You know, we actually had a moderator once who found a way to handle that type of "witty banter." His name was kero, and if my recollection is correct he used that strategy to great effect in ending stankthebadspammer's attempts at derailing so many threads. It worked quite well, so maybe you guys should take note.

Or at least those of you who don't hate kero based off brucez tribalism.

Let's have mat open a brand new sub forum with nothing in it where Chex and that other guy can start his entirely new forum. Then let's have well named moderate this forum under the rules he proposed in post 21

@WN I agree. That bit was explanatory.

But when there is big change there has to be some limit on how far we look backwards. It's quite possible that I should have gone for a far more drastic change with the past but I'm generally more into a reasonable compromise.

I have no problem with us disagreeing a fair bit - the fact we did was no secret. I expect we will find a reasonable way to move fowards and although I recognise we might fail, I don't think we should let the fear of failing bother us too much.

You still haven't explained why a big change was necessary, other than you felt like it

It seems to me a forum should cater to its guests. A huge majority of voters have voted to return to politics unchained. The correct course of action seems obvious to me.

Yes, but miraculously you're not even as big a troll as chez, who has been doing this song and dance for almost three years (in September!)

The vast majority of people on this forum thought he was a clown. I wasn't around when he was a mod, but it's clear to me why he was knocked off his high horse.

Right here I'm (continuing) to call BS.

There are two garbage-in-garbage-out assumptions here: (1) That name-calling is the 800-lb elephant of derails, and (2) that there is a hard dichotomy between chats that include name-calling -vs- chats that are typically characterized as "productive".

These are just flat-out false.

As I've pointed out many times, mindless semantical derails regarding the r-word dwarf by orders of magnitude all other derails here in Los Dos Politards. Why are we wasting all this time worrying about a relative derail 'mouse' (name-calling), and completely ignoring the true 800-lb gorilla in the room (mindless squabbling over the r-word).

Two, this whole vendetta against name-calling not only doesn't have any "kind of studies" backing it up... it can't even be rationalized anecdotally. Let's say we took the top 25 threads by posts prior to Nuevo Baja, and did a quick and dirty sort into "productive", or "derailed", and for those deemed "derailed", what was the major in-thread cause. Let's say we did the same for the top 25 (or all, if there aren't that many) threads post Nuevo Baja.

If someone did this, we'd (a) have an anecdotal data point to back up this demonization of name-calling, or (b) we could have a hearty round of lol-sample size. Right now, all we got is bald-faced assertion, followed up by *sound_of_crickets*.

I don't understand why you post in this forum. I have never heard any substance from any of your posts, and you're calling people trolls?

Habitual lying is an inter-personal and meta-personal attack at some point and this poster has the proof in their various histories. Whether torturous or abusive, habitual lying is a pox on community.

Back to trolling I see. Some habits die hard.

But no, it wasn't the vast majority, it was a vocal minority of trolls and racism defenders sad their racist friends were getting nuked. Having been there at the time I'm a much better authority on the subject than you.

Oh look, the twice-de-modded SMP clown has decided to weigh in.

Yall's regressive clinging to the past and absence of justice is all on display today. Look at it.

Yeah, this reminds me. When we look back on Baja prior to the Nuevo, we'll find that mindless thread spamming derailed orders of magnitude more threads than simple name-calling also.

For derails in Baja prior to Neuvo, -both- mindless spamming -and- mindless squabbling over the r-word, will -both- be found to dwarf by orders of magnitude simple name-calling as the source of derailments. AINEC.

So... why are we spending all our time worrying about simple name-calling, and studiously ignoring all these many other sources, including these two obviously much larger sources, of derails ??

I agree that both are false, but I have claimed neither of those things. I don't think that chats including name-calling are necessarily less "productive", however we want to define that. I also don't think that name-calling is particularly problematic in and of itself. As I said in #21, I was already attempting to take a more relaxed attitude in that regard. If I thought name-calling led necessarily to problematic derailing, I wouldn't have chosen to suggest changing the rules to focus more on derails and less on personal attacks, because it would be a distinction without a difference. Instead, I made the distinction because I do think there is a difference. I chose my example (78 posts in a row between two posters) fairly carefully because I was trying to distinguish the kind of scenario I think is problematic from mere "name-calling".

edit: I'm avoiding the conversation about definitions of "racism" for now, but I'm happy to come back to it at some point.

A good example of a productive but heavily "name calling" thread would be Peak Oil thread. It has thousands of posts and thousands of insults, but the topic is substantively discussed. Now lots of the thread is normals calling jiggs a moron and him angrily lashing out when his views look more and more dumb, but how is that a problem.

But now everyone is too scared to post in that years old thread because it simply cannot function without name calling and we aren't sure what chez will do with it

Also, derails shouldn't be prohibited so much as extracted. If there is a substantive derail that means at least two people are sure bterested in discussing a thing! Move it out into its own thread! What exactly is the problem?

But what is the typical chez reaction? Delete dozens of posts. Happened recently in the moderation thread, where that other guy said there was some worthwhile stuff but nevertheless he was deleting everything because it was a derail. Awful.

I'm sorry you're scared but the worst I would do to you is not very scary.

To clarify though: There's nothing stopping name calling related to the topic or the posts except that if it goes on and on into a derail then you might see some green ink.

I don't think there's any question that "substantive derails" should just be extracted somewhere appropriate. There's probably some question about whether some of the posting which has gotten deleted is "substantive" or not, but I'm fine with employing a very loose definition there. But that's partly why I was suggesting an LC thread, so there would be somewhere to move very LC derails into, mostly to get them out of the moderation thread.

I agree that it's obvious that everyone hates having lots of posts deleted so we should probably try not to do that too much, but partly that relates back to the question of what kinds of posts to allow. Under the rules where no-content personal attacks are disallowed, obviously a bunch of posts that contain nothing but the same were likely to be deleted. So I think to some extent this complaint reduces to the previous complaint.

Wow! Who knew Will Ferrell moved to Oklahoma to start making R&B commercials for barbecue joints?!?

So personal attacks are allowed?

I mean you might want to update the forum rules

Assuming we have the rule against no content personal attacks (which we should ) then the choice is to delete as most of the sanction or to delete less and rely on more warnings/timeouts.

Where I agree there was a very legitimate complaint was in deleting replies simply because they responded to deleted posts.

I would also add the bad posters thread, in which much fruitful discussion occurred. Where would we be if we hadn't figured out which posters are the nut low?

There must be some question because a few days ago that other guy straight up deleted like fifty posts in the moderation thread, while acknowledging that there was some stuff there that merited discussion

What if I get some old POG gimmick accounts and use them to even up the poll results a little bit. Do you think they'll fall for it?