BrikWars Officialer Chat

[dilanski]

On the other hand I think this MAY be a troll effort by Mike because he always makes fun of people talking about nostalgia and how BW used to be good and now he's saying those exact words a lot so it may all be a clever ploy.

I doubt it, Mike has expressed similar sentiments in the past about these topics.

[mercury19]

On the other hand I think this MAY be a troll effort by Mike because he always makes fun of people talking about nostalgia and how BW used to be good and now he's saying those exact words a lot so it may all be a clever ploy.

I'm going to be an optimist and pretend this isn't the case.

Like IB and lanski said, the problem is that everything is arbitrary. There's nothing wrong with a bit of arbitrariness, but when something is almost entirely arbitrary, it tends to break down. And it's not just the moderating, it's basically everything. Like this:

Totally serious and Out-of-Character for the moment

A lot of people can't tell what is serious and what isn't. Unfortunately, translating emotions and intentions and facial expressions and vocal inflections and what not over the internet is very difficult, so when people talk about nazis and nazsism or whatever else it's hard to tell whether or not they're serious, and when people are actually angry or troll baiting, which leads to people saying the wrong thing and the toxicity arriving in full force. Even with IB's words above there's a part of me that doesn't take him seriously simply because I don't know that it's not a very elaborate troll, as he pointed out for stubbs.

I'm not saying that trolling and shitposting are bad in and of themselves. Like stubby said, these forums can do a good job of making sure we don't get too big for our breeches and take ourselves too seriously; that's important. Actually in a way people have become too self-important; trolling and shitposting has run so rampant that when people say "hey, that' snot funny anymore" the people doing the not funny thing say "that's stupid and your stupid cause you don't agree with me". Ideally it would be something like "hey, this has kind of been worn out, can we do something new?" "eh, fine." and then you can bring up the really good jokes that always make people laugh or whatever, I'm too tired to figure out that part.

I don't really know where I'm going and I had a new thought so I'm changing the subject sort of.

Thunderdumb is there for shitposting. I think that certain threads that are especially awesome and/or good for the community/lore/gaming should have some immunity to to an extent. Like try and keep cool armory threads or cool politics threads in GD clear of random shitflinging. Not just telling people to stop, but deleting/moving posts and possibly little bannings? Idk, I'm tired.

To be honest, I'm not even sure there is a problem with anyone other than silver, IB, and overwatch. A lot of people are creating cool content and doing cool things, it's just that those three are wandering around doing goon stuff and they have a big enough presence on the forums that it seems to be a more universal probem.

I'd like to note that I'm not thinking fully straight, and have no specific examples to back up my words, so there's probably a lot of gross over generalizations up there. Also make me a glob-mod so I can ban people. I make a great candidate cause nobody really knows who I am, I'm still basically a lurker with an account (300 posts over 5 years is really awful), and I might take the job seriously. And my name would look awesome in red. Or something.

[dilanski]

Also make me a glob-mod so I can ban people.

I was actually going to suggest another cause of the problem might be the proliferation of Moderator positions. Like seriously, what are people actually doing with their mod status other than trolling? And why are 49 moderators needed for what is a forum of less than a 100 active users? Shouldn't the point of moderators be to stem the toxicity?

[RedRover]

Let alone most are inactive... If you aren't active on the forums, you probably shouldn't moderate... Unless we are all about the absentee father thing.

On another note, I think it's unfair to shift the blame unto just those three mentioned... We all have had a role (wether it be action or inaction) on how the forum has come to be. I know I have had my share of horrible attempts at shit posting with the whole "+1" thing. I think instead of sitting and assigning blame, we just need some clear operating guidelines. There is a good place for random posts that are off topic or considered "shit" but we also can't let them seep into everything. However. I don't want us to go so far in our attempts to create a welcoming space that is free of trolling that we actually alienate forum members and stifle the brikwars community. I for one miss guys like overwatch who were genuinely funny. I don't want to drive him or anyone away.

So let's not sling shit and assign blame, let's just set some guidelines, and consistently enforce them.

[Zahru II]

Blaming or not, you cannot deny the tendency that as soon as one gets called out on bullshit the other two immediately chime in to dogpile on the person and making it 1v3 bullying.
I'm mostly lurking as I cannot really add to this other than agreeing with some of mercury's sentiments (although I voiced similar suggestions in past threads which were met with ire) but it's good to see some discourse is going on.

Oh might as well give a small PSA: being globmod is nowhere near as enticing as you folks drum it up to be. It essentially means more responsibility since now you hafta keep more than your pet subforum clean, plus banning is always kind of a hollow high with diminishing returns. Plus you still cannot do cool shit like set custom ranks, which is ironically what most requested from me when I got upgraded.

