Changes In Forum Administration

[randi]

I'm not sure when this got added but having to fill out a Justification form to have a reason to join the forum seems pretty gate-keep-y to me. It just screams "Oh, you better have a good reason or you're not welcome here" and I think that's just bad optics.

That looks like something put in place to combat spambot registrations, which have been a problem here in the past. I've set new user registration back to email verification instead of admin verification, so we'll see how it goes. Admin verification can be useful temporarily, but I'd prefer it not be a long-term solution, because it does discourage participation by new users.

The justification request looks like this extensions. At first glance, based on their description ("How do you know whether or not the person who has just signed up for your board signed up just to spam it? Letting people justify their activation can help you decide exactly who should be activated and who shouldn't be."), I can see the appeal, but anybody who wanted to cause trouble would just lie on the form, and other people who would have contributed would just be put off by it. Probably it's only real benefit is adding an extra required field to the registration form that an unaware bot wouldn't fill in, so its registration would get rejected that way.

[june gloom]

I've kind of avoided talking about PB because it felt like a waste of time, but it's been bothering me to the point that I do have to speak up as a transfem myself and try to unpack this at a more granular level than I've seen so far.

So I do have to agree that PB's post, regardless of what he (or his defenders) claim his intent to be, was making some pretty heinous implications, and then arguing that it wasn't bigoted to cast aspersions on the trans members of the community. The way he uses phrases like "the trans lot" ("What do you mean 'you people?!'" -- like who in particular is he describing, and what is his intent in using this phrasing?) and that the leadership is "strangely" made up of trans people (what's so strange about a community full of queer and trans people having queer and trans people in leadership?) -- I'm sorry, how is hiding behind ESL/poor phrasing to excuse these inflammatory claims any different from his claims of hiding bad moderator behavior behind accusations of transphobia? (Which, for the record, I'm not saying didn't happen, but it's such a common complaint from privileged people that "you can't say anything without being accused of being a bigot" -- often supporting this argument with made up scenarios, if they deign to support it at all -- that I cannot take it in good faith, even if -- especially if -- in this particular case he may be correct.) To say nothing of him directly linking abusive moderator behavior with trans identities in his second paragraph.

I'm making no suggestions on what to do about it, mind. I'm so used to communities just letting stuff slide on even the slightest ambiguity that I've learned to never expect any real consequences. Do what you want.

[DoomKrakken]

You still ignore one thing here: You may not have been offended by that post - others definitely were.
Now you are doing the exact same you accuse the former admins of - let your own bias get in the way of a reasonable judgment.
While I didn't feel personally attacked by that post, I felt it went too far - and had I been the one moderating it it'd have gotten a stern warning that any repeat offense would result in a two week ban.

With all due respect, you also failed to understand the point PillowBlaster made.

That's completely irrelevant. Whatever he was trying to say (yes, I freely admit that I had difficulties getting to the actual point of that diatribe) was presented in a manner that at least some people considered extremely offensive. The post made it very hard to get to the essence but made it very easy to piss people off. It's the presentation that matters here, not the presumed content.

Be that as it may, I was not addressing the offensive nature of the post (personally I don't believe such reprimands should be handed out just 'cuz people took offense to it, but that's just me and that's a whole other discussion for another time and place). You would've handed out a reprimand because the post was considered offensive by some? Fine, I guess.

However, notice that when I was responding to others about this topic, those others were commenting on how PillowBlaster's comment was transphobic (which it wasn't, just so we're absolutely clear). I was only addressing the transphobia accusation, and that was it. When I appealed to Cali about removing PillowBlaster's warning, he said his warning applied to the offensive nature of the comment, since he spoke harsh words, but didn't have malicious intent behind them.

From there I left it alone.

[Graf Zahl]

That's completely irrelevant. Whatever he was trying to say (yes, I freely admit that I had difficulties getting to the actual point of that diatribe) was presented in a manner that at least some people considered extremely offensive. The post made it very hard to get to the essence but made it very easy to piss people off. It's the presentation that matters here, not the presumed content.

You are entering a very slippery slope here.

At what point does offending behavior become a problem?

How many insults have to be traded before action is taken?
What kind of sexual advances are acceptable before it becomes harassment?

You see the double standard you employ here?
The entire thing started by not acting on the latter kind of bad behavior much earlier, but you are strongly in favor of doing it with the former, just because you respect the person this was about.
Well, until last month Marisa WAS a respected member of the community.

