But as a former hard-ass moderator of the US Men N&A forum - when MikeLastort and set the standard for hard-ass moderating - I can say that while it does work, it isn't good for the soul. I think Mike and I both gave it up because we didn't need to be making enemies in cyberspace. Mike and I both still have a fair amount of negative reputation around certain groups of ignorant posters, and it's been probably three years since I stepped down. I still needle monster about some of the fluff that passes muster in B&M. The problem is the personal cost in stress, time, and annoyance to the folks who do keep certain forums clean. And last time I checked, moderators don't get paid around here. There's just no good and fair way to keep jacknuts from starting threads. And having been the B&M moderator when Oliver-mania was peaking, I can tell you that self control doesn't work either. Normal, otherwise sane posters, would start salivating and twitching at the slightest indication that Oliver was around. Sad, but true. So are we going to be blessed with a Belo Horizonte sighting soon?
a) In a perfect world, yeah, but I see AndyMead's point. With the amount of traffic in the main boards, troll patrol is damn near impossible, and that's why I wouldn't moderate anything busier than Asia & Middle East (even then, we still need 5 mods). b) See, self control isn't my thing -I can't just click on some threads and ignore the tasty ones- and that's why I don't visit the main boards. Cold turkey for me, which is a damn shame because there are very knowledgeable posters in MLS and USMNT.
Now that we're all back at zero, or thereabouts.... The only use for this system is for geeky silliness, and the system was actually working to perfection. Good posters aren't going to get any better simply because they have a cute label. And bad posters aren't the sort to care about what the rest of the board thinks of them to begin with. There were only two tiny mistakes - one was telling people there might be tangible rewards for a good reputation. That encouraged not a small portion of the hilarious whining we've seen. Come to think of it, maybe promising rewards for reputation wasn't a mistake after all. The second was taking away the commenter's anonymity. Okay, I'm probably the only one who enjoyed anonymous drive-by negative comments. There's kind of a first-strike aspect that doesn't seem preventable - if (say) Galaxy fans gang up to give Quake fans a lousy rep, then it will be tough for Quake fans to retaliate, since their reps will be in the sewer and their counter-attack capabilities will be miniscule. Well, okay, Quake fan reputations will generally be deep in Nowheresville based on their own efforts, but the theory still holds. Still, the comedy aspect of the whole thing outweighs everything else, by far. So let your children run wild and free. Give reputation points for screen names, avatars, sheer randomness. We all get cute little tags, Bill and Andy rant like baboons - everyone wins. EDIT - I should clarify which Andy I meant is ranting like a baboon. Of course, I mean Andy Griffith.
See what good it did ya? The sheriff ain't supposed to be popular. I feel you, Andy, I really do. Just as long as you realize that the other side of the coin is the stress, time, and annoyance to folks who would really like to have an intelligent discussion about soccer, but can't because of the morons who either just want to futz around, or who are too stupid to actually contribute (and, yes, before you ask, I have tried to ignore them, and am trying). The point is this - the morons are winning. Their sheer numbers, plus the fact that the difference between genius and idiocy is that genius has limits, makes it unlikely that this place will ever be as good as it really could be. Now, God bless Jesse not only for starting this whole thing, but for the whole entrepreneurship thing (I'm all about the entrepreneur), but what's best for the business isn't always what's best for the community. And I'm not naive enough not to know who loses in that scenario. That's fine - it is what it is. But, Jesse, I'd pay you $100 a year if you'd let me be like a lawyer and have a certain number of pre-emptory challenges and boot people off with no reason needed. When jacknuts are outlawed, only outlaws will be jacknuts. I know what you mean, though. I mean, we all know who the morons are. We all know who the smart ones are. If there's no way to stop jacknuts from starting threads (actually, there is, but it's draconian), then the self-control bit has to come into play. Seriously, do you know how many "FreddydeservestostartwecouldsueESPNforfalseadvertisingwereallycouldpathetic" posts I've seen just in the week since I've been back that in the old days would have been a smackdown landrush, with me carrying the first flag? But you can't win. So I don't engage. It's like we say down south, "If you get into a fight with a pig, y'all both get muddy and the pig likes it." Oh, true. And not just him. We need a support group. Meeting at my place.
