[karajorma]

Why on Earth would I want to interact with you when you can't even be civil towards me?

I'll answer this one point though.

And I'm certainly not in favour of creating a two-tier system where the content creators are allowed to be more disruptive than other people.

Well you bloody should be. Not because people should be allowed to stir up more **** than others but because HLP should treasure content creators.

Given that you've made long rants in the past about no one playing your content, what good is it to treasure the content creators if doing so drives away the people who use it?

[General Battuta]

You're actually doing a very good job of showing exactly why the admins gave WoD such a wide berth. Why on Earth would anyone on the admin staff want to interact with you in any way when this is the result of us trying to make HLP better? Why on Earth would I want to interact with you when you can't even be civil towards me?

So it's up to you. You can be part of the process or you can complain and moan about the past. But should the changes that occur without you bite you on the arse down the line, I doubt you'll get much sympathy over it.

Come on, this is retroactive mythmaking. The admins gave WoD a wide berth simply because they didn't pay any attention to it. There was no reason for the admins to avoid the board at the time, no major issues or arguments; it simply did not get attention. The bad blood came well after that.



e: Seriously, on the Spoon issue...bear in mind that he suffered through at least one (more than one?) user who simply came into his forum to tell him how awful he was, how terrible everything he'd made was, and then pursued the grudge so far it actually led to a parody campaign.

How long would that kind of behavior have lasted in a subforum with active moderation or an admin on the project team? I really can't blame him for feeling like he was just thrown to the wolves. And then the first moment someone in his forum drops a nasty aside - and I agree it was nasty and unnecessary - about someone else's campaign, the whole thread gets locked! So it's not just that he was thrown to the wolves; people were paying enough attention to spot negativity. They just didn't do anything when the negativity was about Spoon.

Given that you've made long rants in the past about no one playing your content, what good is it to treasure the content creators if doing so drives away the people who use it?

This too seems really disingenuous to me. Spoon's major conflicts have been with another campaign designer (TopAce) and with the admins after a huge failure to communicate in his project board. More broadly than that, I don't think we've had any real drama outside of GenDisc and Gaming Disc since Mobius and, later, TopAce. I don't think you can make the claim that any content creators have been particularly disruptive to the user level of the community.

I'm really troubled by the way this feedback is being handled. Sure, Spoon's angry, but...it seems to me that the tone of these changes, and the tone of the reaction to the feedback, is too focused on reaction and covering. I'd focus on three points in particular:

• The effort to depersonalize mod/admin decisions
• The mournful refrain that pops up again and again: 'because it's HLP, there was drama'
• The confusion as to why many of the people calling for action against troublemakers are troublemakers

On point one - it shouldn't matter whether a decision can be connected to a particular admin. I understand the motivation behind action here, I don't think it's hugely objectionable, but I do think it's a bandage on the wrong wound. The admins shouldn't have to give a **** if people are mad about their decisions, because they should be making good decisions, decisions that lead to a more positive, functional climate. If they're not making those decisions, they should step down. I'm not saying the admins need to step down - I think they do a pretty decent job, all in all, though the global mod team is less effective. All I'm saying is that the end goal of moderation and admin action should be a civil, constructive tone, rather than a more effective system of punishment.

There is nothing essential to HLP, except possibly the color scheme, that creates drama. The problem is that mods and admins have been slow and inconsistent to act, and that the focus of the forum guidelines - then and now - gives neither guidance nor power to proactive moderation. The only person who's ever tried it was Unknown Target and holy **** was he bad at it. I hesitate to resort to the 'ounce of prevention' cliche, but, well, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Identifying problems early, taking gentle action (PMs, communication) with clear signposts to sort them out, and generally making sure that reasonable people can post without frustration will prevent drama. Waiting until everything's up at a boil and then coming down on everyone involved like a ton of bricks only creates bad blood and mistrust.

The entire forum starts to feel like a honeypot. Post about an issue? Get engaged with a topic? Ha ha, sucker! You'll have to deal with today's TrashMan or Liberator, today's freakout in Blue Planet about how Muslims are evil or tirade in Wings of Dawn about how this is GAIJIN FALSE ANIME or baffling misogynist in Diaspora telling you how to be a real man, and once you're angry at him, we'll ban you both!

