Suggestion and Update Thread

OBAMATRON said:
Limit access of new users to Discussion.
Click to expand...

Viewing is fine but posting should be a privilege. That's my two cents.

Last night in chat someone mentioned locking threads after a certain number of pages. This seems like a good idea to me. I honestly didn't realize how bad the problem with discussion was until yesterday, because I rarely hang out past the six page mark. There's also no good reason for these threads to go on indefinitely. If someone has a question about an update but wasn't able to post in the discussion thread before it locked, they can just post in Random Thoughts & Questions.
 
  • Disagree
  • Agree
Reactions: garbageraider, Mr. 0, exball and 2 others
CuriousBystander said:
Viewing is fine but posting should be a privilege. That's my two cents.

Last night in chat someone mentioned locking threads after a certain number of pages. This seems like a good idea to me. I honestly didn't realize how bad the problem with discussion was until yesterday, because I rarely hang out past the six page mark. There's also no good reason for these threads to go on indefinitely. If someone has a question about an update but wasn't able to post in the discussion thread before it locked, they can just post in Random Thoughts & Questions.
Click to expand...
They'll just start new threads on the same topics and it will piss people off more.
 
  • Agree
  • Disagree
Reactions: CatParty, asperhes, garbageraider and 3 others
exball said:
That's like trying to prevent someone from pissing in an ocean of piss. If you want new updates on whatever Chris has done just read the updates forum.
Click to expand...
exball's articulated what I wanted to say pretty well.

The fact is that there's no cure for discussion.

I would say that there's two main groups that visit this forum from having known Chris. The type of people who ask questions and want to understand something alien to them, and the type of people who want to whine about what a bastard Chris is to make themselves feel better about what a shitty person they are.

The first group join and lurk. Sometimes they get involved, post a little, build up a bit of a reputation, and then join us off-topic.
The second group shit. On everything. All the time. Perpetually. They never have anything to say, and they don't fucking think. They just shit. Because they want to be heard, because they want to be complimented or applauded for their efforts of shitting.

People constantly suggest little ideas for Discussion. They usually suggest new rules, but sometimes they suggest prohibiting new users from posting there. I feel that defeats the purpose of having open registration to begin with. Any forum that complicates the process of registering and posting is a shitty forum. Having little, individual rules to tell people what they can and cannot post about is almost entirely ineffective. Half the page would be the big red box up at the top. The more rules, the fewer people read.

The other really difficult thing about fixing up Discussion is that, the amount of energy required for reformation isn't justified by the end goal. What happens if I can dedicate my time to stringently moderating discussion? We get a nice place to talk about Chris? Who gives a shit? Taking a board about someone who's retarded so seriously is quite retarded in itself.

So the answer is there isn't an answer. Deleting individual posts as they're reported placates people. Ratings seemed to have helped a little bit. Banning shitty posters helps out. But there'll never be a day when Discussion is really "good". I'll drop chlorine in the pool to clean it out every so often, but it'll never be sterile.
 
  • Like
  • Agree
  • Informative
Reactions: Dr. Meme, limecouch, Johnny Bravo and 2 others
@Null Why not appoint a couple hardass mods for Discussion? I think that by pouring bleach into Discussion every now and then, you are encouraging the kind of behavior that you don't want. You're saying "keep doing this, I'll just step in when it gets to be too much to bear". That's a reactive solution to what I see as a progressive problem. Just appoint a couple people to kick this shit down when it pops up, like on the spot correction. I think things went well when Marv and Alec were locking threads that went on too long and keeping threads on topic. You need people to do that full time. You also don't need to have a big wall of rules. I think a couple guidelines would work. In any case, ignorance of the rules is no excuse. People should get called out for making stupid posts, rather than being allowed to contribute to the cesspool.

*edited for more content
 
Last edited:
  • Agree
Reactions: Holdek, garbageraider and Foulmouth
OBAMATRON said:
@Null Why not appoint a couple hardass mods for Discussion?
Click to expand...
Selecting moderators is an exceedingly difficult task that I take really seriously. There's a massive number of things I look for in a staff member.

Currently, we have 3 categories, 7 forums, 16 if you include sub-forums. Between them, we have 2 (active) moderators per category, 4 global moderators, and 2 administrators. Between all of these, only DeagleDad420, Glaive, Saney, and Hellblazer were selected by myself.

In the month of August, we had 272 new threads, 28207 new posts, and 111 new users (that posted at least once). Split evenly between them that's about 22 threads, 2350 posts and 10 users per month for each person to deal with. It's actually quite a bit of work. The cool thing is that an overwhelming percentage of our users are awesome people and there's very rarely a problem that arises, and those that do are squelched expediently.


The issue with giving someone who just wants to delete stuff and ban people power is that it's really off-putting. Our mods are great at filtering out posts based on if they cause problems and/or explicitly break rules. By moderating outside of the boundaries of the rules, you distress the userbase.

Also interestingly, if you start deleting posts based on an imaginary, discretionary basis, only the good posters start wondering if they have anything to say. I see this a lot with the updates board. Strangely, people who do have something to add rarely post there, but I still end up removing a ton of submissions by those that just want to be heard for the sake of it. So that sort of approach doesn't work.


So back to the criteria for a moderator. I don't have a formal list, I play by ear. Here's some things I can think of off the top of my head.
  • Does not make emotional decisions. @KatsuKitty is a good example, and combined with his technical abilities, is why he's the only administrator I've ever selected.
  • Handles criticism with finesse, rolls with punches really well. @DeagleDad420 is a good example.
  • There is no chance of drama promoting the person. @Glaive, @Niachu, @Dunsparce, etc are all excellent community members. Glaive was promoted on extremely short notice, but everyone had great feelings about him and he comes from a background of putting up with more bullshit than I can imagine.
  • If the board covers a specific thing, knows a lot about their subject. @DeagleDad420 and @He Sets Me On Fire are veterans in the topics their boards are about.
  • Not afraid to act punitively. All of our global moderators can put their foot down. @Dunsparce is out of control.
  • Fan of Commando (1984) and The Room. @CompyRex is a fag.

