assumption that they have a reason to hold that position, and I'll try to ask them about it and engage them in a conversation, rather than recoil in horror and start shrieking about how they are bigoted nazis. For all I know this person was raised in an environment where he was led to believe from childhood that homosexuality hurts those who practise it (random example), and while that position itself cannot be rationally defended, it is an important piece of information needed to understand why people react the way they do. That's the lack of intellectual curiosity: instead of trying to understand how the other side thinks, why they are wrong, people here seem to content to know they themselves are right. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I like to walk away from a discussion knowing I've reached a new insight, not gloating that I shouted down the other guy.

It's one thing to flame people who are unrepentantly obstinate or try to preach hate; having that liberty is what made the board stand out. But I hate to see that go at the expense of learning something new.

I wonder if part of the reason for that is the general assumption that our debates are theater. This is something I've read here before - that since you can't change the mind of a rabid fundie, or you can't change the mind of a rabid Trek supporter, the real target of the debate is the audience. I don't dispute that the audience is important, particularly in real-world public debates. But that attitude could easily lead to grandstanding and pointless flaming if a debater is trying to play to an audience, particularly on an issue that the board has already "decided."

I think it is instructive that the most civil and productive debates and discussions I can recall seeing here have involved the primary participants asking questions of each other.

[Phantasee]

Wait, Havok, Coffee, Stark, and the Duchess as Horsemen?

I'm taking a leave of absence for my own good, I think.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I've had the power to ban or delete threads elsewhere, but I never once thought of the need for a separate account. I'd always think very carefully about any moderatorial decision and I doubt another dedicated account would alter that.

I also agree about the flaming over subjective likes and so on. I don't mind constructive criticisms of certain things, it's just some feel the need to parrot stupid positions because that's the in thing. I clamp down on this when I can.

[Ubiquitous]

I feel the board has declined with the advent of The Senate. I preferred it when Darth Wong was fully in charge of the board. All good forums in my experience have solid, singular leadership. Then The Senate came along, which was sadly opened up to too many people which weakened the level of quality.

I want to see Wong take more control over the forum and be a strong leader again like in the first few years. Cut back on the amount of people with power in general. With Wong in charge again, or at least more visible in a leadership capacity, this place will recover. And ditch The Senate, or at least make it hidden. It is a cheap talking shop which comes up with the occasional good idea which it then fails to implement.

[Coyote]

I feel the board has declined with the advent of The Senate. I preferred it when Darth Wong was fully in charge of the board. All good forums in my experience have solid, singular leadership. Then The Senate came along, which was sadly opened up to too many people which weakened the level of quality.

I want to see Wong take more control over the forum and be a strong leader again like in the first few years. Cut back on the amount of people with power in general. With Wong in charge again, or at least more visible in a leadership capacity, this place will recover. And ditch The Senate, or at least make it hidden. It is a cheap talking shop which comes up with the occasional good idea which it then fails to implement.

The sad truth is, Wong would basically have to make this his full-time job. And he'd be grumpy, because instead of being a fun hobby to while away time or blow off steam, it'd become a frustrating chore. That is a Bad Path.

Unfortunately, the size of the board and the varying interests make some level of beuracracy necessary.

I suppose we could also fold "pure Star Trek" into "Other Sci-Fi", archive the ST vs SW portion, and essentially close down two low-traffic forums... or just combine them all into one "General Sci Fi" discussion, since even the "Pure Star Wars" board doesn't get much traffic except the the thread about the new Clone Wars series.

There may be a lot of areas where we can "consolidate and reorganize" if we looked.

Senators may actually take on the role of being responsible for, and arbiters of, certain forums, and representing them in the Senate... give us folks to be answerable to, like a real Senate.

[Bounty]

I think PST and PSW can easily be revived on the strength of the new canon material alone, provided both forums are properly and actively moderated.

But I don't think "dead weight" problems are the problem as much as they are a symptom. Shuffling around the deckchairs - be it by consolidating forums or, as suggested in the Senate, appointing even more mods - isn't going to do any good.