[jovial] a) We are paid how much to make this board out life? b) as I've said elsewhere (to paraphrase), tollarance and restraint vary from person to person. I agree that taking all the rep from all post in NSF is good. The problem is that it is just as easy to search a post in a Soccer Related forum and then give rep. Personally, I thought that the rep thingy became funny. As one poster said "I'm not sure I want three nipples." [/jovial] As for the origionator of this thread, I say shut up. You posts appear to be nothing more than some child running to the teacher saying that the cool kids are teasing you. I have given you bad rep in the past because I don't like your posts. But I am not a member of BSSM. You wine and complain and you don't stop until you get your way. Andy was much the same, but at least he's toned it down. In anycase, this was something for the admins to look into, not call anybody out. Why not just have the rep be yes or no with no comments? And why not let us who have the ablilty as a premium member use that the ignore ability to ignore those we find as being grey and encourage the premie membership to those who want to use the ignore function?
I see your point, but I'm not talking about making it your life or my life or anyone's life (and why does everything have to come back to "getting paid" before someone can care a little bit about it? I'm just askin'.), I'm just saying that if there's a community of any kind that you choose to be a part of, you want it to be worthwhile. Some care more about it being worthwhile, some can just blithely be okay with a different signal-to-noise ratio. That's cool. I can only speak for me, and (getting further off the original topic, and for that I apologize) I'd like to have a place that's not so frustrating to belong to. Yep. I'm with you. I know I'm weak on the former, so I am working on the latter.
The reputation system has been tremendous source of amusement - far beyond what anyone could have imagined. That can't be all bad. What's missing is a black market where you can buy good rep, and a protection racket where you either pay up or you get bad rep. Or maybe those things haven't been entirely missing. Since this is the suggestion forum, I'd like to make a suggestion: there should be a reputation forum where posters can express their concerns about the reputation system, a reputation arbiter to handle reputation disputes, and reputation investigators to catch the abusers of the reputation system. The point is that morons only win because people respond to them. Not feeding the trolls works.
Kenn, An interesting thing I've noticed --- The preemies have a soccer only forum, where (a) they know everyone cares above a certian level cause they all paid to be premie and (b) it's SOCCER __ONLY__. It never gets used.
XYZ - You're assuming that the bulk of posters aren't morons. I'm not sure that kenntomasch has the same assumption. I think he is suggesting a sort moron critical mass where there aren't enough posters who aren't morons themselves. So the morons respond to the morons (because they're morons), and so on, and so on, and so on ... What is this thread about anyway?
True dat. We've tried repeatedly to get that thing going and only about 5 of us ever seem to use it. Hence, we've pretty much given up. I discuss more soccer in some of the "chat threads." we haven't been able to drum up interest for it in the premium soccer forum.
If that forum got any traffic, it'd be useful for soccer discussions, but it's way easier just to discuss in a FFA blog thread where the discussion will actually flesh out and not rot because no one checked the forum.
I steal your posts, my authors destroy your authors, I have better avatars...and I will grind you to dust in the next smack off.
What I'm assuming is that the bulk of the posters aren't trolls. If the morons are winning, it's because good posters aren't able to resist responding to the trolls. Seriously, some of the stuff posted is so absurd I can't imagine why anyone thinks it warrants a response. And yet people do respond. It boggles the mind sometimes.
I have to admit though, it is nice to be able to tell someone off, smack them down with the iron fist that is reason and facts. Also, I think a maternal instinct of sorts kicks in, because I think, "I must protect the impressionable posters from these horrible trolls!" Yeah, I realize the above makes me come off uppity, but that's just the way I am and that's why I don't visit the main MLS and USMNT boards any more - I value my sanity highly and I don't like how condescending and know-it-all I get.
