Aurora

I am not chasing your ass all day, and neither is the rest of the staff...no more posting real names or initials, no more posting unreleased Shelter information to mock people or I will ban you until Elwood can come online and deal with you.

You know better than this. You know Kirk did not share his name here and you know Shelter communications are private until released.

Now..knock it off...once and for all.

Christ.

Y'know, I don't necessarily disagree with nailing Cass to the wall for this one, but fuck, Tamar. The way you handled this was...not good.

Seriously. In the future, I wish that everyone would just have someone else handle it if there's even a sliver of a conflict of interest. And somehow, you managed to make it look like you were having a goddamn temper tantrum right along with her.

We just don't need the fucking drama. Board software's shitting up around us, and we might as well be taking hatchets to the rest of it.

[action=Kyle]sighs.[/action]

Been a long day.

Excuse me?

This is about the only place I was really rude about it...and that was because I was trying to get her frigging attention. Don't you think I tried just about eveything else? Take a good look around the board.

Conflict my arse. If anything she gets more free passes than most and what she pulled today was clear cut to everyone but her.

We do give Cass more latitude than most, I think. Probably based on her status as "founder" more than anything else.

But Tamar's right, there wasn't much hissy-fit going on there on her part this time.

Welcome back to the fun of being on staff, Kyle.

I'm sorry that post was snappy, Kyle, but it was 3 AM and it was a loooooooong day yesterday.

Yeah, I was snippy too. Frustrating day. Sorry!

Still, I'm not convinced that this was handled as diplomatically as it could have been. C'est la vie.

Good, you two have kissed and made up.

Goddamnit.

If you've got an opinion or suggestion, come out with it.

Well, I think it was obvious Cass knew what she was doing all along. I think that she played the staff pretty well.

Thing is, I don't think she did it out of malice. I think she, in her mind, was pointing out that the personal information rule gets ... a little unruly pretty quickly. And, let's face it, 'tis better that she did it rather innocuously than someone else who would use it maliciously.

And while what Tamar did was ultimately the right thing to do, it was rough around the edges (which is somewhat understandable due to the circumstances, but will all respect, diplomacy isn't Tamar's strong suit), and there are going to be those who will inevitably say that there was some level of bias involved. And you get an ironic icing on the cake when it all comes from someone known for the "Tamarchives" .

Fact is, two people were banned today, and that ain't exactly something that shines all a'bright in terms of WF history. And over what, a name that someone stupidly posted at a board that we're so obsessed with that we're desperately afraid of becoming it, but apparently far enough removed that it's no longer to be expected that what happens at TBBS can be talked about over here - hell, we've got a forum for that. An entire forum devoted to bitching about a place that should have ceased to matter five years ago. That's a hell of a double-standard - we can talk all about the goings-on of some BBS full of nerds, but if they post something personal over there, and they happen to post over here, it's off-limits?

Hell, Peter Octavian's said the most responsible thing I've heard yet - he made his bed, he'll sleep in it. Does that mean I think we shouldn't be doing serious damage control for screwing around with private information? No. But I think it means that we need to take a look at what is, quite frankly, beginning to sound a hell of a lot like legalese, which last I checked, we were trying to avoid.

Keep 'em banned until it's sorted out. But it's that double standard that's bugging me - that we've got an entire forum devoted to talking about the users of another BBS, but if you happen to post here, you get a free ride when you do something stupid. I think if we want to say that posting information from another board is bad, we probably shouldn't be encouraging the posting of information from another board by giving it a forum or letting threads about it gallavant around.

Wait, so Aurora is banned because she posted the full name of KIRK1ADM, which he accidentally posted on TBBS in a picture?

So what happens on TBBS is irrelevant, except of course for it being the reason you're all here. I must say, there's a certain amount of irony to the founder of Wordforge being banned for information posted on the board you all despised and ran away from.

Wanna talk about other websites? Great! We have an entire forum devoted to the topic.

Want to post another members private, real life information? Not great. Doesn’t matter where/how the info was found.

Seems that is where Aurora obtained this bit of personal info. Though Aurora claims K1A posted it here on Wordforge.

TBBS relevance lies solely in the history/creation of Wordforge. What happens on TBBS nowadays is no more relevant than what happens on any other website.

Any member sharing another members personal info was a no-no from the very beginning of Wordforge.

There it is.

You want to say what I did was not diplomatic...What should I do? Let someone post a person's real name all over the board and let it sit there for hours without even trying to do anything?

