Violet Room

Ok, I'm not going to wade into the shitstorm going on across the board about this, and I really don't want to give the vultures any ideas of staff division, but the Violet Room and its execution was poorly implemented, especially with gturner's Daycaring.

Ultimately, in my opinion, this was a bad idea that's blowing up in our faces, and this is coming from someone who brought up the idea of a Day Care forum a couple years ago during one of the Castle episodes. The idea was shot down at the time because we aren't Troll Kingdom, and I daresay that part of the reaction we're seeing, from both sides, is that implementing the Violet Room and then caging gturner reeks of TK and TBBS shenanigans.

While I don't dispute gturner didn't go out of his way to make any friends in the Red Room, his posts outside from there (and in Techforge in particular) were of contributing and useful material. Other approaches could have been used to curb potential problems -- one that comes to mind was shortly after he arrived and would use colored text for his article quote blocks, which I found annoying for legibility reasons against certain skins, and gave him a friendly in thread about it. Of course, there was nothing in the rules forbidding colored text, and I technically overstepped my bounds in giving him that friendly. Outside of one of the Horseman's comments here in the Shelter, I don't recall much reaction, if any, from the membership at large; gturner did stop using colored text as a result in favor for his current, more legible article quote format (contents thereof aside).

I realize that the idea and implementation of the VR is wholly up to the discretion of the owners, but I am a bit surprised that I, one of the admins, didn't hear anything about it until it was effectively rolled out, so there was no way for me to provide any feedback on the idea. I can't say I would have been on board with it; however, one of the other boards I mod at (AARoads), uses a similar forum to split thread derailments. AARoads has enough of a dedicated focus (and stricter moderation) where such a forum is accepted, where if said forum isn't visible to the membership at large, then they don't question or care when disruptive posts and spam suddenly disappear. As it is, here at WF, no matter how smoothly this was implemented, including changes to the RR's rules in preparation (which should have happened), there would have been Drama. The way it was implemented brought on the scenery chewing ham acting by those who have whatever beef with the owners they can find. While Drama is an amusing diversion, I can say that this has been anything but.

As far as gturner's particular style of spam being disruptive -- yeah, it is. But I'm not convinced it's an existential threat to the board; I really don't see anyone leaving WF because of him. We're insular enough that we either take pleasure in mocking him or we outright ignore or scroll past his diarrhea.

Like I said, I'm not posting this in the shitstorm where the vultures can start crowing about staff disagreement nonsense, but this is needless Drama that could have been addressed differently.

It came up over a PM. Some wanted a banning but I suggested the intermediary step before going to that.

But it's clear there's a trust issue between us and the board. What can we do? Some of us want a more cleaned up board that doesn't appear like an alt-right love in and some want to remain stuck in 2003. Maybe this was too much too fast and I'm sorry we didn't include you, but I don't know what to do.

Truth be told, I'd just told the staff I'm stepping down because I'm burnt out and I'm sick of the racist shit that we'll be stuck with evidently. I'll probably edit this out before the release, but I suggested you as a good person to take the reigns and this level headed post states why.

While the Violet Room had been bandied about before in other forms, like your idea from way earlier, the ultimate decision came in a PM between the horsemen and was decided upon really quickly, which I then implemented. Honestly, the reaction has been far, far, far beyond reasonable. I'm disappointed in a lot of people right now, people I would normally consider sane, reasonable human beings, but they've been caught up in this huge pot of shit that gturner is stirring so very well. They have taken the bait. This must be what Hillary Clinton felt like when Donald Trump won because people went batshit insane over conspiracies that weren't there.

The members of Wordforge's Red Room are siding with the lying shit stirrer over the people who have been working tirelessly to keep things running smoothly. I'm tempted to give them what they want. It's turning into the goddamned Lord of the Flies in the Red Room.

I say do it and cut bait.

We all have Facebook and TBBS.

Indeed we do.

Tempted to rename the Violet Room to Violent Room for shits and giggles and see if anyone notices...

I say do it. At this point, I'm tired, hungry, I'm still wearing my shirt where I made thanksgiving dinner preparations, and it has pickle juice in it (potato salad), and I am fresh out of fucks to give.

Done.

Also, Chup does have a point about Dinner's shit too. That shit isn't contributing much at all, and if gturner is a detriment, then his Muslim rant is even worse. When you all first came here from TBBS, I doubt harboring white nationalists what what Cassandra and company had in mind.

The question boils down to how willing are we to take this free speech concept? When our friends we invite here look at us and say the place is too racist, that's a concern for me. Now, having people say the place wasn't too nice is one thing, which...yeah, that's part of the appeal. But does that mean we need to accept ALL speech to be free?

