14 Jul, 2008, Kayle wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
After serious consideration (or maybe just serious iritation over the last 3 days…), I've come to the conclusion that we need a set of rules to govern the channels. I think the rules should cover what is and isn't acceptable on which channels, it should also detail what channels are for what. I'm also open for discussion of a revision of channels. Which ones are needed, which ones aren't necessary, etc. Anyone with input should feel free to post. I'll take a couple days of discussion before I draft up a set of rules/guidelines for the channels for further discussion.
14 Jul, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
I agree that a set of guidelines would be a good idea. I'm not sure how strict it needs to be, but at the least it should be clear what is a bannable offense, who decides whom to ban, etc. I've been off IMC for a bit so I must have missed the most recent drama. :wink:

For channels, it seems to me that almost everybody just tunes in to almost all channels, and yet only uses ichat. In that sense, all channels but ichat (and I guess inews, but I don't really count that as a proper channel) are more or less useless. Either it should be accepted that ichat is "the" channel, or it should be more strongly encouraged to keep channels on-topic.

ichat sometimes tends to be too full of clutter to be useful as a serious discussion medium, though. Then again, I'm not sure how to fix that. A "chatter" channel is needed, but if you made a general-purpose "serious" channel people probably wouldn't use it (because not enough other people use it).
15 Jul, 2008, Guest wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
And lo, we realize why I didn't want to have to draft rules. Too much hassle to deal with.

I tend to agree that ichat is about all there is as far as useful channels. Unless something changed while I've been ignoring it. The inews feed is good, though I wonder if it might not be better served as a read-only feed. The IRC relay is cool too but if it's to be truly useful perhaps it should be attached to ichat too?

As far as bannable offenses. I think it should be rather obvious to anyone who paid attention that Cratylus ( only example I have, being the only banned user ) was only there to be antagonistic and insulting to those in authority on the network. Most other times he was just an obnoxious bastard. Like I said before. I fielded a number of complaints but ignored them. Kayle did as he saw fit in removing the nuisance. So I'd say as long as you're not there just to be an ass and be insulting and rude to everyone all the time, there shouldn't be a problem.
15 Jul, 2008, Kayle wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
I'd be all for making inews read only. I'm also all for finding a way to fuse the IRC bridge into ichat instead of requiring a separate channel for it. But I think I'd like to try and move code talk and build talk onto their respective channels. icode, and ibuild. And just use ichat as that. For chatter as David mentioned.

As far as bannable offenses, yes, Crat is a perfect example of how NOT to act on the network if you'd like to stay. Being a constant thorn in the sides of the Admins is probably the easiest way to get banned. Circa@Azereth (formerly Circa@AvP) is currently the latest incarnation of Cratylus on the network, being constantly obnoxious, and has caused me to seriously consider writing up something for the server side to be able to shut specific individuals off from the network. Because most of the people on AzerethMUD are responsible, and fun to talk to. I'd prefer to not have to punish an entire MUD because one individual can't control himself.

Couple of things I'd like to toss out there resulting from the drama over the last 3 days. Mindless advertising on pchat/inews needs to stop. Responding to someone asking for your connection information is one thing, but mindless idiotic banter about you everyone should play your game because it's the best thing ever is counterproductive to forming a community. That's almost like me coming into your house and telling you my house is better because my carpet is a different color than yours. Or because my ceilings are higher.

But I'm sick, and the drugs I'm on are kicking in and I completely lost my train of thought, so I'm going to stop here and hope I remember what I was talking about at some point later… =/
15 Jul, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
Well, I used the word "guideline" instead of "rule" on purpose. I think that trying to establish hard and fast rules will be pretty useless, and they will either be enforced harshly or be "hot air" and not worth the trouble in the first place. Basically, a community culture shift is (IMO) the only way to change things. Of course, the question is whether or not we actually want such a thing.

The Crat situation on IMC makes me kind of nervous. Unless there was a lot that happened on IMC that I was not witness to, he didn't show behavior there too terribly different from a lot of other people in several venues. I realize that there are very deep personal rifts at play here, but if we're going to talk about guidelines or rules I'd like to know very precisely what he violated and why very precisely he's the only one who did so.