I wanna say I sorta get why everyone was made mod when that was the hot merit badge to get (kinda how now folks try to go for glob/admin access), "nobody's special if everyone's special", but it does give the place a bit of an inmates running the asylum vibe. If anything that number could be thinned down by demoting inactives.

[Bragallot]

I was actually going to suggest another cause of the problem might be the proliferation of Moderator positions. Like seriously, what are people actually doing with their mod status other than trolling? And why are 49 moderators needed for what is a forum of less than a 100 active users? Shouldn't the point of moderators be to stem the toxicity?

If I recall, stubby tends to do the opposite of what people expect / want.

[Zahru II]

What I do in the armoury is all adhering to guidelines I have set out for myself nearly two years ago, if that was not clear yet. All that ever got the ax or got edited by my hand have been shitposts, derails or attempts at flaming. Whereas:

I delete a bunch of his old content to piss off Colette.

In my eyes this is a bigger and more damaging problem and it is not okay.

Don't pretend that this forum has some great legacy of having responsible moderation

Never did that. But just because others misused or abused their mod rights doesn't mean I should fall into line.

[stubby]

Oh man looks like I touched a nerve, so much to reply to today.

I'm confused about the whole issue. Silva has always baited people and now people are saying it isn't funny anymore.

Well let's be fair, we have a long history of nobody ever thinking it was funny. The funny part was when it was unfunny at people who needed somebody to be unfunny at them. Like there's nothing funny about Tarren's giant posts full of identical dick photos, especially after the tenth or twentieth time, but when he puts them into an Asterios thread it's hilarious. Not because the photos are funny, but because Asterios needed a hundred dicks so very, very badly.

So I can't just straight-out ban Tarren from posting dicks, because he serves a crucial and valuable role. But if he started coming to the forum every day and posting dicks into every thread, it'd stop being the BrikWars forum and just be the pictures of a dick forum, and then I'd have to make some changes.

Goons are acting like our name implies and everyone seems to be taking it very seriously.

I'm not actually super familiar with the whole goon thing so I'll take your word for it. But it's not about whether anybody's taking it seriously or not. I was talking about this yesterday off the forum: I knew a guy who beat his wife for years, and told everyone he was "just playing around." Sometimes when it was extra bad he'd say he was "half kidding." The dumbass never got it through his troglodyte skull that nobody cared whether he was "serious" or not, they cared about the fact that he was beating his wife.

So in this context: yes, I understand that Silverdream is "joking around" when he edits the word "nigger" into everyone's posts to make the whole place sound super racist. Obviously. Everybody gets that. The problem isn't whether he's joking or not, it's that he's editing "nigger" into everyone's posts.

I don't think I need to make some official Clear-Cut Administration Rule about it for everyone to know that that was shitty.

So is this an actual "Make Brikwars Great Again" speech? I'm excited. Personally I find humor that is either just great observations or self depreciating as great, but once your humor thrives off of tearing others apart it isn't really humor anymore... you're just an asshole.

Nah, it's more of a Let's Make The Forums Slightly Less Awful conversation. Let's try and be less shitty to that portion of the population who aren't coming here just to be goons.

So maybe we need to roll it back a little bit. The rule used to be that you were fully encouraged to be belligerent violent assholes to each others' factions and characters, but not to each other as people, and nobody was allowed to make themselves or other forum members the topic of a thread. I don't remember when I stopped enforcing that, but maybe I need to start that up again.

I entirely agree on all of that. Perhaps clean up exactly what is and isn't a bannable offence? When the list of automatic ban offenses is just an in-joke, it is no surprise if no one takes them seriously.

Working as intended. I'm not using bans as a deterrent, but as a soundboard level mixer. Sometimes you want more treble, sometimes more bass, sometimes more trolling, sometimes less. Bans aren't punishment, they're tuning.

As a very general rule, I want less of whatever makes people feel unwelcome to contribute. On the one hand that means racism and abuse and bullying, but it also means people acting like divas or shitting on other people's work or refusing to acknowledge other people's contributions or getting overly anal about other people's grammar. I'm completely happy to ban somebody who's contributing great photos and battles if it means less toxicity and prima donna grandstanding (see: Asterios).

If no one is clear what the rules are or what is and isn't ok how can you expect them to follow the rules? If you joke too much about the punishment then it's natural people will treat it as a joke. So for example banning silva seems like a pretty funny joke to all of us and I dunno if you were being serious or not.

Normally I like to leave it ambiguous, but if I wasn't joking I'd have banned his IPs and alts instead of just the one account. I'd also probably have picked one of the more offensive posts to get all banhammery over.

But yeah, working as intended. I'm not setting up rules with the expectation that anybody's going to follow them, because that's the opposite of what I'm trying to achieve here. What I'm trying to do is develop a strategy to steer the forum as a whole closer to the direction that I want it to go in.

