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[OLD] New Rules Regarding New Members, Anonymous Members, and Drama Magnets

Rory said:
The thing that’s interesting is that some people oppose transparency about receipt of financial benefits in money or in kind. Why?
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I believe in 100% transparency as far as charitable donations go, but in everyday business, no. We know that there are employees of developers here. We know that there are affiliates and third party sellers here. But I don't see that as a problem. Many of them identify their affiliation through their custom title or logo. Some don't, but they make their affiliations obvious by the content of their posts here and on other forums. Personally, I don't see such posting as deceitful and requiring special notation.

Now and then, however, a member comes along who touts a product in such a way as to raise suspicion, such as bumping or burying posts. A little detective work may indicate they're obviously in cahoots with that developer, or they are in cahoots with a competing developer and trying to stir up some controversy. Do you think this kind of member is going to voluntarily follow an "admit your affiliation" rule?

If any posting activity seems intentionally deceitful to you, report the posts and let the mods deal with them. A great way to weed out deceitful posting activity from honest posting activity is simply to stick around VI-Control for a while and get to know the community.

I want to emphasize I'm not writing your suggestion off. What you're suggesting may be of interest to some members, especially newer ones, and it certainly wouldn't hurt existing members to have an affiliation flag attached to their profile. I just personally feel it would be a frivolous feature added to the site because it wouldn't do anything to delineate the intention behind the posts we read.
 
Brambleclaw said:
Arbitrary justice. A despotic regime where people are punished without rhyme nor reason and no one knows where they stand. The laws are so malleable you can be charged with a crime for merely existing.
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The rules here are based on rhyme and reason. Quoting Mike Greene...

Mike Greene said:
The purpose of the new rules isn't to stop critiques, the purpose of the new rules is to get people not to be jerks when they do it.
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If you're a jerk in this forum, you may get punished. If you're not a jerk, you won't be punished. This rule satisfies the 99% of the members who never have been, nor ever will be, punished.

Typically, it's the 1% who ask for guidelines explaining exactly how much of a jerk they're allowed to be before they get punished.
 
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Mike Greene said:
As you may know, we had some drama in the Spitfire Westworld Winner thread last weekend. Heated discussion isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except much of this drama wasn’t from actual VI-Control members. Several of the loudest voices were people who joined the same day, apparently realizing Paul and Christian are members here, so they took this as their opportunity to vent (sorry, "offer helpful suggestions") directly at them.

That’s not what this forum is for. Members (high profile or otherwise) come here to learn, share, and enjoy themselves, not to be annoyed by people they don’t know.

The challenge in moderating that thread was that we have very few actual rules to point to. That’s intentional, because this forum mostly self-moderates. 99% of the people here inherently know what’s cool and isn’t, so the “rules” are intentionally loose, since I don't want to fix something that isn't broken. (Our current guidelines, as well as my philosophy on rules, are here.)

I’m spotting some patterns in our recent dustups, though. Problem members tend to be new, with little understanding of what the vibe is here. Also, problem members tend to be anonymous. It’s a lot easier to come in guns a-blazin’ when you’re anonymous with no real ownership of your words. Lastly, problem members tend to be people who love to debate, and do so voluminously. In that Spitfire Westworld Winner thread, for instance, things were mostly cool, except for a handful of debaters who posted in such high quantity that it gave an appearance of controversy much larger than it actually was.

So here are three new rules:

1. If you are a new member (“new” is at a moderator’s discretion, and includes someone who may have joined long ago, but has little posting history), then you may not post anything that could be construed as negative (including “just offering suggestions”) about any person or company. (Critiques on products are okay, but be cool about it.) You also may not tag any member, unless you’re sure they want you to.

2. If you are an anonymous member, then be aware that you have much less leeway on any negative posts. If you’re not willing to let us know who you are, then you’re not entitled to give someone else what fer. Either own your words, or accept the fact that we may delete them.

3. If you’re someone who tends to get in a lot of long debates, and especially if you’ve been a magnet for drama, then moderators reserve the right to yank your posts if a thread is getting messy. That’s not to say you were the biggest problem in a thread, but sometimes to calm things down, we just need the overall posting to slow down a bit.

Note - These rules will probably not get enforced much. I’m only adding them so we’ll have something to point to in rare instances when we need them. You know the drill. There’s that guy who just won’t chill when you ask him to, and he instead complains, “What rule have I broken???” So now we can respond, “This rule.”

