Updated Board Rules - Please Read

The board rules have been updated. In addition to an update, I've also moved them from being a tab in the "Help" link at the bottom of the board, and have modified them into a post and have stickied them to the top of the Help Desk so they can be easily accessed when needed, along with the FAQ and the staff listing.

The new appended rule regards the Report function:

For those who can't find the new rules thread, here's a direct link: http://www.wordforge.net/index.php?threads/wordforge-rules-faq.108022/

This thread is open to comments, compliments, and complaints. Please direct all questions to @John, all complaints to @shootER, and all comely lasses to @John. Emails of a carnal nature should also go to @John, unless they involve various sexual references to one's self, those will go to @gul.

In other words, a rule to target whoever folks like gul don't like. I've already had this lecture from him this week about "abuses of the report function". I think the most I've ever used it in a month is about 3-4 times, and on average it's much less, if at all. I think that's hardly excessive and doesn't amount to "abuse", which would surely be using it multiple times a day. On top of that, the majority of board members do not use it regularly. Some don't use it at all. So I'm calling bullshit on this one. You have a problem with Dayton reporting 10 year old posts? Just send him a PM and say "use your common sense". Christ, it's hardly as if you lot are swamped with modding tasks. There's already too many of you as it is. This just seems like an open-ended rule for less objective, and more ego driven, mods to take a shit on whoever they choose to as soon as someone clicks the report post button. Not only will this dissuade members from clicking the button when it's called for (especially if they have recently used it), but the open ended and ambiguous nature of the rule is such that it's really in the eye of the beholder as to what constitutes abuse and therefore is, ironically, open to abuse by the mods. I mean, FFS, how do you even begin to define "petty revenge"? That's an especially frustrating phrase when you likely have certain mods here who can't even be bothered to PM a person for clarification before, it seems, deciding when something is "petty revenge". Petty revenge will be assessed based on your per-conceived notions of a poster. For instance, "well, Faceman likes to troll so nothing he reports has any value". "Dayton's an idiot so we don't need to take notice of any of his report", "Chups likes to argue and supposedly trolls outside the Red Room, so we can just ignore any issue he raises". "Tererun is a spammer and can be dismissed". And so on. Get the idea?

Personally I think this is a cynical attempt to maneuver posters like @Dayton3 into have their board experience downgraded. Censorship in other words.

In all my time at WF, I have reported 1 post. I don't think culling excessive use is a bad idea. Obviously, if someone sees several things that need to be reported in short order, that isn't abuse. But if we can't trust our mods to recognise that, then not having a rule about it won't solve the problem.

Well, there is already an open ended rule in the main rules that relates to common sense, so this rule is superfluous when viewed in that context. So if they want to have a separate rule then it needs to be properly defined. If it's excessive use that is the issue, that it needs to defined as to what excessive use is. Multiple times a day? Once a day? 3-4 times weekly? 3-4 times monthly?

As for trusting mods, I'm afraid I trust most, but not all. That's why I feel certain members need protection, even if they aren't the board's best assets. They are still part of the community and still should be treated as fairly as anyone else. Take someone like Dayton. He's just come off a month's ban and he's now being threatened with the removal of any way to challenge any injustices that might come his way. What if the report post function is removed for him, he's then reliant on the very mods who have just banned him to be objective? How is he meant to feel he has equal standing as everyone else? That sort of shit could drive someone off the board. Plus, all this comes off the back of questions being raised over the validity of his banning and of Castle's permaban, both of which were carried out pursuant to the common sense rule. Caste may have shot himself in the foot after he left, but his actual banning wasn't even agreed on by all mods. So clearly that shows you how there is scope for open ended rules to be abused.

Yes, but we have seen how everything but open ended rules gets abused that much harder. Rule lawyering doesn't help anyone. (There are logical reasons for this: The board as well as its moderation are positive facts, while the basic idea is negative, i. e. as little rules as possible. Absent a positive idea, further restrictions can never be fully defined: Ahoriston.)

Everything gets "abused" eventually. See: automated posting of new threads to Twitter.

Or, the other route: Everything gets "abused" once you narrow the range of acceptable use.

Um, what?

You missed that one? I had set up the Twitter account to post the RSS feed of new posts, and someone (cough @Faceman cough) decided to play with the functionality.

Why would Face have access?

He has the power to create new threads. All new thread titles were posted to Twitter automatically.

Not at all. Most message boards implement a limit on using the Report function. I mean, if you see someone breaking board rules, or you see a spambot that slipped past the net, let us know. People aren't going to be faulted for using the Report function as intended. What we have been seeing lately are people using the Report function as a part of their feuding with other posters. We'll get half a dozen reports coming in at a time over the most trivial of things that aren't even rule breaks, and it has been going on for some time. So the staff got to discussing the notion of making an explicit mention of what happens if people abuse the report function, and thus it was added to the rule set.

The rules you see are what they've been for ages, but now they're out in the open for everyone to see, rather than implied. We can't think like a small board where "everybody just knows" what the rules are, and now they're easily accessible to all. The Report function rule addition is a reasonable one, and one long overdue for being explicitly posted.

@El Chup

Dayton was reporting posts from as far back as 2005 when we said enough is enough.

As John pointed out, we shouldn't assume that people just know the rules. The vagueness of the rules is something previous admins used to pamper their favorite pets, so nailing that down works in all our interest.

Been there, done that.

And just because the board isn't as busy as is used to be doesn't mean he or anyone else is entitled to spam that feature with bullshit or otherwise use us as weapons as he's confessed to doing at other boards.