That leads into my last point: if it feels like a large number of the most frequent posters - and I don't want to name the whole roster, but I'll happily include myself among them - are themselves troublemakers, consider this. if you're posting on a forum a lot, you're clearly engaged with it. You care about contributing to it, you get angry at its problems. When the forum mods and admins can't effectively solve those problems, they stop seeming like authorities who can be trusted or respected. Look at how many posts intelligent people - MP-Ryan, The_E or for instance - threw at Liberator before he got political prisonered, or at High Max before he finally got some time off. It rapidly begins to feel like the only way to contain these awful, awful posters, people who make the forums basically unreadable, is just to grind them into submission yourself.

It's not just a climate that seems to reward recrimination and punishment more than contribution and thought. It's a climate that incentivizes the thoughtful contributor to become an angry troll, because that's the only tool available to keep the unbearably bad posters in check.

I understand this thread is already full of attacks, that egos are involved on all sides, that it's really hard to swallow pride and back down. But please take this post as heartfelt feedback. I'll try to get someone who people see as a neutral positive party to read it over and back me up or caveat it.

[General Battuta]

hahahaha I can't believe I'm invoking such a dumb, dumb example, but there's that story going around about alternative discipline in schools - sitting a kid down and asking 'What's wrong? You seem really keyed up. How can we make things better?' as opposed to slapping them with punishments.

Obviously this isn't going to work universally, but I feel like we spend so much time on jabs and ripostes - seriously, the entire admin and global mod team is scared of modding gendisc because people might be mean to them? - that a little more focus on communication wouldn't hurt. There are a lot of grudges and generally they seem to get worse, not better.

[NGTM-1R]

e: Seriously, on the Spoon issue...bear in mind that he suffered through at least one (more than one?) user who simply came into his forum to tell him how awful he was, how terrible everything he'd made was, and then pursued the grudge so far it actually led to a parody campaign.

One of those.

One person who was talking openly about how to plan the kidnap and rape of one of his characters, and then went on to draw one of his characters bound and crying with rather insulting stuff scrawled on her skin. (Did I mention this person still posts on HLP regularly? It's Lorric.)

One person who came in and trolled badly a couple times but has been immensely helpful in promoting the mod since. (Hi Battuta.)

Three supportive people. (Sparda, Quanto, redsniper.)

One supportive person who can be kind of an asshole. (Me.)

Andrewofdoom and Droid, who I'm not really sure how to classify.

That was pretty much the regulars.

[Spoon]

Given that you've made long rants in the past about no one playing your content, what good is it to treasure the content creators if doing so drives away the people who use it?

Since this doesn't happen or has ever happened, its very good?

[niffiwan]

hahahaha I can't believe I'm invoking such a dumb, dumb example, but there's that story going around about alternative discipline in schools - sitting a kid down and asking 'What's wrong? You seem really keyed up. How can we make things better?' as opposed to slapping them with punishments.

Obviously this isn't going to work universally, but I feel like we spend so much time on jabs and ripostes - seriously, the entire admin and global mod team is scared of modding gendisc because people might be mean to them? - that a little more focus on communication wouldn't hurt. There are a lot of grudges and generally they seem to get worse, not better.

hahahaha - this the style of approach I try to use with my kids, its very much "in favour" for child raising as a better discipline system than punishment-focused discipline (and in my experience, much harder to do, although that might also be a product of my own upbringing which was firmly in the punishment-focused camp) .  Obviously a parent/child relationship is very different to a admin/mod/member relationship, but I really feel that this would a good.  This isn't advocating a soft hands-off approach, because it takes a lot of persistence, focus & discipline to set the boundaries, enforce those boundaries, ignore the blowback & anger you *will* receive as a result, and then follow through with the consequences where behaviour does not improve.  Focus on the education & they can (hopefully) be a productive member.  Focus on the punishment and it just creates anger & resentment.

