I'm really doubting your mental stability at this point. NOBODY replied with that shit.

I think all sites would want this in their rules. Not sure it's practical to put there, though.

I don't know, if I had to guess an age that BYOND target's mostly I'd say mid teens through early adults, you can't expect seriousness 110% of the time imo and if going off-topic was to change and result in punishments, then there goes most of the usual forum posters, then you'd just have a dead forum with no sense of humor :P

The only thing I find off putting about that thread is how useless of a suggestion it is, and the fact that every time Lummox says "nah bruh, I ain't doin it", the OP ( not just Alien, other people have done this too ) immediately respond with "WELL, WHY NOT? I DEMAND A BETTER EXPLANATION!"

When it comes to feature requests, I'd like to see

- People actually THINK before they post feature requests. Just because you had a spur of the moment idea pop into your head doesn't mean it needs to be posted on the forums. Take a few minutes, make sure it's indeed something worth mentioning, and then post. I do this all the time when I post on the Dota 2/League forums. Sometimes something will feel unbalanced or unfair in the game and I feel like going to the threads and suggesting it be changed but then I stop, play a few more matches, search for other threads where people discussed the same thing and I realize it actually is balanced and nothing needs to be adjusted. If I posted every idea that came to my head, I would have probably around 40 different threads on the League forums - instead I only have 2. Check to see if it has already been asked previously as well - a "no" from Lummox last week will probably still be a "no" this week.

- People take "no" for an answer. If your feature request is rejected, move on with your life. In that thread, even after Lummox said "no", there's still people going back and forth about it when a decision has already been made. Of course making a suggestion you think is amazing and then seeing it get shot down feels crappy but that's life. That's why it's called a "suggestion" or "request" and not a "demand". It means the other person has the freedom to tell you to take your ideas and shove them back up your ass - even if it's a perfectly good suggestion.

If the forums went back to a tree structure instead of a linear chronological structure, branching conversations wouldn't be so bad. I suggest we make the Forum link redirect to an official BYOND subreddit.

I do agree that a warning shown to users that have their post's deleted stating why would kinda help lead people in the right direction?questionmark??

We did used to have a warning system but it was phased out for some reason (I miss it!)

Tom phased it out because it encouraged a debate about whether the forum rules were valid with repeated problem users.

Basically, what was going on when I was a mod, was we'd delete a post because it was a derail or just outright blatant trolling, incidental trolling because the user was literally too stupid to understand that their behavior was what was causing people to pick fights with them left and right, or general dickassery. A message would be sent to the user.

Said user would argue, insult, berate, etc. with the moderator. Then would tell Tom that said moderator was overstepping their boundaries.

Once Tom agreed with the moderator's action, said user would then rant at Tom for an hour about how all the mods and developers were literally hitler and about how the boards should be free.

Said user, about 30% of the time would then rage out on the forums, derailing and instigating in order to bring more moderator action against themselves in some misguided attempt to get people in their corner and cause more problems.

Eventually, said user would be banned for 24 hours to 7 days. This would escalate the situation further in most cases, causing the user to jump to alt accounts or instigate their dumb little buddies to start posting on the forums on their behalf. We'd lengthen the ban to 90 days. Then we'd get called power-hungry assholes. Then the users would realize the next action was a permaban and they'd get worse yet, actually harassing users via PM and making threats to moderators via their shoutboxes/PM.

Then we'd permaban the user. Then they'd whine to Tom and get unbanned. Then they'd gloat about how Tom himself unbanned them (only after they begged and cried about how they would change), and went right back to what they were doing before the permaban, only re-permabanning them became uncomfortable because we'd be reversing Tom's actions, so we'd usually just try to ignore the user's ever-worsening behavior and hope Tom actually paid enough attention to the forums to see what the user was up to. (He rarely did).


So yeah, the warning message being removed was a good idea. It created more problems than it solved. Most of the time, the user whose message had been deleted would not change their behavior from a talking to anyway, so the best you could do was chase behind them and attempt to quarantine their effect on the small portion of the community that still is attempting to be nice.

Lummox JR wrote:

This is 100% spot-on.

We removed the automated message pretty much just before I took things over. Tom made the suggestion and I agreed with it. As nice an idea as it sounds for moderators to be fully accountable and have their name attached to all actions, and as courteous as someone might think it would be to have an automated message explaining what happened, in practice it did nothing but cause the very trouble it meant to avert.

And the problem it solved is the reason I became cynical and dickish. Believe me, you don't want the feature back. In some ways, it helped break me.

EmpirezTeam wrote:

but what about the 1st amendment?

What about that privilege?