I didn't even act first, Clyde did. He went down the list first...editing it out, asking her to please stop, warning her and an attempted ban to make it stop until Elwood could sort it out. The reports kept coming in, PMs from Kirk and others and I began asking her to stop...I was polite and civil and was ignored and called names. When I warned her, I got accused of it being a BS warning...I told her it needed to stop and she needed to discuss this with Elwood and closed the thread...and she kept opening them.

If this was anyone else, not one person would be questioning it. Just because she started the place, doesn't mean she can just aggregiously violate the rules with no repercussion. Take a moment and imagine if someone actually found her real life name she posted on another website and flaunted it here, how would she react? She banned Joker for even attempting it when he didn't even have any real information on her. This rule was largely her own creation,if you want to discuss irony. Elwood only tweaked it slightly.

If people want to change it so anything you can find on Google is fair game...hey I don't mind that...but I think you will find it have worse consequences than you think and less people here would want that approach than the one we have now.

Agree with Clyde.

The Gray Room is there so that discussion of other web sites doesn't clog up the Red Room, turning it into the Godforsaken Hellholes forum from TK. That most of our original membership came from TBBS naturally made the primary focus of the Gray Room about TBBS. That seems to have lessened over time.

The rule here at Wordforge is (paraphrasing) No personal information shall be used, regardless of the source, unless the poster involved does it themself. Hence not banning anyone who calls Dayton, Dayton. Or Garamet, Margaret.

Yeah, it's a line in the sand, but show me a rule about anything, anywhere, that isn't. At some point a decision must be made about what's allowed and what isn't, and to anyone who disagrees with the decision, that point will seem arbitrary. That's the nature of rules. Our rule here is as I've stated, and arbitrary as it may seem, that's the rule. Petition Elwood to change it if you think it incorrect.

Ah, yes, thank you for posting that rule that I think needs to be examined, I had totally forgotten what it had said.

There it is.

And other people could close. Other people could edit away, just as Clyde did. But instead, it was you. And that is what casts the entire thing into doubt. I don't subscribe to the idea that anything you did in relation to this is biased, but there are many people who would.

Meanwhile, triumphant posts followed directly by a clang? Well, gee, that hasn't ever just stoked the fire in the past, has it? Maybe at that message board that we're oh-so-afraid of?

Not really ironic, considering she knew what she was doing the entire time. She knew how it'd turn out. Now, I can't claim to speak for her, but I know, the entire time, what I got out of it was someone who was tired of the double-standard.

And oh, what a double-standard it is. To the point where people defend it by posting exactly why it is a double-standard. Let me attempt to explain it one more time.

We're claiming that any personal information gained off-site ain't kosher. Fine by me. But then we also provide a forum devoted to not only basically detailing the antics of a few lucky URLs, but to talking about their very users. But when one of those users happens to post both here and there, that means their personal information, which, if they hadn't been a WF member, could have been posted in the title of every thread, suddenly becomes a protected asset?

Meanwhile, we maintain this fear of rules and TBBS like it's some sort of monster waiting in darkened closets, we let it hold such a signifigance to us that we have a forum nearly devoted to talking about it, yet apparently, when it comes to personal information, it's as far distant and as shrouded in mystery as a well-intentioned but poorly thought-out Geocities page from 1997.

So, what is it? Is TBBS just another site, or is it, and a few select others, special enough to warrant inclusion in the Wordforge pantheon with their own forum?

Nope, don't want that at all. What I do want, however, is something pretty simple - if TBBS is to be treated like any other site when it comes to privacy issues, it should also be treated like any other site when it comes to everything else. However, if it's getting special treatment, then it clearly isn't just some other site, which means that, I'd argue, anything posted over there is fair game over here.



And in the end, I ain't even sure anything should be changed. But I'm trying to point out two things - there is still an unhealthy obsession with that place, and that the issue isn't black and white. It's easy when someone tracks down a name via some crazy-ass Google search. Not so much when it's something that a third, if not more, of this place checks out every day.

Just FYI:

I have sent e-mails to both Cass and garamet. Any response that may come from those will be confidential. However, I don't mind telling y'all what I told them.

There were three important parts.

#1 - This is unacceptable. If it ever happens again, you're gone forever.

#2 - If you think something or someone is wrong or being wronged, there's a way to fix it and this ain't it.

#3 - The bans are being lifted. Sometime during the evening on Saturday for Cass (three days) and sometime during the evening on Sunday for garamet (three days). I'll handle it personally when I get the chance.

Are you gonna free the shit out of them?

I still think you better brace for impact with Volpone.

CM and GE never actually posted your name and they still are banned...I predict he will attempt to begin a over this.