IMO the best thing to do here is to figure out
(a) whether we really want rules or a culture shift or whatever
(b) which of the rule or culture shift approach is better
and most importantly © start with a clean slate.

Not starting from a clean slate will taint the new rules/guidelines/whatever with all the (obviously present) bitterness and anger of the past. That seems to defeat the purpose of trying to work out what will make the community healthy.


Now, some specific points.
Samson said:
The inews feed is good, though I wonder if it might not be better served as a read-only feed.

Agreed.

Samson said:
The IRC relay is cool too but if it's to be truly useful perhaps it should be attached to ichat too?

Agreed again. IRC is not a separate channel – it is a separate means of connecting to the network. Having imc and ichat be separate would be like having Talon be a separate channel. The "right" solution here would be to make IMC support the IRC protocol and treat IMC channels as IRC channels. The more realistic short term solution would be to route IMC traffic to ichat instead of irc.

Kayle said:
But I think I'd like to try and move code talk and build talk onto their respective channels.

These channels exist but are unused. We all have to be honest and point the finger at ourselves for that one: it is solely the fault of the people on the network (i.e. us). If we actually want these channels to be used/useful, the only solution is for us to use them and gently prod others into following suit.

Kayle said:
Mindless advertising on pchat/inews needs to stop.

I don't know what happened in this instance so keep that in mind in the following. A priori I think that some advertising is acceptable – in other words, it should not be "forbidden" to promote MUDs. However, any kind of repetitive announcement is annoying in exactly the same right as any other repetitive spamming. In other words, perhaps the real problem is not the content of the message but the fact that it is blared across channels too frequently.
15 Jul, 2008, Kayle wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
I think a culture shift is probably going to be the easiest to pull off. A set of Guidelines listing the way things should work might also be helpful. Sortof a brief run down of how things work once you're connected for people who are just starting out with connecting.

Now, I'm kinda curious what you mean by a clean slate. Would you mind elaborating on this a little bit?


DavidHaley said:
I don't know what happened in this instance so keep that in mind in the following. A priori I think that some advertising is acceptable – in other words, it should not be "forbidden" to promote MUDs. However, any kind of repetitive announcement is annoying in exactly the same right as any other repetitive spamming. In other words, perhaps the real problem is not the content of the message but the fact that it is blared across channels too frequently.


This is a long story, and what it basically amounts to is that there was a lot of spammed advertising on inews/pchat over the last few days, that was more of an annoyance then anything else. I had received a couple of complaints about it, and talked with the owners of the respective muds involved, and that situation has been mostly resolved (Mostly meaning one of the muds involved is still doing it, but the owner had to be contacted via email, so I wasn't expecting a swift response).

I'm not at all sure that IMC is an appropriate venue for advertising for your mud. Mainly because those muds on the network that are open and have players have generally worked hard for their playerbase, and it just feels inappropriate to me, to have people advertising for their mud on a channel that players of a mud on the network could possibly see. Being connected to IMC is an advertisement in itself. People see you talk, and see you interact with others, and they might get curious about what your game has to offer, so they might use the imcinfo command and come check your mud out for a bit. There's also the complete opposite, they see you talk and interact, and don't like the way you act so they don't come check your mud out.
15 Jul, 2008, Guest wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
DavidHaley said:
The Crat situation on IMC makes me kind of nervous. Unless there was a lot that happened on IMC that I was not witness to, he didn't show behavior there too terribly different from a lot of other people in several venues. I realize that there are very deep personal rifts at play here, but if we're going to talk about guidelines or rules I'd like to know very precisely what he violated and why very precisely he's the only one who did so.