I tell people, I am the worst member of the staff. I do none of these things better than anyone. I can't even quote a line from Commando. But that's why I'm so stringent on who I put in power, because they have to pick up my slack.
 
  • Informative
  • Winner
  • Disagree
Reactions: ⚞⛇⚟, Glaive, Johnny Bravo and 7 others
@Null At the risk of seeming argumentative I will continue with this.
I agree that mods shouldn't delete posts or ban people wantonly. To put it really plainly: Why don't you just hire a couple sperg wranglers? I think the problem with Discussion might be a lack of supervision. Just keep things in line and on topic. Also, I added some shit to my last post while you were writing your little novel.
 
OBAMATRON said:
@Null At the risk of seeming argumentative I will continue with this.
I agree that mods shouldn't delete posts or ban people wantonly. To put it really plainly: Why don't you just hire a couple sperg wranglers? I think the problem with Discussion might be a lack of supervision. Just keep things in line and on topic. Also, I added some shit to my last post while you were writing your little novel.
Click to expand...
I answered your question in my reply. There is nobody who meets that list of criteria who would want the job.
 
  • Disagree
Reactions: Holdek
Maybe the answer is not more moderation but less. Turn Discussion into a basically unmoderated forum and figuratively wall it off from the rest of the site. Trying to regulate the quality of discussion about a retarded manchild is a fool's game and anyone you assign to that task will probably burn out eventually. Let people shitpost all they want there and ban them if they spread it to the other subforums.
 
  • Disagree
  • Like
Reactions: Holdek and Strewth
MrTroll said:
Maybe the answer is not more moderation but less. Turn Discussion into a basically unmoderated forum and figuratively wall it off from the rest of the site. Trying to regulate the quality of discussion about a retarded manchild is a fool's game and anyone you assign to that task will probably burn out eventually. Let people shitpost all they want there and ban them if they spread it to the other subforums.
Click to expand...
Yep, basically, that's how it is. Shitposters rarely tend to crawl out of discussion and I'm OK with that.
 
  • Disagree
Reactions: Holdek
Just have faith in the rating and report systems. Usually a new user getting a ton of negatives is enough to rattle them into line. Look at the negative ratings board. If it's not petty joke ratings, the board is lolcows to avoid or banned users.
 
  • Agree
Reactions: Clown Doll and OtterParty
If you hate stuff in Discussion, report it. If shitty posts are reported and deleted, quality will improve.

Think of it like a community garden in an inner city. If everyone pitches in, you end up with a nice little patch of calm and niceness in an ugly area. If you depend on the city council and cops to do everything, you're going to end up with a gated field of filth full of junkies.
 
  • Agree
  • Winner
  • Like
Reactions: Philosophy Zombie, Ronald Gaygun, Clown Doll and 5 others
Purely, purely hypothetical question - what would you think of a name change?

I mostly went with the name "CWCki Forums" because it was an extension of the CWCki in terms of talking about Chris and keeping that shit off the CWCki. Problem is I think we're starting to eclipse the CWCki itself in terms of popularity. I was wondering for the longest time why people called the CWCki "sonichu.com" and then I realized it's because people might be confused between that and the forums.

I was thinking we could make it something a bit more general. I was thinking of something that's vaguely Chris related but still general enough to encompass the fact we talk about other people besides Chris. Not a huge fan of other lolcows, that's just my thing, but I see that it's an incredibly popular area of discussion and a good chunk of the community do enjoy talking about other lolcows. I still want this forum to always have a place to discuss Chris, as someone somewhere is just discovering Chris, but I don't think we need to be purely constrained by discussion of Chris.

Also I wish Null said I was a model staff member ;-;. I tell everyone about the great taste of Charleston Chew™.
 
  • Like
  • Feels
Reactions: OBAMATRON, CatParty, Glaive and 3 others
I love the idea. And you're not staff- you're our spiritual leader. Our jowly, headless-body-of-Agnew-controlling, unrepentantly evil direct link to GodBear.
 
  • Like
  • Disagree
Reactions: Holdek and champthom
champthom said:
Purely, purely hypothetical question - what would you think of a name change?

I mostly went with the name "CWCki Forums" because it was an extension of the CWCki in terms of talking about Chris and keeping that shit off the CWCki. Problem is I think we're starting to eclipse the CWCki itself in terms of popularity. I was wondering for the longest time why people called the CWCki "sonichu.com" and then I realized it's because people might be confused between that and the forums.

I was thinking we could make it something a bit more general. I was thinking of something that's vaguely Chris related but still general enough to encompass the fact we talk about other people besides Chris. Not a huge fan of other lolcows, that's just my thing, but I see that it's an incredibly popular area of discussion and a good chunk of the community do enjoy talking about other lolcows. I still want this forum to always have a place to discuss Chris, as someone somewhere is just discovering Chris, but I don't think we need to be purely constrained by discussion of Chris.

Also I wish Null said I was a model staff member. I tell everyone about the great taste of Charleston Chew™.
Click to expand...
Yeah, it's not as closely connected to the CWCki as it used to be. But I think the name should still reflect that this is primarily an OPL board.

So maybe, "CWC LOLDairy, Inc." or "Chris n' Friends" :heart-full:
 
  • Like
  • Agree
Reactions: Clown Doll and champthom
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back