board77

...

Wonderful post there, jewelsong.

Says one who thinks the rules are good and should be followed.

<Shamelessly agrees with Cerin.>

Quote:

1. Distill the Charter and by-laws into a short, readable ToS-type document that is easily read and understood by all. (It's already been voted on and is in place; just make it more accessible.) And then...everyone agree to follow it. Then, um...you know - follow it. Because if people don't follow it, what's the point of having it?

Good, common-sense, and very much to the point, Jewel.

Excellent post, Jewelsong.

In essence, I agree. Your point is valid and I think that your analysis is correct.

However . . .

Quote:

Distill the Charter and by-laws into a short, readable ToS-type document that is easily read and understood by all. (It's already been voted on and is in place; just make it more accessible.) And then...everyone agree to follow it. Then, um...you know - follow it. Because if people don't follow it, what's the point of having it?

The problem with this, and what I think has been causing other problems, is that even if we distill it, people will still have their own interpretations. For example, the issue with the chess thread in the Bike Rikes was that some people saw it as being within the rules and some saw it as being outside the rules.

Unless we have even more strict rules, I think this problem will still exist. That's not to say that we're doomed to a board-life with constant drama. This place is new. The Charter was only finished and the board opened just a few months ago. We're still working out what to do and how to handle these things, because there has never been another board like this. We have no example to follow, so we're essentially making it up as we go along, no? Precedents haven't really been set.

I hope and believe that once we're more settled, once we've had a while, things will settle down. The exception proves the rule, as the saying go. We haven't figured out how much the rules can be test before they're broken.

Edit: This is not to say that we won't have drama in the future, because let's face it, we're always going to have drama. It's who we are! But once we figure out how things work and have precedents and set limits on how far the rules can stretch before breaking, it won't be as frequent, intense, and just all around not nice.

Edit 2: I'm not explaining this well, but I hope you know what I mean. Once again, I speak as a rather uninformed poster. Just my perspective.

Jewel, that was an excellent, very thoughtful post.

I just want to say - and this is going to sound strange coming from me - is there really anything wrong with having a bout of high octane drama from time to time?

Not surprisingly, I disagree.

The solution is not to have more accessable rules and to follow them. The solution is to accept that sometimes the rules will be broken. It's to accept that sometimes someone will have a sig pic that offends you. It's to accept that sometimes someone will hijack a thread for a while and spam a bit. It's to accept that sometimes someone will ask you to leave their thread alone and spam elsewhere. It's to accept that sometimes a joke will be misstimed, and should be held off on for a while. And it's to accept that if you ask nicely, chances are the offending pic, joke, spammer, whatever, will lay off it. It's to accept that going to a ranger, or pointing at the charter, or trying to FORCE that offending pick, joke, spammer or whatever to lay off, is going to piss them off and make them fight back.

It's to accept the rest of the posters for who they are, not who you think they should be on this board.

Frelga wrote:

I just want to say - and this is going to sound strange coming from me - is there really anything wrong with having a bout of high octane drama from time to time?

Heh. No.
Human nature at full blast can be riveting.

Unless, you're on the receiving end of all the negativity.
Then it probably wouldn't be much fun at all.

But I think it's inevitable.
We appear to be hard-wired into manufacturing conflict on a regular basis.

jewelsong wrote:

I have stolen Farawen's thread title of old

I am OUTRAGED! And saddened beyond well, you know! My thread was titled "The Problem with Board77".

jewelsong mis-stolen-ed my thread title.

I am going to cry.

<pats poor Farawen on the back and sobs sympathetically>

I will try later to make a serious response to this thread.

Sass, no, it's not fun to be on the receiving end. But I am yet to see a messageboard that got by without flaring up every few weeks. As these things go, B77 tends to self-stabilize pretty well, or it has to date. Perhaps this is because there is no mod to come in and stomp out the hot topics. Or maybe we just have better sort of poster.