[RedImperator]

In defense of the Senate, the Senate has no power whatsoever to enforce any of its decisions. That falls to the staff. If we (the staff) don't carry out a decision, then it doesn't get done.

And now, in defense of the staff, and an argument for more moderators: recently, in the mod forum, Lagmonster posted a thread where all mods were supposed to post their availability and which forums they frequented. It got 11 replies, each from a unique mod. So that's 11, Lagmonster makes 12, and Mike, who didn't reply, makes 13.

So what's the problem? There are 14 public forums. Worse, there are only two active admins, and one of them is Mike. We are just plain understaffed right now, and the kind of hands-on, break-up-dogpiles, call-people-on-fallacies kind of moderating everybody seems to agree we need will require more than .93 mods per forum.

[Bounty]

14? What happened to the rest? Going by the "who moderates this forum" tag on the main page, I get 18 at least. And there's a few forums that wouldn't need much supervision.

I'm not saying more mods aren't needed (well, not any more) but I'm surprised it's a problem.

[RedImperator]

14? What happened to the rest? Going by the "who moderates this forum" tag on the main page, I get 18 at least. And there's a few forums that wouldn't need much supervision.

I'm not saying more mods aren't needed (well, not any more) but I'm surprised it's a problem.

Real life gets in the way. We have a mod staff that hasn't seen any changes since Aya was fired, and that was years ago. People get married, get jobs, find other interests, go back to school, have babies. The situation is actually even worse, because of the active mod staff, a disproportionate amount of the work is being done by a small handful of mods. This isn't complaining from me--some of the active mods only have control over lightly trafficked forums, and others are just busy with more important stuff than a webboard--but when I look at the moderator logs and see the same four or five names over and over, there's obviously a problem. I don't think you can even "ghost mod" a forum this size with that few people.

I made this suggestion in the Senate, but it seems to have gotten lost, so I'll repeat it: I think we need to 1) reshuffle mod assignments so the most active mods preside over the most active forums, 2) make everyone a supermod, 3) give every supermod one or two forums (possibly three, if they're all low traffic) for which he is primarily responsible for ensuring the quality of debate, not just enforcing the rules, 4) create new administrators to watch over the board as a whole and make decisions on things such as insta-ban rule violations, and 5) fill in the gaps as needed.

[DaveJB]

Strange as it might seem, having the heaviest posters as the moderators might actually be counter-productive. If they get really involved in one or two threads in any particular forum (not even the ones they're moderating), I'd have thought that'd leave a lot of threads to go potentially unchecked.

Having said that, they don't do a bad job at all, really. It's just that as we've seen over the last year or so, a lot does seem to be slipping through the cracks, which more moderators might help to plug up.

[rhoenix]

This is an idea I just thought of - if it's been suggested elsewhere, then my apologies. Another user here floated the idea of term limits for senators - which strikes me as a good idea. Perhaps a good idea for a term limit would be three to six months.

Regardless, have the Senators be the pool from which additional Governors (e.g. moderators) are chosen. The requirements may be stringent as necessary; e.g. "a potential candidate for Governor must have served two terms as Senator, and be a member in good standing, and must be voted for by both Senate and Governors," or the like.

The above would cycle new members in and out of the Senate to be voices for the plebes, as well as offering their own voices for a limited amount of time, which would over time help the plebes feel more involved with the day-to-day running of the site as a result. Moreover, it would create a potentially good pool of moderators to choose from, which would solve the issues Red explained above.

My thanks for your reading my thoughts.

[Ericxihn]

I've been a lurker for a couple years until I made an account, posted a couple times and then went right back to lurking. I like the general intellectual rigor. I can see why a lot of people would get intimidated, and I think that that and some other problems stems from this: the brainbug of substance over style.