I think you may be letting your bias of friendship with him get in the way of an objective look at it. I'm sure you've been there on plenty of occasions when he's gone off and become deliberately antagonistic and refused to stop before someone got pissed. I'm sure you're also aware that he has driven a number of previously regular contributors from the network because I dropped the ball and wouldn't put a stop to it when I had the authority to do so. You yourself have joined in with him on a number of occasions to be both antagonistic and insulting, but at least you seemed to have the sense enough to know when you were pushing things too far. Crat apparently had no such restraint. He kept at it and kept at it until people left, other people got pissed off at him, and still others threw their arms up in surrender. Myself among them. His continued presence there was one driving force behind my continuing withdrawal from the community. Mainly because people defend his kind of behavior simply to "get the man". In his case it would only have led me to *MORE* stress and aggravation to ban him myself, so I gave up control of the network and was fully prepared to sever all ties with it entirely before Kayle agreed to take over if I'd hang around in the background somewhere in case he needed help with it. Those are not the kind of people IMC needs. People who exist only for the purpose of being a troll should be treated as such, and I should have simply bit the bullet and banned him a long time ago and gotten it over with. Who knows. Things might be different now and I might not have sunk the vast majority of my free time into Oblivion modding, and might not have decided mudding in general isn't worth the hassle. Fate is a funny thing though, and this is why you have to deal with trolls quickly and not let them take hold.
15 Jul, 2008, The_Fury wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
One word that has been used a few times in this thread and others like it is COMMUNITY and while for the most part the people here and elsewhere want to foster community, it inveritably ends up a dictatorship with the real power held in the hands of a few individuals who are human of course and will sometimes act on emotions and not always with common sense or balance and or let their personal views and opinions influence the decisions made. One way to overcome this would be to be more Democratic in how things are run from a discipline stand point.

The core team who run IMC could, rather than being judge and executioner, could act as a review panel for all complaints against users of the system and issue warrants against whomever is being an anoyance and set a possible penalties, to which the community at large gets to vote on. Each mud would be given 1 vote and an abstance would count as a yes vote. If 50% of the vote was yes, the lowest penalty would be enforced, 70% would be the second and 80% or more votes would be the highest penalty would be enforced. The mud that the offender is from would not have any voting rights for that offense.

Something like the above would, in situations like crat being banned remove all the Kayle or whomever actually did it hates me and its all bias because i made Samson commit suicide. It is much better for the community to speak as a voice and say sorry we as a group will not tolerate your actions and to stand together united on the matter. With a little creative thought, you could eliminate all of the issues that have been raised in the above posts of bias and favoritism. Also the more transparent you make the system and its operations the better it will be for IMC and your own sanity.

Just my 50 cents worth.
15 Jul, 2008, Guest wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
Mob rule eh? Yeah. THAT'S not full of problems, is it? Ever hear of the US Congress? The UN? Letting people vote on stuff just means that if a situation like Crat does come up again it has to be debated in committee like a UN resolution. And then nothing will come of it anyway because in the end one or two people still have to actually carry it out. Much like the US ends up enforcing resolutions because nobody else will. As much as I or others might like, democracy does not work in the "community" and never has.
15 Jul, 2008, Conner wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
Hmm, where to begin… Okay, I'll start by saying that I'm posting with Dragona sitting at my side inputing as well.

I guess I'll hit the easiest points first, each of the specific channels:

  • We agree that inews could stand to be read-only (leave full access to TimBot and Kiasyn's news bots). Though getting rid of inews altogether would be a very bad idea, personally I can't say that my mud would stay if it went away completely as almost all of my staff and many of my players very much enjoy having the presence of the bots on this channel.

  • We also feel that Samson added icode and ibuild specifically to allow ichat to be more available to general conversation without the confusion of code and building matters interspersed and as such, it's really very reasonable to ask that folks keep building questions and such on ibuild and code issues on icode. Honestly, if someone doesn't have access to those channels, they probably shouldn't be asking those sorts of questions on imc anyway or they should look into Talon or ask the admin(s) at their favorite other mud to extend them access to those channels accordingly. I'll certainly be happy to grant access to those channels accordingly to anyone I know is visiting my mud but who I can also verify is an immortal (or equivalent) on another mud that simply doesn't carry IMC, provided they aren't banned from imc already…

  • As for i3b, i2, and irc, other than the fact that irc was once a bridge to allow irc access to imc, I've never known what these channels were meant for to begin with and see no reason to keep them at all. If someone out there really wants/needs to use irc to connect to imc *boggles the mind* I see no harm in merging it with ichat. On the other hand, I have to wonder if it serves our best interest to invite anyone who wanders onto the irc channel in question into our ichat conversations. Do we want to allow players or potential players to be privy to our discussions which could even possibly be about them? (Dragona also reminded me that i2/i3b? was originally intended as a bridge between the imc network and the network now run by Cratylus which we specifically dropped from our mud because the people on that network, other than Tim and his TimBot, were not people we'd accept into our mud, even via network.)