Frankly, I'm sick of Dinner and am ready for Dessert

The reaction to the Violet Room is what convinced me this place is done. It was simply an extra room. If people didn't like it, well, there's still the rooms they do like. Like Anna, I'm done with this place unless things change significantly. We can never come up with a codification, so I'm not going to even pretend to play that game, but there are some toxic people here, and they need to go. The past week Jess clearly demonstrated that. Gturner is now gone, there are others. The people who own the board should have some discretion on this kind of thing and when the response is angry hysteria, it makes me wonder why we even try. This place needs the asteroid.

Agree with OP. The Violet Room was an ill-considered overreaction to what was at most a minor irritant. My eye slides over gturner posts the same way it does terererererererun posts. In the end this is just a message board and a couple of you are taking it too personally.

Perhaps, Lanz, but much the same can be said about the resistance to the idea. Large numbers at wordforge take everything personally. The inability of this place to not have a shitstorm over every little thing is the real problem.

Thing is, if the intent was to get rid of blatant white-nationalist stuff and similar bullshit, it seems like it was both misdirected and ultimately backfired. gturner mostly parrots Republican talking points, while Ramen's the one running around posting his bizarre Hillary Clinton rape fantasies (and so on, and so on). And as a direct result, now we have Volpone playing the "tee hee hee, I said n***er" game.

Yeah, the thing with Ramen is that he's been here from day one, and I'm fairly reluctant to ban somebody who has been here that long.

So, how are any changes ever going to be made, then? If we admit to fucking up, people will still bitch. John admitted to screwing up the controls and took full responsibility and Chup is still banging on about being talked down to. No, he technically doesn't disagree with every staff decision, but he does treat staff as pond scum when he does. You know it, @Elwood knows it, @Borgs knows it, and @Aurora knows it.

You got rid of rep when it took over the whole board. It wasn't an especially popular idea but we accepted it. Even without the gturner part, the same assholes would shit a brick.

They've got their wish. I'm gone, we'll roll the VR back into the red room and let them have the pig slop.

Okay, now that I've a bit more rested....I do want to say that most of them aren't trying to troll. Paladin for example is a guy I respect. So too is Zombie. I hate that they're getting played by an asshole who isn't worth the effort and that we should've ended when he first showed up but they really are thinking of the board the same as us. I'm leaving staff regardless, but for anyone else that is still making a go at this, we've all been targets of mods at some point. a lot of folks besides the usual dipshits are in agreement that they weren't bothered by gturner being banned but the lack of due process. Which is why I was against banning him to begin with but we jumped in without having ducks in a row.

He still needed to be banned. He played fast and loose with the rules for years. Again, like Enterpriser, he always did just enough to keep from making bannable posts. Bonz finally got fed up and just tossed him out, which was for the good of the board, and cleared much of the air. I made it clear that I didn't like gturner, that he needed to go, and that I would ban him if I could, so that when he was put in the Violet Room, people complained because he wasn't outright banned. Now he's banned, and people are still angry. In an attempt to be more even handed, we just made things worse on that end. That's why I guess we should go with the original idea, and just outright ban members that behave that way. I have no doubt anyone who reads this (feel free to leave it in) will scream "FASCIST!" but I don't care what they think anymore. There are people here who have decided letting the bullies run the show is more entertaining, and that includes the wonderfully smart people who I could normally count on to wonder why the hell the assholes are out in full force. Not this time, I guess. I guess now a lot of things are okay that once were not.

But again, I can also see how we haven't articulated our case very well. Most of us have been back and forth because of the holiday which you'd think someone would consider but I do regret that we didn't at least take a couple days before hammering this out more.

Perhaps, but it's too late for that now, unless we make a post explaining everything in detail, while still knocking down the assholes who try to disrupt everything.

Can't be done. We acted for reasons that cannot be codified. Any effort to explain it beyond stating that our opinion was he harmed the board doesn't work. People need to get over this idea that there is some sort of Napoleon's code available. Decisions here and in the real world mostly have an arbitrary element. That's just the way it is.

I'm okay with that, as long as I ask whether the person who initially came to us is okay with mention him/her.

For what it's worth, I just took a shot at it here, to back Anna up:

http://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/2909160/

Of course, the shit stirrers immediately target it. This is too much fun for them to pass up, and I frankly think they don't care whether or not the board exists.

We do owe something more tangible. I probably wouldn't have accepted it on face value if I wasn't on staff either. That's not a reflection of anyone here, just that I trust what I can see.

I don't want to lose good posters over one bad seed. If they want him back bring him back and those of us that leave staff can place him on ignore. And let's switch neg points back on so that the board has some tools to fight back.