[karajorma]

Come on, this is retroactive mythmaking. The admins gave WoD a wide berth simply because they didn't pay any attention to it. There was no reason for the admins to avoid the board at the time, no major issues or arguments; it simply did not get attention. The bad blood came well after that.

I'm not saying Wings of Dawn was ignored because of Spoon's actions. I'm saying his actions made a bad situation worse. I'm saying his actions now are still making the situation worse because instead of trying to engage with the admins he'd rather complain about the past. It's a golden opportunity and he's blowing it.

e: Seriously, on the Spoon issue...bear in mind that he suffered through at least one (more than one?) user who simply came into his forum to tell him how awful he was, how terrible everything he'd made was, and then pursued the grudge so far it actually led to a parody campaign.

As is continually being pointed out, he bears part of the blame for that. As do all the regular posters who didn't report it. I've repeatedly said that the admins aren't blameless either. But if he wants to lay all the blame on the admins he is flat out wrong. And he's going to have exactly the same issues under the new system because with every single post he's making the admins want to interact with him less.

How long would that kind of behavior have lasted in a subforum with active moderation or an admin on the project team? I really can't blame him for feeling like he was just thrown to the wolves. And then the first moment someone in his forum drops a nasty aside - and I agree it was nasty and unnecessary - about someone else's campaign, the whole thread gets locked! So it's not just that he was thrown to the wolves; people were paying enough attention to spot negativity. They just didn't do anything when the negativity was about Spoon.

This is pretty much just as disingenuous as what you're complaining about. It could just as easily be that the first time someone bothers with Spoon's forum they happen across that post and took action. Or more likely it could be that for once someone pointed out that there was a post that was breaking HLP's rules.

This too seems really disingenuous to me. Spoon's major conflicts have been with another campaign designer (TopAce) and with the admins after a huge failure to communicate in his project board. More broadly than that, I don't think we've had any real drama outside of GenDisc and Gaming Disc since Mobius and, later, TopAce. I don't think you can make the claim that any content creators have been particularly disruptive to the user level of the community.

This tangent occurred as a result of your post about banning people for posting TL;DR etc and relates to your call for an increase in harsher measures for infractions. Are you telling me that there aren't content creators who wouldn't be affected by that? Are you honestly expecting me to believe that there wouldn't be fall out if we were to ban Spoon for the personal attacks he made earlier in the thread even though those are very clearly against the rules on HLP?

Any attempt at harsher moderation would drive people out of the community. My comments about a two-tier system relate to the fact that I have no interest in bringing in a system where actions are inconsistent because we don't want to ban content creators for the same actions we ban everyone else for. I'm dead set against doing that, and I can't see any reason why anyone sensible would be in favour of it.

All I'm saying is that the end goal of moderation and admin action should be a civil, constructive tone, rather than a more effective system of punishment.

I don't disagree with that. Which is why I keep stating that the guidelines are far more important than the new policy. Unfortunately all anyone wants to talk about is the new policy.

On point one - it shouldn't matter whether a decision can be connected to a particular admin. I understand the motivation behind action here, I don't think it's hugely objectionable, but I do think it's a bandage on the wrong wound. The admins shouldn't have to give a **** if people are mad about their decisions, because they should be making good decisions, decisions that lead to a more positive, functional climate. If they're not making those decisions, they should step down. I'm not saying the admins need to step down - I think they do a pretty decent job, all in all, though the global mod team is less effective.

I don't know if you've noticed that I'm one of the few admins who still posts in Gen Dis. Most of the other admins give it a wide berth because they're sick of the drama it causes and they're sick of the personal attacks they get when they deal with the drama. That doesn't mean that the others admins won't do their jobs when it comes to moderation, but it does mean that they interact with the forum much less than they would otherwise.

We're here on a thread about how to improve HLP for everyone and I'm the only admin posting, why? Cause no one else wants to turn up and have people like Spoon throw **** at them.

And then the same people causing the problem complain that the admins don't want to engage with them. Is that such a surprise? When Spoon claims I'm not a content provider do you think that makes me more likely to want to code Wings of Dawn features? When he calls me a jerk, does that make it more likely I'm going to do things to help him? Or does it make it more likely that I'm simply going to spend my time on Diaspora instead? Notice that many of the admins who are supposedly not proactive used to be much more active in the community.