Offensive language - even unintentionylly offensive language - can hurt people just as much as bad sexual conduct.

[yum13241]

At what point does offending behavior become a problem?

When it starts to impact, for example, their reputation undeservedly.

How many insults have to be traded before action is taken?

Ideally 0. Normally 1+.

What kind of sexual advances are acceptable before it becomes harassment?

If they tell you to stop, STOP. Don't be a creep.

Offensive language - even unintentionally (fixed spelling error) offensive language - can hurt people just as much as bad sexual conduct.

Parentheses are mine.
And ultimately there's no real way to determine intention. No one can read minds. You can't force people to take an oath, and you can't assume too much good faith, which is precisely what happened with Marisa.

---

You are entering a very slippery slope here.

Made in UDMF?

I feel like further hair-splitting and nitpicking will get us nowhere.

[SamVision]

Hello, I haven't been active in this community for quite a few years, not that I had much to contribute in the first place. I've been following these threads for a few days, and I feel everything I had wanted to say on this matter has already been said by others.

huge snip

This is basically what was on my mind and Boondorl formulated it much better than I was going to.

Offensive language - even unintentionylly offensive language - can hurt people just as much as bad sexual conduct.

Graf, I have to say I am incredibly disappointed and disgusted by your takes on these two threads. Every single one of your posts has been grossly dismissive of the ordeal, trying to frame it as meaningless drama, wanting it to be nothing more than water under the bridge. I understand your position, you don't want the house you guys have built to collapse after all these years, but your takes have been disturbing to say the least and the fact that no one has properly called you out on it is just so beautifully endemic of this entire situation. I admire your work Graf, I really do, but I don't admire your lip. I cannot believe that you are so pathetically out-of-touch you cannot understand the implications of your last post before clicking submit.

For a while now I've been meaning to get back into Doom modding, back into making my GZDoom mods, and while it's something I'm still probably going to do, I'm going to be keeping far away from these boards. The staff has proven on multiple occasions that they cannot get their heads out of their asses, and they prioritize themselves and their clique over the community that they are in charge of. What happened was only a matter of time, it wasn't a lapse in judgement or an accident. The business with the fun police coming to light is scary to be honest, and I know now that this place is not for me to come back to anymore.

[ZzZombo]

All the really unique stuff was written by me, from scratch. Back then, phpBB didn't have an extension framework, so anybody who wanted to customize it (even with "official" mods) was basically making their own fork of phpBB. For smaller incremental updates, there was a pretty good chance that any specific mod would continue to work after upgrading. And if not, it probably wouldn't be too hard to get it working again. But for major upgrades, where a lot of the software changed essentially overnight, that was basically guaranteed to not be the case.

I experienced the same thing with the upgrade from phpBB 2.x to 3.x. All the board's mods had to be redone again. This board wasn't as customized back then, so it mostly meant all I had to do was wait for people to rewrite the mods I had used before and then just merge them in when they became available. After that, with all the experience I had gained from merging changes into phpBB, I got more ambitious and started doing customizations of my own to make this board more useful (or interesting) for me, and ZDoom specifically.

Unfortunately, it was necessary to upgrade from the previous version because the older version of PHP that the old software ran on was about to stop receiving security updates. On the other hand, the current version of phpBB is supposed to have an extension framework that makes it possible to write modifications that are far more decoupled from the core board code than the traditional mod code for older versions had been. I'm also pretty sure that all the data for those customizations survived the database upgrade here, so if those mods were rewritten again as proper phpBB extensions, they would theoretically continue to function with later major upgrades of phpBB with considerably less effort than a full rewrite would require.

Do you need any help? It's been a while since the upgrade and it doesn't look like any progress has been made on the subject? I'd like to volunteer my skills and free time. Personally I strongly want to bring the old features back, so I guess now is as good time as any to offer my help, although I can't promise any concrete results right now, of course.

[Graf Zahl]

stuff

For the record, I responded to this via PM.

[DoomKrakken]

You see the double standard you employ here?
The entire thing started by not acting on the latter kind of bad behavior much earlier, but you are strongly in favor of doing it with the former, just because you respect the person this was about.

... so much for "another time and place".

