Violet Room

I'll make the announcement for both.

Sounds like a plan. Go for it.

It is done

Now to give Nick his title, then take myself off the admin list for good...

He's been added.

It's been good talking to you guys. Catch you on the flipside.

Do I change it, myself? I'm new, here.

You have The Powah.

Also, if my opinion is of any worth, the VR can be a useful tool, but its use has to be explicitly defined and codified; I'd keep all threads currently in there as is, but avoid using it (save for voluntary use by the members -- see Baba) until everything's been established and presented.
As for gturner, I'd say unbanning him sooner than later is better if you are going to let him back in.
My bigger concern is the rampant supper talk leaving a bad taste for any subsequent dessert, if you catch my drift.

Oh Jesus Fuck what kind of hellscape did I come back from Thanksgiving to?

Do I have this right?

gturner was locked in the Violet Room?
gturner was banned? Why?
John and Anna have resigned?
Paladin has quit?
Faceman is banned? Why?
Is Ramen banned? Why?
Dr. Krieg is now an admin?
Who else is banned? Why?
Admins (not me, incidentally ) are having policy discussions over PM?
Admins are acting unilaterally on non-emergency measures?
Talking about maintaining an ideological balance of the administrators???

Have I missed anything?

What in the flying fuck is happening? What is all this nonsense about "a united front"? Did we make a mistake banning someone? THEN WE FUCKING UNDO IT. While admin drama happens occasionally and becomes fait accompli, WF HAS NEVER SUCCESSFULLY KEPT UP A MODERATION MISTAKE BECAUSE WE'D LOOK BAD BACKING DOWN, BECAUSE THE SHITSTORMS DON'T STOP UNTIL WE DO. They continue for a bit after that, but they do peter out. And they laugh and poke fun at us for our fallibility for an age, but you know what, our egos can fucking take it. And if yours can't, turn in your Administrator badge now. Eventually it becomes a bit of nostalgia. "Haha remember when gturner was banned" "Yeah, I 'member!"

As admin, "Just a tech" or not, I've been around these parts longer than literally any of you (at this point, longer than any two, maybe 3, actually on staff combined), and I think I have a pretty solid idea of what works and what doesn't and why.

Did we fuck up banning gturner? If the answer is "yes" or "well, but we were tired of his shit" then the right thing to do is unban him, and that's the only thing that's going to make this calm down. And y'all with the "Administrator" box should know that.

Bans due to disproportional shitstorming (PI, porn, etc.) stand, but keep it finite. A warning for porn, a week or month ban for PI.

Do y'all remember the gul/Storm PI threat/troll debacle? Do you remember what actually finally calmed it down? I fucking banned all the PI-posting shitstormers for a week, warned all the flamers in the Help Desk, and unbanned Storm immediately. And you know what happened? The shitstorm died. 2 days of grumbling, and then it was gone. The board has a strong sense of justice, and we need to remember that. The biggest takeaway from that is that not everyone is a troll. Even Zombie, who I warned twice in that debacle, saw that I was meting out justice and fixing the original injustice (Storm's banning) and did in fact calm down, and most everyone followed his lead. I have no reason to think this approach will not work again.

So. Let's fucking fix this. My impression is that the Violet Room is the prime mover in what appears to be a severely compounded shitstorm. That said, I don't think the existence of the Violet Room is the problem. Callout threads having their own room? Meh. It creates a lot of opportunity for complaints about overmoderation of threads via moving (and were we splitting? Yuck, as yucky as derailment is), so I think it's generally a bad idea, but the existence of the VR doesn't lead to gturner being banned. Consider scrapping it (or not) in 6 months.

How about treating the VR like Daycare? That shouldn't have happened, particularly to gturner. gturner's posts outside the RR are quite useful. The only possible candidates for a Daycare (which, I'll take care to note, is not in the rules and was not, AFAIK, discussed) are @Teh Baba Returns, @DiamondPlayer, and should he ever return, @Starguard (I do not miss those Cleopatera threads). Human spammers. Bad as his content often was, gturner does not rise to that level. Even TBR and DP did manage to have the occasional interesting post (and so did SG before he went off the deep end of the Nile). If a Daycare is to exist, it should have defined rules for its use. Trolls using spam as their medium, for instance. Otherwise, to paraphrase some good but annoying advice, moderate (move to VR) the posts, not the posters. gturner does not rise to that level, and anyway the rule was not there (and still isn't) when he committed whatever offense landed him there.

If gturner acted out in response to this, warn/ban as appropriate for the actual offense. If he was banned "because we're tired of his shit", that can't stand, and the ban should be undone immediately!

Okay, those look like the root causes AFAIK. If they're not, tell me. If you're going to blame anything on gturner, have some links to back it up. I never saw him post anything that violated the spirit of the rules as I understand it, let alone the letter of it. If those are the root causes, link me to all the fallout. Preferably in some sort of chronological order. Note bans and warnings handed out in the timeline. We've got to fix this mess, and if I have to tell you exactly how to do it, so be it, but I need all the information, and I'm getting too old for this shit.

If I have understood the root causes, unban and un-Daycare gturner and then we figure out the rest of this shit, and fix it all at once. The shitstorm ends, no one commits seppuku (Anna, John ).

Sorry, but John already left and I'm not paying the upkeep for what's probably going to be another alt-right echo chamber in six months for reasons that are obvious.

But that said, I'd recommend keeping VR for split content. Sean complained about how much of MC had become about pissing on Dayton and no amount of warnings, verbal or otherwise, really made a dent. With the new Trek series, I only see that becoming worse. So cut the cancer outta the episode threads and stick it into its own box set.

Daycare can be an extreme last resort.

How do I do it? also, I don't catch your drift.