In a week or two, I’ll add these (without this explanatory post) to our Posting Guidelines thread. For now, I’ll leave this here if anyone has thoughts or suggestions.
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I don’t have a problem with any of that. I’m not sure why people would, to be honest. I’m a new member, and I’d much rather lurk for a while, putting my oar in where appropriate every now and then, and get a feel for somewhere than blunder straight in and irritate people. This is not my house, and I wouldn’t want to annoy my hosts.

I also made an introduction post almost as soon as I joined. I’m glad I did, since it turns out there are members near my than I would have expected! Hopefully we can meet up after all this COVID stuff is over.
In the meantime I’m happy to chill, watch what goes on, help if I can, and make new friends.
 
Polkasound said:
The rules here are based on rhyme and reason. Quoting Mike Greene...



If you're a jerk in this forum, you may get punished. If you're not a jerk, you won't be punished. This rule satisfies the 99% of the members who never have been, nor ever will be, punished.

Typically, it's the 1% who ask for guidelines explaining exactly how much of a jerk they're allowed to be before they get punished.
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It wasn't a direct comparison of the current rules, it was a comment about the notion of "principle" based systems, that another guy is in favour for.

The current rules are fairly explanatory and Mike seems a very reasonable and patient guy. The fact he feels the need to be able to point to some publicly explained/announced rule(s) before taking action that would otherwise be arbitrary, is a very health sign for the forums moderation.
 
To paraphrase a certain owl..... How many posts does it take to get to the chewy center of VI-C and lose "new member" status?
 
sndmarks said:
To paraphrase a certain owl..... How many posts does it take to get to the chewy center of VI-C and lose "new member" status?
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I don't know. I always wind up going for the chocolatey center before I can find out.

I'm not sure what number the software is set for determining the switch from "New Member" to "Senior Member" under your avatar. You can edit that yourself, by the way, and say whatever you want there. (See Stephen's avatar above.)

For purposes of these new rules, though, "new member" isn't related to the designation under your avatar. I'm being intentionally vague (ie - flexible) with that.
 
Mike Greene said:
I don't know. I always wind up going for the chocolatey center before I can find out.

I'm not sure what number the software is set for determining the switch from "New Member" to "Senior Member" under your avatar. You can edit that yourself, by the way, and say whatever you want there. (See Stephen's avatar above.)

For purposes of these new rules, though, "new member" isn't related to the designation under your avatar. I'm being intentionally vague (ie - flexible) with that.
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Can mods edit that status as well?
 
Mike Greene said:
I'm not sure what number the software is set for determining the switch from "New Member" to "Senior Member" under your avatar. You can edit that yourself, by the way, and say whatever you want there.
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I don't know either, but based on observation and deduction, I think it goes like this:

New Member (1-49 posts)
Member (50-149 posts)
Active Member (150-499 posts)
Senior Member (500+ posts)
 
Anders Wall said:
Yay! Only 450-ish posts to senior. I’ll give it a week :)
Best,
/Anders
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I gave a little motivational speech to myself, to steadily speed up my posting frequency: 2023 and Senior Member status - here I come! :grin:

It's good to have goals in life. I was thinking about some other goal too, but I already forgot what it was.
 
Angry avatars..

I can only say I avoid those threads because I have LASS and love it.

But anyone complaining about the way this forum is run, you can always get your own show unless you fear failure or not enough likes leaving you with a sense of unwanted-ness.
 
@Mike Greene Please add another pointer about unnecessarily creating multi threads, especially in the Commercial announcements. Just this morning, there are two threads running in the Commercial section for the Emotional Viola - one via Best Service, the other via a regular member... and BS is having to comment in both sections which requires reading both threads for info. Same thing in Sample talk as new users will start a new thread to ask a question that could/should be answered in an already established thread. Seen up to three threads running simultaneously. It's like a monkey-see, monkey-do phenomena/virus that is getting worse.
 
"your job and mine is to walk this land and make sure no one harms it. If you show up on time, speak honestly, and treat everyone with fairness we will get along just fine."
Ron Swanson

There, simple as that :D
 
Mike Greene said:
3. If you’re someone who tends to get in a lot of long debates, and especially if you’ve been a magnet for drama, then moderators reserve the right to yank your posts if a thread is getting messy. That’s not to say you were the biggest problem in a thread, but sometimes to calm things down, we just need the overall posting to slow down a bit.
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Oh, c'moooon, that's bread and butter of the internet, I just love to get into discussions, and especially disagreements, it's just sparring, a status competition, a male thing, it's just fun! :D
 
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