When you're complaining that the person who wrote the original Freespace FAQ isn't active in the community, maybe you need to listen to him when he says why.

Identifying problems early, taking gentle action (PMs, communication) with clear signposts to sort them out, and generally making sure that reasonable people can post without frustration will prevent drama. Waiting until everything's up at a boil and then coming down on everyone involved like a ton of bricks only creates bad blood and mistrust.

A main reason for the guideline and policy changes was to point out that we would be sending PMs to disruptive members much earlier. I suggest you pull up the new guidelines and compare them against the old and see if you can't see a very large shift in tone as to what is considered actionable. Remember that you are talking to the same admin who came down on Trashman more than any other and who finally banned him and Liberator from Gen Dis. I would have done it sooner too but the simple fact is that the old rules didn't let me and every attempt to change the rules (such as this one) is greeted with more ****-flinging.

That leads into my last point: if it feels like a large number of the most frequent posters - and I don't want to name the whole roster, but I'll happily include myself among them - are themselves troublemakers, consider this. if you're posting on a forum a lot, you're clearly engaged with it. You care about contributing to it, you get angry at its problems. When the forum mods and admins can't effectively solve those problems, they stop seeming like authorities who can be trusted or respected. Look at how many posts intelligent people - MP-Ryan, The_E or for instance - threw at Liberator before he got political prisonered, or at High Max before he finally got some time off. It rapidly begins to feel like the only way to contain these awful, awful posters, people who make the forums basically unreadable, is just to grind them into submission yourself.

It's not just a climate that seems to reward recrimination and punishment more than contribution and thought. It's a climate that incentivizes the thoughtful contributor to become an angry troll, because that's the only tool available to keep the unbearably bad posters in check.

I understand this thread is already full of attacks, that egos are involved on all sides, that it's really hard to swallow pride and back down. But please take this post as heartfelt feedback. I'll try to get someone who people see as a neutral positive party to read it over and back me up or caveat it.

Actually I don't disagree with this point. I completely understand it, especially before I became an admin. But given that the whole point of the changes is to stop doing that sort of thing, why has the thread largely consisted of people complaining about the past rather than posting comments like this about how to make the future better?

[General Battuta]

Do you see it as a comment about how to make the future better? That's an awful lot of line by line rebuttal for something I really wanted to be taken as heartfelt feedback and a gesture of rapport and understanding.  I feel like you came at my post looking for the most combative interpretation possible.

The answer to your last question is that I don't think the current changes or the mindset behind them are going to make the future better. I spoke with The_E about this today and, while I'll leave him to share his own opinion, my conclusion was that the changes are turned about backwards. He pointed to the Penny Arcade forum rules as a really good example of what I'd like to see.

[NGTM-1R]

As do all the regular posters who didn't report it.

You want to move boldly forward into the future and take suggestions on how to do so?

You can't do this.

You have assumed a responsibility for the maintenance and good order of these forums. Any failure in this is a failure of the administration and moderation and theirs alone. You people are the captain of this ship and if it runs aground it doesn't matter who's at the helm then and if you were asleep in your cabin, it's your responsibility it ran aground because you volunteered to take it.

If people aren't reporting, it's because they aren't aware the feature exists, because they don't see it produce results, because they don't desire admin or moderator intervention. These are problems that can only be addressed by action of the admins and mods.

You want to know why people are talking about the past; because of what you're doing now. Because the moderation and administration is disengaged and new rules won't help that. Because the rules don't matter without the personalities capable of enforcing them.

But also because the trajectory HLP rule changes have been on really isn't changing here. They've progress along a line, and promises have been made each time that a more active and early-acting administration and moderation will help, and frankly none of them really proved to be more than a passing bump to business as usual. I'm not being told anything I haven't heard in concept before, really. I think I have reason to be a bit cynical on that.