  • Which brings us to the other two mortal channels, game and pchat. Personally, I think that unless the gamebot is fixed (was it ever fixed already, maybe I missed the event?) then the game channel is pretty much obsolete. Pchat is a tough one, on the one hand Fearitself made a strong argument for not allowing players access to channels at all (and Circa has, over the last few days, demonstrated it as well).. on the other hand, I really don't see any reason not to allow players who don't cause problems to reach out and chat with others if they choose to, but that requires the admin(s) of each mud to assume responsibility for that mud's player base. Maybe it would be best to simply remove pchat altogether. Though I'd much rather see gamebot fixed than the game channel removed, if it's decidedly not going to ever get fixed why beat a dead horse?


  • Okay, next topic.. "Group Rule":

    The_Fury, democracy sounds great in principle, but it doesn't actually work in practice. There are just too many reasons why your idea wouldn't work on IMC.. starting with the fact that the muds which make up IMC's population often change rather drastically and frequently. (New muds join in, other muds go offline or leave the network, and so on.. not to mention how do you convey to the admins of each mud that they need to be online to cast their ballot about such-n-such when you have no idea what time zone a given mud might be in or which day the admin might decide to log on for an hour or…)

    Next topic that I'm going to try to address.. unacceptable behavior on the network:

  • We'd love to see something in the guidelines about foul language (possibly even going to adult-like content). Many of us host muds that allow, if not cater to, players who may very well be young children (or parents who don't want to see it either) and there's no reason to have to use that sort of language anyway. Ultimately, these are public channels, why can't we keep it PG-13, if not PG or even G…

  • Advertising should not be allowed. Period. It's one thing if someone directly asks for your connection info (not that you shouldn't respond via imctell or remind them that imcwho will most likely provide that info or else imcinfo is likely to provide a website and such which in turn will provide it..), but it's quite another to blatantly advertise your mud on network channels either unsolicited or repeatedly. Even aside from the annoyance factor if it's spammed, either way it's simply inappropriate. Most of us have struggled to get the players (and staff) that we have and continue to do what we can to keep those we have. Why would any of us want our players or staff enticed away by flagrant advertisements of another mud directly imported to channels on our own muds?

  • Anyone just trying to make every effort to be a nuisance to the network admins or the general imc populace is probably not worth having in the first place, but certainly if, after warnings, they refuse to be civil. (Is there some reason discussion, in general - extreme subjects from time to time withstanding, not to be polite to one another, particularly among those of us who are all imms on imm only channels and, maybe even more so, on the mortal channels when we're even more directly in the public eye?)

  • These are network channels, can we restrict local conversation to the local channels of the mud in question? (We're not talking about asking questions of the network about local issues - seeking input on ideas or building/coding issues, etc (on the corresponding channels) but rather if a player and an imm, or two imms, or two players, on the same mud are having a casual (private?) conversation, does the rest of the network really need to be included?)


  • I think that covers everything that was discussed so far and the couple of additions that Dragona and I particularly wanted to toss into the kettle, though I fully reserve the right to add further, elaborate as I see fit, or otherwise throw my two more cents in as I choose. :tongue:
    15 Jul, 2008, The_Fury wrote in the 11th comment:
    Votes: 0
    It does not have to mean mob rule, the vast majority of issues can benefit from a little open discussion, it can also add a little peer pressure on certain individuals who are acting up. of course in instances when someone joins just to be an asshat, the core team should reserve the right to shut them down without warning.

    Having a set of guidelines that outline acceptable behavior and a tiered penalty scheme for 1st, 2nd and 3rd offense, plus being open and giving the community some say in the decision making process will go along way to resolving problematic people.