I'm honestly offended that you think my opinion here is based off of that held by PillowBlaster just because I respect him. Even if I despised PillowBlaster to the point of utter disrespect, I'd still hold the same opinion. On the contrary, I have held high (albeit waning) respect for you, even more than I have for PillowBlaster, and yet obviously I've never shared your opinion.

You're equating Marisa's repeated and varied sexual misconduct with PillowBlaster's one post concerning a possible cronyism ploy. Why? Is every form of offense taken to be thus treated the same? I'm not trying to diminish the fact that PillowBlaster's post offended some people, but are you really going to say it's comparable to Marisa's exposure and the actions of the former moderators?

See, this is precisely why I advocate against issuing reprimands for "offensive content". Mods and admins get to a point where they equate any behavior or content they deem offensive to be the worst-case scenario, failing to acknowledge the existence of tiers of offensive content and the fact that some people are more prone to filing complaints because they're easily offended. People keep touting how PillowBlaster's comment was "offensive", yet the only argument I've seen for why it's offensive was because those who complained about it thought it was transphobic.

Huh... so I guess I was indeed attempting to prove how PillowBlaster's post was not offensive all along. If I addressed the transphobia concerns to show how the post wasn't transphobic - since the transphobia was the only thing people brought up against the post - then logically it would follow that the post should no longer be called "offensive" either. At this point now I wonder what's left of his post that's still offensive or what rules he broke that'd justify it.

[dpJudas]

You need to take into consideration that all moderation evolves a fair amount of judgement call of what you think the intent of the submitter was. It is a job where you can't just ask the one posting because that takes a long time and bad actors generally try to fuck with you with the untruthful answer they will give.

This is why one moderator might reach the conclusion something seemed transphobic while another one felt maybe that wasn't the intent.

[Graf Zahl]

You're equating Marisa's repeated and varied sexual misconduct with PillowBlaster's one post concerning a possible cronyism ploy. Why? Is every form of offense taken to be thus treated the same? I'm not trying to diminish the fact that PillowBlaster's post offended some people, but are you really going to say it's comparable to Marisa's exposure and the actions of the former moderators?

No, I am pointing out the double standard you are showing here, i.e. condemn the bad actions you disprove of but shrug it off when it's "mere" verbal assault that doesn't further the main argument.
Do you know how many people get emotionally hurt by these things? It's a lot more than some people seem to think. Words can often be the strongest weapons an opponent can wield.

It doesn't matter if it's a one-off, the mere fact remains that this post received strong complaints from non-staff members. Why do you want to treat this kind of transgression differently? If we get this kind of selective moderation we'd just switch from one extreme to the other and in the end little or nothing will be gained.

[Ihavequestions]

Do you know how many people get emotionally hurt by these things? It's a lot more than some people seem to think. Words can often be the strongest weapons an opponent can wield.

People have a right to not be sexually harrassed. I think you really fail to see this.

What people do not have is a right to get their feelings protected all the time and on every occasion. But you and many others seem to believe that they somehow do, which is the main problem here as it eventually leads to what has happened around Marisa. A broad change of attitude is needed towards all this.

[Vyticoz]

verbal assault

>Verbal assault means a threat of an immediate harmful or offensive touching, coupled with an apparent immediate ability to commit same.
>Verbal assault means any willful spoken threat to inflict physical injury on another person, under circumstances that create a reasonable fear of imminent injury, coupled with the apparent ability to inflict injury.

Where is the verbal assault in his post? There is none. I don't know if you have some sort of axe to grind against PB or what's going on in your mind but you need to sit down and be quiet now. You've been nothing but dismissive of this entire incident from the start. YOU are part of the problem. Stop it.

[Caligari87]

Alright, I've let this go on for way longer than it should because I wanted to give people a chance to work out their feelings. It's clear that's not going to happen, and things are devolving into insults.

PillowBlaster has been given a second chance. It's not some anti-trans conspiracy, nor a lack of understanding about how words can offend. It was a moderation decision by me, because I believe a warning for a first offense is usually more appropriate. Of course, is kinda moot because I think given this whole debate he's probably leaving anyway....

Unless something new about PB's behavior comes to light, that topic is closed, and continuing it will result in a warning. If you have concerns, you may PM me directly.

[yum13241]

Let's stop beating a dead horse.

What people do not have is a right to get their feelings protected all the time and on every occasion...

Bold is mine.

I wish more people knew that.