Had a nice reply. It got eaten by a busy server. Go back to get it, it's gone, forget about it. And right after I said "I wonder if I should have hit Control-C." Oh, well. The highlights were: There may not be more morons, but they talk louder and longer. I can't pretend to tell people how they should enjoy their Bigsoccer, but I agree with you when you say that not feeding trolls would be a big help. And I didn't know about that premium forum thing, but I imagine that most folks aren't as militant about this stuff as I am, and perhaps it's that trolls and newbies and sockpuppets and morons are the lubrication that makes the whole ecosystem work. I guess every ecosystem needs parasites, too, in some strange way. Maybe a lot of people feel it's just no fun to talk soccer with like-minded people, and that they need to have foils to do their best work, or to enjoy the community more. That's cool, too. I've noticed I've just lost a bunch of posts off my post count. Wow. Things are going strange around here. Before you know it, I'll be one of the newbies I despise.
I don't think most of the posters are morons. They've figure out how to use a computer, how to type, and not to use the CAPS LOCK key. What I do think is that we're just seeing yet another manifestation of the intellectual laziness that infests our society. BigSoccer has morphed into sports talk radio where everything is hyper-sensationalized. If yer not fer something, yer agin it. Anyone who acknowledges any gray area in a discussion "loses.". It's about the soundbite - the windup - the slam. How many moderators and super-moderators - and yet today alone we get two brand new troll/sockpuppets running a thread in MLS Forum to over 50 posts. No cards, no deletes, no nothing. One possible use of the "rep" system would be that if any poster gets to say -25, they're instantly put on every other users Ignore List. Folks could manually remove them, but mostly the troll/sockpuppet would be neutered. And it would be real easy to tell if some BigSoccer clique were ganging up on Tom Flanagan, Bill Archer, or AndrewGK. I followed the point system, and while the high end of reputation was a sign of nothing in particular, the folks who populated the bottom end of the list all pretty much belonged there.
I noticed that, too, Andy (and said as much in the post that got eaten). I thought there were some folks near the top of the rep list who pretty much belonged there, and the bottom was pretty much folks who belonged there, at least according to my accounting. So the system was pretty much working, with some abuse caveats. But, hey, you're on about the mods and supermods and you just gave us the dissertation about what a thankless job it is?
Gotta agree with this. One of Huss's stated purposes for the rep system was to "filter out the noise", and it did exactly that... more or less.
Then it didn't come out right. I'm just saying that the mods are pretty much doing all that can be expected of them, and yet we get today's two trolls - on top of yesterday's Canadian troll. And the funny thing is, almost all of the trolling goes on in the "SR" forums. The "NSR" forums pretty much take care of themselves. Occaisionally someone decides to post an ad on as many forums as possible before they get deleted, but the spammers are rare compared to the troll/sockpuppets. Part of the appeal of BigSoccer is its openness. New posters get to jump right in the deep end. We want to encourage that. Any method that would limit the ability of newbies to post/start threads would limit the usefulness of BigSoccer. Not every new poster is bored and frustrated bully looking to wind-up the natives.
Well, I think it just reaffirmed things many of us were thinking anyway. But it sure didn't stop noise from getting through. If you had to "earn" the right to post quantity by posting quality, that would be a way of filtering noise. Or, as mentioned, we could all just learn to ignore it. Perhaps they'd give up, eventually. But my intrinsic problem with that was always that stupidity left unchallenged often becomes accepted as actual truth. See, you see it as appeal. I don't. It's a shame that the newbies who aren't dumb and bored and frustrated and looking to wind up the natives have to pay for the sins of those who are. But in my experience, if you "dive right in" without lurking or seeing the mores of the society and then (as many do) bursting in through the door with absolute statements that either (a) we've all heard before or (b) are completely ludicrous, you're violating one of the unwritten rules of internet communities (well, it may be written down somewhere, but, admittedly, this is all still 10-15 years old at most). Far too many newbies have more exuberance than experience. Exuberance is fine. We need passion. But it needs to be tempered with experience, or, at the very least, a respect for one's position within the hierarchy of the community. This is all getting to be way too deep a discussion. Can someone do a "fixed your post" for me, just to rein it in?
Which, in the past, has seperated the AndyMead, Dan Loney, and kenntomasches of the world from the Sam Pierrons. Sam can tune it out and move on, the rest of us can't. I challenge a lot less stuff than I used to, but I still tend to try and correct stuff in what I consider to be the "better" forums that I visit (B&M, MLS N&A). When the Ollie wars were being fought, I asked repeatedly to have the admins just put Ollie and his detracters on eachother's Ignore Lists.