[General Battuta]

A main reason for the guideline and policy changes was to point out that we would be sending PMs to disruptive members much earlier. I suggest you pull up the new guidelines and compare them against the old and see if you can't see a very large shift in tone as to what is considered actionable. Remember that you are talking to the same admin who came down on Trashman more than any other and who finally banned him and Liberator from Gen Dis. I would have done it sooner too but the simple fact is that the old rules didn't let me and every attempt to change the rules (such as this one) is greeted with more ****-flinging.

If it wasn't clear, I fully support changes in this direction, and I think it's a positive aspect to the new guidelines. I wish our feedback weren't being characterized as ****-flinging, though.

[karajorma]

Yours isn't. But I find it hard to not apply that term to Spoon's actions on this thread.

Do you see it as a comment about how to make the future better? That's an awful lot of line by line rebuttal for something I really wanted to be taken as heartfelt feedback and a gesture of rapport and understanding.  I feel like you came at my post looking for the most combative interpretation possible.

I felt the second part of the post was fine. But the first part of the post ignored the issues which are still present and will continue to cause issues if they aren't resolved. Which is why I posted my feelings about them. It's not about being combative so much as not ignoring issues that will bite us on the arse if they are ignored. 

He pointed to the Penny Arcade forum rules as a really good example of what I'd like to see.

Why?

I don't go to the Penny Arcade forum so I have to ask what it does right that we don't. I like that you're making suggestions about how to improve things. I don't want that to stop, but quite a few of the responses on this thread including my last post are about why we don't think some of them would work.

[General Battuta]

I think Spoon has the right to be upset about the way he's been treated by the mods and administration, and that there needs to be some kind of formal apology or gesture - on both sides, sure - to really begin a thaw.

I'm not advocating different standards for content creators and ordinary users. The harsher measures I talked about upthread are often the form of one-week probations for minor offenses (tl;dr, hotlinking an image, using a meme or image macro). I don't know if they'd be a good fit here. But I'm happy to paste over the Penny Arcade rules and point out why The_E and I like them:

On Rules Lawyering

These rules are not complete and are not intended to be. These forums are privately owned and the administration reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. The excuse “but there's no rule about it!” will never be accepted as an excuse for bad behaviour. It is expected that all users are intelligent and mature enough. While we strive to be fair in the moderation of these boards, said enforcement is subjective by its very nature. Please see the FAQ below for information on what to do if you feel you have been treated unfairly.

Don't Be A Dick

This is the most important rule of all and its influence is wide-ranging. These forums are at various times a haven for silliness, debate, discussion, humour, advice and various other forms of discourse. They are not, at any time, a haven for pricks. Forums that are welcoming to pricks exist and you are more than welcome to go and find one, but we are not interested in running one here.

These forums are restricted to ages 13+ and it is expected that all users, regardless of age, are able to act in a mature and respectful fashion. Users are expected to have a reasonable level of social intuition regarding what is and is not acceptable social behaviour, and you should avoid saying anything to someone on these forums that you would not be willing to say to them if they were a) standing in front of you b) considerably bigger than you and holding a club. Things that we are not interested in seeing include (but are not limited to)

Getting mad about videogames
Racial epithets of any kind regardless of context
Misogynist, misandrist, homophobic or transphobic behaviour or attitudes. “Pick up artists”, this includes you.
Posting gigantic images or gifs. Anything above 500kb should be linked to.

The decision on what is and is not considered Being A Dick is determined by the mod staff. The defense “but I don't think I was being a dick” is not an acceptable one, nor is “but I didn't mean to be a dick”. Your message is what you communicate, not what you intend. That said, we understand that there is room for misunderstanding and interpretation in this rule and moderation staff will be open to polite and reasonable messages explaining why you do not feel an interpretation of this rule was fair.

Remember that we do not owe you an internet forum and that this forum is almost entirely run by volunteers.

First of all, it clearly reserves the right to moderate any behavior that the moderators judge disruptive. There's no commitment to rules minutiae here, no situations where you can't ban High Max because he hasn't technically done anything wrong. This is a clause shared with other websites (SA for instance) that reserve the right to ban anyone at any time for no reason. It may sound bafflingly totalitarian, but it seems to work - perhaps due to the caliber of the staff, I don't know.