Also, regarding that 2007 meltdown, Elwood did end up making a,shit ton of changes. It wasn't just unbanning Storm....he condensed the staff to having a handful of staff, having Listkeeper leave and not just handing everything off to Tamar that he didn't want to do.

Of all the things he did, removing Listkeeper was the absolute fucking best thing. People may be out for gul's head but he is Clyde 1.0 compared to that fuck tard who is still a condescending twat when I see him on Facebook.

Is Ramen starting all his shit threads in the VR, or are we moving them there? I'm beginning to see where the worry about politically-biased VR use is coming from! It took, what a week, for it to become reality?! Jayzus, it takes most politicians at least a few months to start abusing a new power. WTG, guys. WT fucking G.

I'll have to poke through the ACP to figure it out again
Dinner and his animal talk.

If he's starting the threads there on his own accord, I don't give a shit

There was also vastly increased transparency externally. And internally too, where it's apparently been sorely lacking for some time now. What happened to the whole "discuss things in The Shelter instead of over PM" guideline? This is for our own (staff) good, because PMs (and caht before it) got echo-chambery.

Yeah, neither do I. Apologies if that wasn't clear.

And while we're on topic, why the hell is it now the Violent Room? Don't troll the membership.

You have a lot of good advice, O2C. The only problem is that shootER and I both specifically do not want gturner here. It's not political, we simply see him as dragging the overall tenor of the board in a bad direction. And there's what Anna said. I'm not going anywhere just yet, but I completely agree with her about where I see the board headed and not wanting to pay for it or have my name associated with it. Ultimately that's what we need to figure out.

Something else to keep in mind is that gturner, subsequent to his pre-ban restriction, shared PMs with a few people. I think that's a problem regardless of anything else.

Also, the other two bans were just one week bans, for much the same reason as you banned people during the so-called Storm/gul incident.

This entire thing has been handled in about the worst way possible while it's also true that the board was heading in a very ugly direction.

His tone at TK makes me less sad about keeping him over there. I'm just sorry we had to lose Paladin and John on his account.

This whole thing has been a Kobayashi Maru.

For the record, this was one of two times we've discussed board matters via PM. The other was Flashy's rep bullshit. But please note that it didn't come outta malice or trying to hide thing. It came in PM, we rushed, we didn't think. I can only speak for myself when I say I wasn't thinking about cutting you guys out intentionally. To paraphrase something Tamar once told me after the Meka thing, we're not evil.

So, who here thinks the Violent Room should continue, and who thinks it should be done away with?

See here:

http://wordforge.net/index.php?threads/vr-poll.111677/

Of course it's your legal right to do that, but yeah, it is political, dress it up how you want. Used to be we fought shit with words. For a while with rep. Now with a ban? How can you want to be associated with *that*? We've allowed blatant racism and thread derailment since day one, and you know why? Because those in the right could always win the argument. This is giving up the fight, and just swatting away with a banhammer at whatever you don't happen to like. And not even consistently! As far as dragging the tenor of the board in a bad direction, Ramen and Dinner are far wore offenders than gturner. Are they next? Where's the line? Why does it look like there isn't a line and you're being entirely capricious? This is not a good quality for a board owner or admin.

Unban gturner*, or draw the line, admit you want new restrictions, write the new rules, ban Ramen and Dinner after their next offenses, and let the cards fall where they may.

Links? *possibly offset by the justice in this

Good.

I'm finally back. My apologies for being absent at a critical time, but I had a staffing emergency I had to deal with over the holiday and weekend. I won't bore you with the details here, but from Thursday night to today, I worked 63 hours covering unmanned shifts in our editing department plus covering a police officer funeral today.

The gturner "exile" was a technical SNAFU. I thought he was being kicked from the Red Room and could post elsewhere. I believe Anna and gul did as well. That was fixed as soon as we were all aware of it, but not soon enough to keep him from screeching that he'd been banned (though, from his perspective, it probably seemed that way).

I'd be willing to entertain all of that. Bring back gtard after a week as a punishment for his PM/account shenanigans and, if everyone agrees, write new rules to try to clean up the unsavory turn the board has taken.

And you could ditch the Violet Room as well.

Agreed. That's probably how to get out of this utter clusterfuck with the least damage done. The shitstirrers have won this round anyway. Yay, I trolled an admin into resigning - what an accomplishment for people in their 40s as must be most of us here by now

As for the racist stuff: It's your board. Your rules. While it does say jurisdiction of the United States in the rules, you can still make house rules. If the bar owner won't have racist speech in his establishment, the 1st amendment is kind of nonexistent wouldn't you say. You can cite it all you want as long as it's while you're on the way to the exit.

Finally I'd like to add that I think 4 horsemen are too many. I get it it's nice when it comes to the bill but what about sharing teh powar based on quarters? Or at the very least speak with one voice, not four that contradict each other. There are really plenty of staff members who could play the role of mediator behind the scenes, help coordinate and be your PR officer when it comes to the membership.

Just b/c gturner spams up and derails threads with bullshit of a conservative flavor, doesn't mean ban is b/c of the conservative flavor, it could just be that he spams up and derails threads.

The guy isnt here for discussion or community. He's here to see how much shit he can throw and get away with. Just as he was at TBBS. His words and actions since back this up.

Board ownership is under no obligation to provide him space for that.

That's precisely my view. When you find the place disquieting and often unenjoyable, it often comes down to why am I paying the bills so that this guy can blatantly fuck with us?

I say we set up a GoFundMe account and everyone can chip in on their own accord. Then people will have more ownership in the appearance of the board to not let shit stirrers stay around just cuz

But yeah. For all practical purposes, it's been three of us for the year I was on staff, since @evenflow is pretty busy these days, but with the number of people we have, we could operate with two and let the staff get involved with any tie breaker situations. shootER and Krieg, I've got trust in to make good decisions.