    Quote
    Letting people vote on stuff just means that if a situation like Crat does come up again it has to be debated in committee


    Actually this very situation in the first instance could have benefited from a little open discussion and community input to coming to a resolution on it. No offense here Samson but you two are both as bad as one another and equally to blame for how the situation escalated, irrespective of who started it. In the end Kayle put a stop to it and is applauded by some and hated by others for doing what was right, in a situation where you couldn't act. Having the community vote on it would have stopped the whole fiasco a long time ago, leaving no one to blame but the persons causing the trouble.

    For the record i am trying to be constructive here not pointing fingers or blaming anyone and apologize in advance if anyone is offended in my take on things.
    15 Jul, 2008, The_Fury wrote in the 12th comment:
    Votes: 0
    Quote
    The_Fury, democracy sounds great in principle, but it doesn't actually work in practice. There are just too many reasons why your idea wouldn't work on IMC.. starting with the fact that the muds which make up IMC's population often change rather drastically and frequently. (New muds join in, other muds go offline or leave the network, and so on.. not to mention how do you convey to the admins of each mud that they need to be online to cast their ballot about such-n-such when you have no idea what time zone a given mud might be in or which day the admin might decide to log on for an hour or…)


    Voting would only be offered to the owner of a mud that has kept an online presence for a nominated period of time. It would be not be offered to any fly by night mud. As for ballots, you would need to allow for a period of time day 7days for each vote, it could be conducted with a simple addition to these boards with email notification to the muds specifying the offense and for how long the vote is active.

    It would take a little thought to iron out the details and would add to someones administrative tasks, but its not impossible to do, tho changing some of the existing culture might be a hard ask.
    15 Jul, 2008, Guest wrote in the 13th comment:
    Votes: 0
    The_Fury said:
    Quote
    Letting people vote on stuff just means that if a situation like Crat does come up again it has to be debated in committee


    Actually this very situation in the first instance could have benefited from a little open discussion and community input to coming to a resolution on it. No offense here Samson but you two are both as bad as one another and equally to blame for how the situation escalated, irrespective of who started it. In the end Kayle put a stop to it and is applauded by some and hated by others for doing what was right, in a situation where you couldn't act. Having the community vote on it would have stopped the whole fiasco a long time ago, leaving no one to blame but the persons causing the trouble.

    For the record i am trying to be constructive here not pointing fingers or blaming anyone and apologize in advance if anyone is offended in my take on things.


    I'm sorry, but you're wrong. Not to mention in no position to be saying either one of us is at fault for anything when you deliberately engaged in the same attack style behavior yourself in other locations outside this discussion. I could have acted, should have acted, and if I'm ever in this sort of position again, will act. Hindsight. *I* could have stopped it a long time ago when he first started the whole pile of crap. When he first began bringing his bile to the network. But you know as well as I do that he'd never have let that go without starting another lovely flamewar on the subject somewhere else. And frankly I wouldn't doubt for a second that you would have jumped into it yourself just for the chance to snipe another shot my way.

    You also know full well that everyone and his uncle would have started calling me a Nazi and all that crap for daring to actually do something about him. As it stands, that happened anyway. Again, hindsight. Had I known I'd be dragged through the mud as viciously as I have been for bothering to try and maintain some level of decency both here and on the network I would have simply packed up and left a long time ago. I don't have time for this kind of crap anymore. It's not worth being turned into Ghengis Khan over.
    15 Jul, 2008, The_Fury wrote in the 14th comment:
    Votes: 0
    Quote
    You also know full well that everyone and his uncle would have started calling me a Nazi and all that crap for daring to actually do something about him.


    I know and i understand the position you were in, Damned if you do, Damned if you don't and no matter what you do everyone is still going to be pissed at you for some crappy reason. But its also where a committee approach could have helped you in the situation. Your not left to act alone in an impossible situation or one where you are personally involved, but rather passing it on to have others review the situation and to recommend a course of action. Sure some would still be pissed at you for acting on that recommendation, but you cant always satisfy idiots or everyone.