On the other hand I think this MAY be a troll effort by Mike because he always makes fun of people talking about nostalgia and how BW used to be good and now he's saying those exact words a lot so it may all be a clever ploy.

I don't necessarily want to go backwards either. There were good and bad things about the forum in the past too. There's some parts that worked better, and I'm trying to remember what was the combination of semi-responsible adminnery and completely fucking with everybody that kept those things working the way they did, but otherwise I'm not all that interested in trying to duplicate the past.

[stubby]

A lot of people can't tell what is serious and what isn't. Unfortunately, translating emotions and intentions and facial expressions and vocal inflections and what not over the internet is very difficult, so when people talk about nazis and nazsism or whatever else it's hard to tell whether or not they're serious, and when people are actually angry or troll baiting, which leads to people saying the wrong thing and the toxicity arriving in full force. Even with IB's words above there's a part of me that doesn't take him seriously simply because I don't know that it's not a very elaborate troll, as he pointed out for stubbs.

Isn't it amazing, though? I feel like it has almost a zen quality. It's simultaneously true lies and false truths and thirty layers deep and yet as bullshittily shallow as possible. It's an amazing fine art performance piece and sometimes you just have to take a step back and admire the sublimity.

But - stepping back to the deliberately overblown example of the guy beating his wife - unraveling the mystery of how much is serious and how much is trolling doesn't matter when the main issue is there's a guy who's beating his wife. If the things you're doing are creating this consistently toxic environment for anybody not in on the joke, then the question of whether you're trolling, and how much, don't really matter anymore. There are plenty of ways to troll people other than just being generically toxic and abusive.

Actually in a way people have become too self-important; trolling and shitposting has run so rampant that when people say "hey, that' snot funny anymore" the people doing the not funny thing say "that's stupid and your stupid cause you don't agree with me".

Yeah, you might have hit the nail right on the head with that one. I wasn't able to put my finger on it, but that's probably the biggest thing that makes me feel like the forum turned a corner from friendly but ill-mannered rambunctiousness to actual cliquish bullying abuse. That "we're going to abuse you and you don't get to complain about it" that goes on now.

It's part of why I pick mods who I completely disagree with, and who disagree with each other. I'm trying to avoid the creation of monolithic power bloks that lead to that kind of cliquishness.

Thunderdumb is there for shitposting. I think that certain threads that are especially awesome and/or good for the community/lore/gaming should have some immunity to to an extent. Like try and keep cool armory threads or cool politics threads in GD clear of random shitflinging. Not just telling people to stop, but deleting/moving posts and possibly little bannings? Idk, I'm tired.

Nah. Nothing's immune to Rule 7. Some of my very favorite in-game developments have come from people trolling each other's armory threads. But if shitflinging is the fittest topic then something's gone wrong.

To be honest, I'm not even sure there is a problem with anyone other than silver, IB, and overwatch.

Nah, there's lots of good aspects and bad aspects to everybody, those three just have the most effective ground game right now. All three of them have been playing their particular shticks pretty harmlessly for years. It's only when they joined forces in a coordinated retributive thug squad that it turned into such a forum-defining experience for everybody else. I kind of have to admire that kind of street-gang effectiveness, even while I'm trying to figure out how to steer it back towards positive territory.

[stubby]

I was actually going to suggest another cause of the problem might be the proliferation of Moderator positions. Like seriously, what are people actually doing with their mod status other than trolling? And why are 49 moderators needed for what is a forum of less than a 100 active users? Shouldn't the point of moderators be to stem the toxicity?

I think on most boards, the administration sets up some vision of The Way The Board Is Supposed To Be and then picks moderators to enforce that vision. I have a different view: I've tried to pick admins and moderators who have strong but competing visions of their own, both to come up with new angles I haven't thought of myself, and to keep both me and each other in check.

Like the Overlution? I didn't have the balls to do that. Overwatch did. That would never have happened if I was picking mods whose job was to toe the line.

I'm still sad he deleted the toilet-licking thread though.

Let alone most are inactive... If you aren't active on the forums, you probably shouldn't moderate... Unless we are all about the absentee father thing.

I like the inactive mods the best. Because you forget about them for years, and then one day they show up and do something completely crazy.

[mercury19]

Let alone most are inactive... If you aren't active on the forums, you probably shouldn't moderate... Unless we are all about the absentee father thing.

On another note, I think it's unfair to shift the blame unto just those three mentioned... We all have had a role (wether it be action or inaction) on how the forum has come to be. I know I have had my share of horrible attempts at shit posting with the whole "+1" thing. I think instead of sitting and assigning blame, we just need some clear operating guidelines. There is a good place for random posts that are off topic or considered "shit" but we also can't let them seep into everything. However. I don't want us to go so far in our attempts to create a welcoming space that is free of trolling that we actually alienate forum members and stifle the brikwars community. I for one miss guys like overwatch who were genuinely funny. I don't want to drive him or anyone away.