BTW, Google thinks B77 is selling out. The current ad on this page is
Wholesale Poster Sales

I think things are working very well, overall. I hope to have some good news to report soon in the bike racks. And we have an amendment to the charter that is about to pass on an extraordinarily difficult issue, that took much work and compromise from diverse people, particularly Cerin and Estel. And people actually came out supported the system by voting, almost doubling the quorum amount.

Yes there will be disagreements about the meaning of some of the Charter. Look at the disagreements that Cerin and I had over some Charter issues in the course of the ToE discussion. But we should be able to have rational, reasonable discussions about these disagreements, like mature people do.

And for the most part, we do.

Oh dear, I just posted my own exigesis on this topic in the other thread as an answer to Estel's post. Can I just give the link?

http://www.phpbber.com/phpbb/viewtopic. ... d77#157409

The last paragraph is something I want to elaborate on but don't have the time for right now, so perhaps I'll do the elaboration here a bit later instead of taking it to the other thread. It seems more appropriate here.

Basically, I think we are particularly vulnerable to certain kinds of manipulation - and the manipulation may be subconscious - because of the kind of freedom we have chosen to allow ourselves. I don't think that rules alone can solve this problem - neither simplyfying nor complicating them - and the answer has to come from a general awareness of the type of pit we are likely to fall into because of who we are, and a studious avoidance of that pit through self-control.

Jn

...

Quote:

We also have a large proportion of high-octane, emotionally-charged, feisty, go-get-em, don't-tell-me-what-to-say posters. (And as I said before, this style of posters is often what makes a board most interesting.) On TORC, which has thousands of members, these posters still stood out, but there were enough other, less volatile posters to kind of dilute the angst and cushion the blow. However, on B77, there are less than 300 registered posters...possibly 150 who post on a regular basis. And 30+ of them are Code Red, in-your-face, take-no-prisoners style posters. It throws the tenor of the Board off-balance.

I agree with this and I think this is why some people perceive the "complaints" to be happening all the time or why some have the perception that disagreements happen more here. The fact that we don't have hundreds of other posters to dilute it is entirely correct.

Thank you for pointing it out. I hope more of us stay aware of this.

Frelga wrote:

I just want to say - and this is going to sound strange coming from me - is there really anything wrong with having a bout of high octane drama from time to time?

I have seen many. Many got resolved. Many did not.

I have seen grown-up women behaving like high school adolescents just over different tastes in FANFIC, for cornsake.

What has shocked me about the latest B77 fracas is the depth of vitriol it has exposed. I can't be amused by that, I really can't.

Jewelsong and Jnyusa, you are Teh Kewl!

What has shocked me about the latest B77 fracas is the depth of vitriol it has exposed. I can't be amused by that, I really can't.

No, it isn't amusing in the slightest.

My experience with message boards is limited to TORC and b77, so I don't really understand the dynamics too well. Except for this one observation: Everything, literally everything, both good and bad, is amplified to the nth degree.

It's like living in the middle of a melodrama.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Adding to the admiration for Jn's excellent, thought provoking post.
Damn! How I wish I had had teachers like her.

I've also posted in the other thread, but on an oblique issue.

I don't think I'll become involved in this particular brouhaha; it's too exhausting and, to be frank, I think it's a roundabout. I'd rather go ramble on another, more profitable path for a bit.

I do hang out on another forum completely unrelated to B77 or TORC. SO unrelated I even use a different nick. This other board has more registered members, but fewer active members and the major drama ala TORC and B77 doesn't really happen. There's a TOS somewhere, and it is indeed owned by a single person and his gf, who are also the mods. However, for the most part, it's a self-moderating board. S, the owner/main moderator, is very hands off with regards to posters. I've been on that board since 2001 and he's deleted/locked maybe five threads and banned a whopping six people, all of whom were textbook trolls. I've never seen him edit any posts other than a few one particularily nasty troll made (lots of swearing and threats directed at a member of the board). Everything else is handled by the membership. This system has its drawbacks. We've seen our share of drama and flame wars, but it doesn't seem to happen as often as it does on TORC or B77. I think the main reason it works is becuase on this board it's a small active membership.