Petty revenge? I've been drafting policy for the last two months and can't get my mind around that. Define that shit or rewrite it.

Fuck. The mods need to grow some balls or female equivalent. I used to report dozens of posts en mass at one time and whoever the fuck the owner was (Elwood or Elwood's puppet Lanz) figured out how to deal with it. A Dayton only rule? Please. He's not that good. You'll make Tererun jealous.

Petty Revenge (adj.)
1. of little or no importance or consequence: petty grievances.
2. of lesser or secondary importance, merit, etc.; minor: petty considerations.
3. having or showing narrow ideas, interests, etc.: petty minds.
4. mean or ungenerous in small or trifling things: a petty person.
5. showing or caused by meanness of spirit: a petty revenge.
6. of secondary rank, esp. in relation to others of the same class or kind: petty states; a petty tyrant.

We are going by definitions #1, and #5, which I will go into detail about later.

There are people who like to traipse along the line as closely as they can, while claiming that they're still within the rules. That's Enterpriser shit, and it's what lead to the piles and piles of rules TBBS ended up having because of that one poster, who took advantage of every loophole he could to troll others and to keep the appearance of his hands being clean in the process. Not here. Wordforge tends to be a "spirit of the law" rather than a "letter of the law" board, and I hope it stays that way.

See, unlike legal policy, there isn't an out for every single contingency. Instead, we rely on members to act in good faith; That's something that would fail utterly in the legal world, since loopholes are a way of life and every jot in a legal document is scrutinized until people's eyes bleed, but here, on a message board, it's just one more part of what makes this community work. This means that at the end of the day, it comes down to the discretion of the people in charge, and whether the poster in question was acting in bad faith, and that is something that must be taken on a case by case basis. The rules are here to guide, not to force people into some kind of legalistic trap.

Now, about the petty revenge. This isn't some kind of "Dayton only" rule. There are a number of people who lay heavily on the Report button, so this applies to everyone; If you spam the Report function, taking every opportunity to bury us in documentation regarding what the other guy is doing, then we will review it. If it is a legitimate grievance*, we'll act as necessary. Sending report after report after report from a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, will not go unnoticed. Sending a report on the same person over and over and over again in a thread where the both of you are screaming at one another, and each report can be summed up as "I think he's being mean to me, do something about it right now or I'll go over your heads," will not go unnoticed. Sending a report that claims the other person released information about you when no such information was released will not go unnoticed. That is abuse of the Report function, though not the only examples of how the abuse may come about.

The salient point is this: nothing occurs in a vacuum, and rules alone do not make a community work; It requires people willing to look at context.



*I will not define "legitimate grievance," and I do know what the definition of "is" is.

I said something similar to Tamar when she pushed for the Blue Room rules we have now thanks to you trolling Ted Wolf.

And despite her very obvious favoritism of Ted that pushed that along, Blue Room protection is actually a very good thing. It allows for cohesiveness that wouldn't work otherwise.

Being on the other side of this now, I'm okay with spelling out some rules. The general mantra here is "Don't be a dick." Ninety percent of the time, telling folks to cut out the trolling works. For that small percentage of times where that doesn't work, we have black and white rules. I wasn't on staff for either of Castle's bans, but that was a problem I had because that definitely smacked of banning for the sake of banning. We had nothing about what constituted a threat in the RR or whether that was ever not allowed.

I'm all for clarification in our FAQ. Not more rules, just more definition in the ones we have. Like gun laws

But see you didn't need a new rule. Abusing the report post function is trolling or spamming members of WF (mods) outside the red room. That simple.



Seems you need a lawyer on staff.

@Faceman for moderator!

I reported 4. But, they were four posts I negrepped someone in ... the science room...what's that called?

Shut. Up.

Chup, some folks need the super simplified version before they can understand it.

Not sure that this needed codifying, as it was already pretty well handled under existing rules. I think this will just encourage those who were already abusing that rule to test the limits and play victim once their access is removed.

Ultimately, removal of this feature doesn't remove someone's ability to "report" a post, it just limits how they can "report" a post. There are other methods such as sending a PM to staff or starting a Help Desk thread.

For many things, I agree that they need not be codified. But when it comes to placing a restriction on a user due to behavior, I think people should have a chance to know that it can happen. If, for example, we didn't have a warning system, we would probably make an announcement before starting to hand out warnings. People will complain regardless, it's what we like to do here. But they won't be able to say nobody told them it could happen.

Oh, I agree completely. It's important for new members to be aware of it so that their access isn't shut off without them being aware of a violation (though, I expect some degree of leniency was previously shown to newer users who broke unwritten "common sense" rules such as this one). At a certain point, codifying our common sense rules becomes too much from both an administrative perspective and a member perspective (though, I'm not claiming we're anywhere near that point). In this case, it was fairly obvious who this rule was targeted at, and it's not new members.

It wasn't codified just because of one person, because it wasn't just one person spamming the hell out of the Report function, and it wasn't due to only the recent behavior. It was an issue that has cropped up in the past a number of times, the more recent example got everyone to discuss the notion that it was finally time to put the rule out in the open, where it would hopefully be more effective at curbing the behavior.

I don't like warning people, I don't like banning people (except spambots, I love banning the shit out of them), and I really don't like functions being denied because of behavior but, and I've said this before, sniping back and forth is one thing, as it's a time honored WF tradition, but I don't like it when people fuck with the board itself.

Thank you for sharing the context (to me it seemed in direct response, but I didn't realize it's been so ongoing). I've obviously been out of the loop. Also, I am guilty of pushing the line on this in the past.

Reported.

Looks like we have our first opportunity to invoke the new rule.