So let's not sling shit and assign blame, let's just set some guidelines, and consistently enforce them.

I'd like to clarify my statement: I didn't mean to say that those three are the root of the large problem, I meant that perhaps there really isn't a large problem and everybody is simply blowing those three out of proportion. Those are the only three names I've seen mentioned consistently, other than people who aren't active. Again, I don't have much to back it up, it was a general observation.

I'd also like to apologize for my glob-mod comment, it was a lack-of-sleep-induced attempt at a shit post-ish thing.

Thunderdumb is there for shitposting. I think that certain threads that are especially awesome and/or good for the community/lore/gaming should have some immunity to to an extent. Like try and keep cool armory threads or cool politics threads in GD clear of random shitflinging. Not just telling people to stop, but deleting/moving posts and possibly little bannings? Idk, I'm tired.

Nah. Nothing's immune to Rule 7. Some of my very favorite in-game developments have come from people trolling each other's armory threads. But if shitflinging is the fittest topic then something's gone wrong.

That's kind of what I meant, just being a bit more heavy handed in order to prevent the fittest thread from being shitflinging all the time. Steering rule 7 towards the environment we want, as opposed to letting every thread devolve into dumbshittery; Which, to be fair, most don't so I suppose my point is mostly moot.

To be perfectly honest, I'm still not up on the "what is and isn't ok" thing in terms of trolling and joking, so I suspect my stance is a bit more conservative than the general attitude of the forums.

[stubby]

Oh might as well give a small PSA: being globmod is nowhere near as enticing as you folks drum it up to be. It essentially means more responsibility since now you hafta keep more than your pet subforum clean, plus banning is always kind of a hollow high with diminishing returns.

Isn't it a bitch, though? I'll be honest: I gave you the globmod status partly because I knew you'd be tortured by this artificial sense of responsibility about it. I don't know why that kind of self-inflicted suffering is so funny to me, but there it is.

Don't pretend that this forum has some great legacy of having responsible moderation, especially when your idea of that is to delete all of Overwatch's posts in your armoury board.

It's weird to call out deleting Overwatch's posts as some terrible crime, after the Overlution.

In either case, a moderator had a vision for how to make the forum better, and executed that vision in good faith. I think both are genuine examples of admirable moderation, whether or not you agree with them.

Natalya would have been fired from her administrator role a long time ago for putting music on the brikwars forum, a universally hated action.

Ha ha ha, I still laugh every time I'm reminded of this. I feel like it should have stopped being funny a long time ago and yet it's still fresh every time.

Weirdly enough, the only person on this board to have power and use it responsibly was Insert Blank's status as owner of the brikwars chat. He gave 0 positions of power to his friends, never banned anyone, and had a public account that anyone could use to change the chat's topic.

And what was the result? It created a high school cheerleader clique that became the bullies of the forum. The "responsible" use of power among simian primates always creates abusive hierarchies, and therefore it must be opposed and subverted in all forms.

[Zahru II]

Overwatch's comments are some of the most hilarious and creative things on this site. To delete them without backing them up is more damaging that deleting pictures of lego

There are a ton of subforums to do that, and he can do a lot better than "bump" and "the roma curse". If anything it's an incentive for improvement, memetic Darwinism if you will - survival of the dankest.

But yeah I don't buy that sorry, the armoury is for MOCs, love it or leave it.

I'll be honest: I gave you the globmod status partly because I knew you'd be tortured by this artificial sense of responsibility about it. I don't know why that kind of self-inflicted suffering is so funny to me, but there it is.

I could envision you twirling your mustache while typing that one out!

[stubby]

Maybe I'm going about this all wrong. Like, bullshitting about science and technology is funny, but for whatever reason Tahthing was psychotically unhingedly bad at it. So I didn't ban talking about science, I just banned Tahthing from talking about science, and that solved the problem.

So by the same token, there's nothing wrong with discussing whether some post or other is racist. But editing the n-word into other people's posts just so you can start a crusade against the racism you put there in the first place isn't friendly trolling or participating on the forum in good faith, and even if it were, it doesn't justify the racism. If all you're interested in is actively working to make the problem worse for everyone, maybe it's easier just to say that Silverdream has lost the right to play identity politics anymore. No more race baiting, no more gender baiting, no more sexual-orientation baiting. If there's a joke to be make about whether white people have butts, you're just going to have to wait for someone else to make it on their own.

[Insert_blank]

Yeah my IRC channel was just people hanging out and talking. Colette's s the abusive hierarchy you were thinking of. The skype group on the other hand is totally different. It's Silva, Ham, Overv and Whiteeagle and some guy how posts his MOCs.