Here's my guess as to why, broken down between the two boards.
TORC: strictly monitored and policed within the bounds of a TOS. HUGE board, lots of people from all sorts of backgrounds with all sorts of interests, it even has cliques and neighborhoods. Cliquishness develops. SO does discontent among those who aren't too keen on rules or have seen their friends disciplined. Also, there's more dramatic types just because there's more people. And when dramatic people get mad, they get MAD and they make sure everyone else knows it. Eventually those that were discontent to the point they wanted to do something made their move and to facillitate their move they created B77.

Push comes to shove...
The axe falls...
Jon and Ted make what I believe to be a huge mistake. I've seen what banning does to a community IRL. I do not say this lightly. They made a mistake. TORC will recover if it hasn't already, but they made a mistake.
B77 becomes something more than a meeting place for the people who want to change TORC. It becomes a community of it's own.

B77: founded by TORC's discontents, refuge for TORC's banned, this board is populated by the rule-benders and the dramatic types. For a period we were invite only, which only enhanced the cliquishness that haunted TORC and haunts us too, to some degree. We're smaller, but for the most part we're all from TORC and we carry with us the dust of the place. A fair number of us either got banned, got pissed off and left, or just sounded off a lot on TORC. A bunch of us (like me) got invited in by members of the former. I accepted the invite beecause people I liked to post with were here, but I had some trepidations simply because I'm not a big fan of cliquishness, and face it, invite-only is cliquish. I never said anything because we were headed towards going public when I arrived, and we've gone public, so that's a moot point. Made even more moot because, due to our small size, paths that would never cross on TORC intersect all over the place here on B77 and the old walls are breaking down and new ones don't seem to be coming up. However, the founders and the invitees are a self-selecting group. The dramatic types, the rebels, and their friends. We choose our friends based on compatibility. We're enriched for drama. And that's why drama happens.

SO what to do? I don't know. Curb the impulse? Take a deep breath? One thing I like to do if I'm really angry is write one flamer of a post and then instead of hitting "submit" I close the browser and walk away. Such is the liberty of written communication. Words are hard to take back. Here on a message board it's easy to just not let them out in the open at all. You can walk away and breath without offending. No one can see your face. No one can see your back. So just walk away and come back later when you've blown off steam.

Or start a food fight somewhere. We've got plenty of places for that.

...

to Jewel

and

to Jny's post in the other thread

I already said it in halplm's thread in Turf, that I think we have our rules for the sake of the community, and that therefore we need to live by them, and if someone refuses to live by them, there needs to be a way to do something about it.
I don't think explaining them better would help - I think all you need to read in order to understand our "rules" are the few lines about the key principles.
I also don't think that empowering someone to police the board would be a solution, simply because it was our ideal that we are a grown-up board where we keep ourselves in line.
It's true, though, that this latter thing doesn't seem to be working.
I think what we need is what Jny said in her long post:

Jny wrote:

We have to realize that our 'rules' such as they are can only prohibit very limited kinds of behavior and a culture of tolerance has to spring not from the rules but from the personal disgust that each of us feels when we see another person treated unfairly and intolerantly. We have to have an interior sense of when things have gone too far and not opportunistically use every discussion as a way to harm those whom we don't like. The kind of freedom we want to have here must, in other words, come together with a very keen sense of community well-being and personal self-control.

Unfortunately, I haven't a clue of how to get there.

Jny wrote:

I have been made to feel on several recent occassion that there is a faction that would like to drive me away from the board. Voronwe, I believe, feels likewise but he can speak for himself. I have said things that seemed to me completely non-controversial, as Cerin thought her own comments in the Ranger thread to be non-controversial, and they became cause for the creation of what I would call a lynch mob. I have felt ambushed. I find myself becoming paranoid (which I am not at all in real life) and this certainly does not contribute to my posting pleasure.

A bit embarrassed to add myself to such great names , but this is exactly how I feel.
There's no enjoyment here. Mostly I just come to check on how Primmy is doing and TIGG and a few others who are sharing their worries here. Plus, I don't want to give anybody the satisfaction of having pushed me away.

Well, I had needed a couple of days away from here to get some fresh air - off to catch up with things now.