    There is a lot to be said for more open and inclusive ways of doing things. That is what community is all about, its about involving people in the processes. Maybe the voting system above is too cumbersome for something like IMC, but a small committee that reports to Kayle or whomever is ultimately running the routers could make disciplinary decisions, with a couple of slots that get rotated on a X monthly basis. Drawing from the bigger more established games, or respected community members.

    A community voice is always going to be louder than one person.
    15 Jul, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 15th comment:
    Votes: 0
    All I'll say further about the Cratylus issue is that you, Samson, have your share of responsibility, not just in inaction as you have already recognized, but in action. By engaging him at all times, and, yes, viciously occasionally, you made the problem worse. You enacted exactly the kind of aggressive, knee-jerk authority that he was complaining about – in some cases, you even made his arguments look right. If you insist on claiming that I am biased in favor, allow me to insist in turn that you are biased against, and are just as incapable of objective judgment. Your own behavior with him has not always been praiseworthy. Frankly, it comes off as you kicking him off your network because the two of you kept bickering on every site, but you could remove him from IMC, but not from e.g. MudConnector. You two have good reason to not be able to stand each other, from how you have interacted with each other on all of these sites, but both of you have blame. It is unfair to lay all of the blame on him.

    The point of this is not to recriminate you, I think I've made clear in the past that I'm just as tired of this issue as anything else. But I think it highlights that administrators have a considerable responsibility when it comes to the network. Administrators are not "normal people" who can act as they wish. Their acts carry more weight than other people. Their behavior sets the example. Since we're being honest here, in the past, I do not think that admins have always set the best example, and have contributed to the culture we see now by both their action and inaction. That is why I am bringing all of this up: I don't think that it is wise for administrators to use the "big stick" unless they have done everything they can to be on exemplary behavior themselves; I don't think that has always been the case in the past.

    Again, please don't take any of this badly. I think it is on topic for this discussion and, unfortunately, involves discussing the past with specific people involved. Please understand that my point is not to point fingers but to explain where we are now and how to move on toward progress.

    In any case, this is why I would insist that if anything comes out of this, it be made very clear who is responsible for banning decisions, what the appeal process is (if any), what factors go into the decision. If people are going to use big sticks, I want it to be crystal clear what the process is.

    Kayle said:
    Now, I'm kinda curious what you mean by a clean slate. Would you mind elaborating on this a little bit?

    Well, it's pretty simple in the end of the day. I want to start without the encumbrance of all these grudges and bitterness. This is not some material action that we can go out and perform; it involves everybody taking a deep breath and being a little chill for a change. :wink: (Actually, I think that would do the community good, with or without anything coming out of this thread.)

    ———–

    I have to run to work now so I'll be brief on the democracy issue. I don't think that a full democracy would make much sense, however, I do think it would be sensible to have a clearer process on who is involved in decision processes, and perhaps have a small group of sorts and not just one or two people. It would make things hinge less on the personal feelings/grudges/mood/whatever of an individual, and bring more perspectives in. Even without such a group, I think it would be a good start to at least make official who is in charge of the thing. It was always clear that Samson ran the network technically, but it was never (officially) clear who ran the policy side.
    15 Jul, 2008, kiasyn wrote in the 16th comment:
    Votes: 0
    i think the current [unofficial] leaderboard of imc is kayle, samson, davion? and myself.

    also, *big stick whack davidhaley*
    15 Jul, 2008, Guest wrote in the 17th comment:
    Votes: 0
    Seems pretty clear to me David that no matter what I say I'm the devil in your eyes, so we'll leave it at that. You act as though you had no part in egging him on but you were instrumental in encouraging his vicious behavior. I strongly feel that if you hadn't been actively participating in the same sort of thing that he might have figured out he was not the one in the right. But the past is the past, and it's done. No sense in giving a crap about it now.