Second, a huge block of the rules here are just devoted to making it clear that a certain standard of civil discourse is expected. This covers things like being a total creep or taking everything too seriously. Most importantly, it creates an environment where the kind of poster we want to encourage (substantive, polite, reasonable grasp of social norms, your Swash or redsniper or niffiwan, doesn't have to put up with total asshats and so doesn't turn into a jerk.

This is really what I'm taking issue with about the current rules, and it's a qualm I think The_E might share - it's a set of prohibitions, a more and more exhaustive list of what not to do, rather than a proactive and flexible guide about what kind of posts will be rewarded and what kind of tone the forums as a whole should have. SomethingAwful has done an incredible job of setting a forumwide tone: almost everyone is polite, engaged, makes high-content posts, immediately calls out creepy behavior, stays on topic and even uses proper grammar and capitalization. This comes from the understanding that the moderation team actively gardens the forum culture towards this goal. I don't know if HLP could manage this without startling degrees of user attrition, but...at least it's an ideal to look towards.

If the best a poster can hope for is to squeak along surrounded by jerks until the jerks jerk too hard and get banned, well, that's a pretty brutish forums climate. Framing the forum rules as 'be this way' rather than 'don't be this way' is a sophomorically simple reversal, but I think it might be an important one.

I think this bit is silly so I'm splitting it off:

The Glorious Edict

The only insult that is permitted on this forum is “silly goose”. No other adjective may be added, you cannot call someone a “fat, stupid, silly goose”. The only exception to this is the moderation staff, who work hard for free and therefore can call you bastards whatever they so desire. We are aware that this is very unfair and consider it to be part of the fun.

Among the insults this covers (ie; all of them) is the insult “troll”. Accusing someone of trolling will be treated as an edict violation. If you call someone a troll and they are, then you are an idiot for doing what they want. If you call them an troll and they're not, then you are an arsehole for calling them names. Please use the report button if you have a problem with another user.

The Glorious Edict is not negotiable.

[mjn.mixael]

Can we implement the silly goose rule? I love it.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

To add on to NGTM-1R's post...perhaps another reason why regular users don't report stuff is because they think it has already been reported. I remember getting chewed out by The E for reporting High Max's posts about a year after he got banned for those because I thought there was an oversight. I've been less trigger-happy with the Report to Moderator function ever since because it seemed the mods and admins clear things very quickly.

Can we implement the silly goose rule? I love it.

Would silly geese coexist with monkeys?

[karajorma]

I think Spoon has the right to be upset about the way he's been treated by the mods and administration, and that there needs to be some kind of formal apology or gesture - on both sides, sure - to really begin a thaw.

I've pointed out repeatedly that the admins do bear part of the blame. Ball is in Spoon's court now.

I'm not advocating different standards for content creators and ordinary users. The harsher measures I talked about upthread are often the form of one-week probations for minor offenses (tl;dr, hotlinking an image, using a meme or image macro). I don't know if they'd be a good fit here.

I didn't think you were. But the point is that if we institute much harsher punishments, that sort of system would quite likely evolve on its own. Hell, you can see it on this very thread. Spoon didn't get banned for insulting behaviour and the main reason is precisely because he's involved in this discussion and we don't want him excluded from it. If someone else does it, their chance of getting banned is much higher.

So yeah, I don't think harsher punishments would work on HLP. We're too small a community and quite a few people are "Too big to ban" for minor infractions.

EDIT : DAMNIT! ****ing cloudflare shenanigans chopped off the second half of this post! I'll repost in a bit.

[karajorma]

First of all, it clearly reserves the right to moderate any behavior that the moderators judge disruptive. There's no commitment to rules minutiae here, no situations where you can't ban High Max because he hasn't technically done anything wrong. This is a clause shared with other websites (SA for instance) that reserve the right to ban anyone at any time for no reason. It may sound bafflingly totalitarian, but it seems to work - perhaps due to the caliber of the staff, I don't know.

I've repeatedly stated that HLP's first rule is "Don't be a dick" in the past. I've used those exact words and said that the admins will ban you if you are a dick. And every single time I've gotten complaints that it isn't enough. Some people seem to need what being a dick is spelled out for them.