Okay, allow me to wade in on this mess with a few thoughts. First, I can think of no surer way to kill this board than for any members of the staff to step down as a result of gturner's banning. I mean, who the fuck are you going to turn it over to? Volpone? Yeah, that'll go over well. He'll deliberately destroy the board just because he can. I should also point out that you'd be entrusting him with the contents of the Blue Room. I don't know what's in there, but people get pretty fucking butthurt if even a hint of it's contents are made public. Do you think that a professional shit-stirrer like Volpone is gonna be able to resist dumping the contents of that forum on to the larger web? (And deleting the forum is going to fly about as well as banning gturner did, if not worse, so cross that off your list.) Sell it to El Chup? Not only will he use his powers to wage vengeance against those he's got an axe to grind with, but the professional shit-stirrers will go after everybody remaining on staff because blood's in the water and they'll be wanting more of it. Flashy? See my argument about Volpone.

It doesn't matter who get's it, there's going to be a shit storm, because that's Wordforge and people take this interweb shit waaaaay too seriously. I can understand that folks might want out, but if you want the board to be around, you're going to have to hang around for a while longer, I'm afraid. Besides, it'll be good practice for the next 4 years of Trump's America. Trust me, I'm surrounded by gturner-types, and this shit is only going to get worse in the coming years.

Next, stop this hodge-podge method of responding to the complaints. You guys are stumbling all over one another and contradicting each other and not giving a clear answer. You need to come together, hash things out with one another, and then post a response. This includes personal attacks like Captain X is currently flinging against @John. If I were you, John, I'd let someone else write your responses for you and then post them. If you guys want this to die down quickly, then you've got to stop letting them get to you. Avoid loaded emotional language, and if you can, avoid responding at all. They're looking for ways to try and trip you up and by responding to every single complaint of theirs, you're just handing them more ammo. They'll bitch about this, of course, but as they don't get a response, they'll get bored and look for more interesting targets elsewhere.

Moving forward from here, I suggest that you do the following:
1.) Create an Admin-only subforum, if you guys want to talk about shit without the rest of us mods knowing about it. If you do any communicating via PM, that stuff gets C&P'd there. Periodically dump the contents of the forum so the rest of the board can read them.

2.) With any changes you make to the board, or banning people, either have a clear statement about what you're doing and why, that you sticky before you do anything (save for the bannings), or do it and just meet the inevitable weeping and wailing with, "Suck it up, buttercup. There's the fucking door if you don't like it."

3.) Set up a rotating schedule for the Admins to disappear for a while. All of you seem to be taking this place a bit too seriously, so you need to step away for a while, but since you can't all leave at once, do it one at a time, and have your access completely blocked so you can't read or post anything here no matter how badly you might want to (and you do).

4.) Any bans need to be posted as soon as they happen, along with the reason why. Make two sticky threads. One for permanent bans and one for temporary bans. Have them be read-only for anyone who's not on staff, and if any poster makes a thread complaining about the banning, let it run it's course, with the only response given by the staff being along the lines of, "We gave our reasons in the post announcing the ban. If you don't like it, there's the door."

5.) Make sure you're goddamned clear to people that you're officially warning them. I've said before that official moderating comments need to be posted in a different color than regular comments. I know I haven't done that, but it needs to happen. Like many people I tended to scroll past gturner's comments and those of anyone responding to him, so if public warnings were given to him I didn't see them, because I was scrolling past.

6.) Remember, most people who're serious about leaving a message board don't post threat after threat of leaving, they either flounce out or just leave quietly. If they're still here bitching and threatening, then they're not going anywhere.

I do agree that regarding the communication, there's sometimes too many cooks in the kitchen.

It's good to have more than one person so that the sole owner isn't burned out, but sometimes we have talked over each other. I'm glad I've had gul and shootER the last year that I was in car sales since deals can come down the pipeline and obviously I won't be dealing with a dumpster fire while delivering a car.

Color coded posts for warning, full and verbal ones, I like. Another board I post at does this and it works.

Admin only forum, I don't think we need since staff is so small. It's basically the three of us, plus John, Bick and yourself as the ones we see nearly everyday. We'll just have to be proactive about posting here.

I'm not sure how it'll work on the other skins, but purple for moderator actions seems like a good bet.

Also, we don't use this forum nearly as often as we should.

Sort of, Tuckerfan.

Let me be blunt: Gul, John and Anna have been totally inept in their handling of this whole thing. There was no Shelter discussion of the Violet Room or the gturner ban, you guys did it all behind the scenes and that ain't how things should work. The Shelter is for staff discussions of stuff like this. You don't want it released, don't release the thread.

Castle was banned over nothing. Gturner has been banned over nothing, You guys have fucked up, but Tuckerfan is right: backpedal now and you're just plain fucked. Best thing to do now is get rid of the idiotic Violet Room, let the banned sit out a two-week or a month or whatever, then let them back. And John, you need to stick to tech admin stuff and not engage with the membership. You don't seem to have the temprament for it.

It's mostly about presenting a unified front. If the shit-stirrers think that there's disagreement between the staff, they'll use that as a wedge to create dissent. Way too many posters here have nothing better to do with their lives than to try to fuck over their personal obsession. See Dayton and El Chup, for example. Always say that you're in complete agreement without any of this, "Eh, I don't really care." responses.