I understand that calling somebody stupid for repeatedly making the same stupid arguments doesn't change the fact fact that the arguements were stupid or even one line of valid, logical argument at the end of 5 paragraphs of personal attacks is still one line of valid, logical argument, but some people on this board seem to take it way too far. It seems like there can't be the smallest of disagreements without everything turning into a flamefest and if anyone try's to object, then he gets shouted down by a chorus of "style over substance" along with the requisite flames for not understanding how logical debate works.

Of course makings things excessively civil makes it almost impossible to call someone out for bullshit, but people seem to think that adding things like "cumstain down-syndrome baby" to every lines adds something to the argument. Now, in a purely rational debate, flames would neither add nor take away from any argument (though there would be no need for flames in a purely rational debate), but people debating are not purely rational and the flames just lead to idiotic chestbeating until a mod forces whoever he or she disagrees with to concede(if he doesn't want to get banned, otherwise he keeps going). There is no useful discourse that comes from this. Not only will neither side actually change its mind, but neither will either party gain any insights into the other opinion.

I wonder if part of the reason for that is the general assumption that our debates are theater. This is something I've read here before - that since you can't change the mind of a rabid fundie, or you can't change the mind of a rabid Trek supporter, the real target of the debate is the audience. I don't dispute that the audience is important, particularly in real-world public debates. But that attitude could easily lead to grandstanding and pointless flaming if a debater is trying to play to an audience, particularly on an issue that the board has already "decided."

I think it is instructive that the most civil and productive debates and discussions I can recall seeing here have involved the primary participants asking questions of each other.

The problem is that the grandstanding and pointless flaming rarely endears anybody to the audience. Why else were people giving McCain so much shit for the negative ads? Yeah he didn't have many arguments to go with them and he lied when he had an argument, but he was still getting condemnation just for going negative.

Asking questions is also difficult here. Many times when somebody not well established asks a question in n&p, the thread seems to go "No you ignorant piece of shit, [answer to question]" as if going in guns blazing expecting another flamewar/debate, to which the questioner replies "Ok, sorry for asking " Granted this doesn't happen all the time, but I've seen it on many an occasion.

[RedImperator]

Asking questions is also difficult here. Many times when somebody not well established asks a question in n&p, the thread seems to go "No you ignorant piece of shit, [answer to question]" as if going in guns blazing expecting another flamewar/debate, to which the questioner replies "Ok, sorry for asking " Granted this doesn't happen all the time, but I've seen it on many an occasion.

This one really bothers me. I can see losing your patience in a debate, or seeing someone post an opinion which makes you really angry, and overreacting, but this always comes off as sheer bullying, especially since it's usually aimed at newbies.

[Temjin]

Since a few different but related subjects have come up in this thread and other place, I'll tackle the ones I want to comment on individually for convenience.

Intimidating Mods/Senators: Maybe it's a side effect of being here for so long, but I don't really find any of them intimidating. I wouldn't really fear debating any of them if a topic came up that I was knowledgeable about. None of them attempt to use their power in any thread their involved in (except for a few senators bringing up subjects they're involved in in the senate, which admittedly I'm not too crazy about), so what's to fear if I don't break any rules? Them calling me an idiot and a retard? So what? Wouldn't be the first time I've been called that.

The Senate: I have to admit, when it was first created, I wasn't happy with the idea, but now I see it as a useful tool for the administration. Darth Wong deserves to have a life, and this hobby shouldn't become a job for him. I'm not too happy with some of their special privileges though. The thread in there detailing possible editing changes is a good example in my mind. While normal users will be able to edit their posts for five or ten minutes after posting (yay!), senators will still able to edit their posts indefinitely. Why?

Excessive Flaming: Oh hell yeah, I think there's a problem with this. I never much noticed it in the past, since it didn't really effect. What little debates I've had here have been generally civil. But now I hear that people are actually scared to ask simple questions for fear of getting flamed to a crisp (and actually having it happen!)? That's a big problem, and it's one I fear that's going to be hard to solve. It's an ingrained part of board culture, no matter how mistaken the belief is. And old habits are so easy to fall back into, especially when apparently some of the worst offenders are those at the top.