Hell, at one point during the discussions about the new guidelines I did state that many of them could be replaced with "Don't Be a Dick."

Second, a huge block of the rules here are just devoted to making it clear that a certain standard of civil discourse is expected. This covers things like being a total creep or taking everything too seriously. Most importantly, it creates an environment where the kind of poster we want to encourage (substantive, polite, reasonable grasp of social norms, your Swash or redsniper or niffiwan, doesn't have to put up with total asshats and so doesn't turn into a jerk.

This is really what I'm taking issue with about the current rules, and it's a qualm I think The_E might share - it's a set of prohibitions, a more and more exhaustive list of what not to do, rather than a proactive and flexible guide about what kind of posts will be rewarded and what kind of tone the forums as a whole should have. SomethingAwful has done an incredible job of setting a forumwide tone: almost everyone is polite, engaged, makes high-content posts, immediately calls out creepy behavior, stays on topic and even uses proper grammar and capitalization. This comes from the understanding that the moderation team actively gardens the forum culture towards this goal. I don't know if HLP could manage this without startling degrees of user attrition, but...at least it's an ideal to look towards.

I honestly don't think that there is anything we could post today which would achieve that without losing lots of people and causing more forum drama. So the question is whether the new guidelines are a step towards that or not. I'm sure they could be improved but bear in mind that the intent of the guidelines is actually similar. The new stuff at the start about the purpose of HLP is meant to point out a lot of that.

If the best a poster can hope for is to squeak along surrounded by jerks until the jerks jerk too hard and get banned, well, that's a pretty brutish forums climate. Framing the forum rules as 'be this way' rather than 'don't be this way' is a sophomorically simple reversal, but I think it might be an important one.

Well one suggestion would be to move the positive stuff up to the top and only later go into the stuff that makes you a dick. Leading with

1) Be like Mr Rogers
2) Maintain a high signal to noise ratio
3) Try to make HLP a pleasant place

might help.

[The E]

I should probably mention that while I was in favour of these rules when they were discussed initially, the reaction we got here in this thread has convinced me that we went about it the wrong way, and that a leaner, more flexible set of rules would serve our purposes better than trying to build a catalog of infractions.

Also, while Kara's three rules are the obvious core thing we should strive towards, I have to ask, WHO IS MR ROGERS?

Yes, I know how to wiki, and I know who this is referring to, but I think that using pop culture references like that should be kept to a minimum when discussing things like this

[karajorma]

I think the problem with a leaner set of rules are things like Backseat moderating, stream of consciousness post and running your own karma system. All of those things are actionable and it can be easily explained why they are dickish things to be doing but don't really come under the heading of Don't Be A Dick.

If you are new to HLP, it's hard to know that posting InB4Lock will get you into trouble unless you're told that.

[The E]

Yes, and just like the PA forums have a list of thingsthey do not want to see, we can give a few hints as well. However, the emphasis should be on moderator discretion, a transparent appeals system, and Wheaton's Law, not a specific list of behaviours and punishments associated with them.

Now, I do realize that an appeals system is a multiedged sword, especially when it comes to issues where we ban people for nebulous things such as obnmoxious behaviour or zero-content posting, but we cannot put ourselves up as authority past fault or folly.

[Spoon]

I've pointed out repeatedly that the admins do bear part of the blame. Ball is in Spoon's court now.

This is like the ****tiest excuse for a 'apology' (if it is one at all? its hard to tell) I've seen.
If you expect me that this is in anyway shape or form sufficient for me to just say "oh geez, you are right! After all the snide ****ty remarks and blame shifting in this thread it's all up to me to just get over it and move on!". If you really believe that you really lack a basic understand on human interaction (and you do, you've repeatedly proven that).
As you may notice, I'm still rather pissed at how this issue is being treated and you seen adamant at trying to keep it that way. Due to your lack of empathy you just wanna vulcan it over and marginalize the beef I have. You are still actively dismissing the points Battuta bring up and ignore mine completely. Yet you think the ball is in my court?
Laughable.

I'm done here, I'll put you back on ignore.