    Kiasyn, I've got nothing to do with the leaderboard of IMC, unofficial or otherwise unless you consider one server being run through my hosting as some kind of leaderboard position. It's basically you, Kayle, and Davion now.
    15 Jul, 2008, Kayle wrote in the 18th comment:
    Votes: 0
    I'm the Admin for Server02, Davion is the Admin for Server01. Technically, he and I are the leaderboard, but I didn't want just me and Davion making all the calls, so Kiasyn and Samson were given access to the Admin channel as well. In the end, anything that gets decided has to be carried out by either me or Davion. I personally am disinclined to enjoy making decisions on my own, and I can assure you the choice to ban Crat was not taken lightly. I weighed all options and found that with the complaints that had been lodged, and his actions as I had seen them on the network, banning was the best solution in regards to the available options.

    As for Conner's comments, i3 and i2 have been gone for some while. irc however was revived recently when Kiasyn rewrote the bridge and got it working. I second the idea of Kiasyn fixing the gamebot, I enjoyed those games, and I know Venia did as well, So.. *cracks a whip at Kiasyn* Fix it man, fix it! :P As far as inews goes, I think everyone is in agreement that it should be read only, except for the bots. There also seems to be a decent following for the idea of pushing build and code talk to their respective channels.

    For pchat however, this is a touch issue. Fear put forth some good arguments for it's removal. Players can't always be trusted to behave themselves and not start flaming shit-slinging contests over who's mud is better. But what if there was a guideline/rule put in place for pchat that stated that no game-specific content could/should be discussed?

    I have a feeling Foul language is directed at me. :P I swear like a sailor, and I have a hard time stopping myself. But if there's enough community backing, I'll do my best. :P

    I agree whole-heartedly with the advertising sentiments. Those on the network with players have no doubt worked extremely hard to get and keep their players. It does indeed seem inappropriate for advertising to take place. Especially since the IMC connection itself could be viewed as advertising itself (see previous post for details.)

    I'm all for restricting local conversations to local (read: non-IMC) channels. If it's a private discussion between two individuals on the same mud, keep it off the network, the rest of us surely don't need to know if it's private. And for those unaware, the channels are logged. Scoyn and I are probably infamous for this, but for whatever reason, he doesn't find poking fun at me as funny if everyone on the network can't see it and join in. *shrug*

    I'm going to go with the common sense rule as far as Conner's other point about the "not worth being on the network". If it sounds like it could get you in trouble, it probably can. So don't do it. If you're just hanging out to cause problems, save me and Davion some work and just go away. We don't want troublemakers, we just want a nice close-knit community where everyone feels comfortable discussing things together. (particularly PoLiTiCs :evil: Muahahahaha.. *Ahem* I mean.. Uh.. Nevermind.)

    On another note, Rehashing the whole Samson Vs. Cratylus thing is really getting old, can we drop it please? Also this new found Samson vs. DavidHaley is a little tiresome as well.
    15 Jul, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 19th comment:
    Votes: 0
    Samson, your response to my comments is exactly the kind thing I was talking about. I am trying to talk about this politely and you won't even look at the olive branches. Look, it's utterly obvious that the community has some serious problems in some places (otherwise this thread wouldn't even exist) and if they are to be fixed they're going to have to be talked about. There's no sense trying to fix things if people aren't going to even talk about what the problems are. I thought I made it very clear that I was not trying to paint you as an evil person. Apparently my efforts failed utterly with you, so I'm not sure how else to say it at this point. I agree that in light of how you seem to irreparably feel, it seems to not be a very productive conversation.

    Kayle said:
    I have a feeling Foul language is directed at me. :P I swear like a sailor, and I have a hard time stopping myself. But if there's enough community backing, I'll do my best. :P

    If it were to be desired as a policy, you would absolutely have to set the example as an admin. :wink:

    And I know you said the politics thing in jest, but I'd like to make it a serious topic. I would much rather politics be utterly removed from the network to whatever extent possible. Too many "melt-downs" have been due to somebody holding a political position that somebody else thought was completely untenable and immoral, or plain stupid or ignorant. You can't expect somebody to just sit there and stay silent in a case like this. :shrug: So better leave it unsaid in the first place. Besides, it's completely off-topic and dilutes the intended use of the channels.
    15 Jul, 2008, Guest wrote in the 20th comment:
    Votes: 0
    DavidHaley said:
    Samson, your response to my comments is exactly the kind thing I was talking about. I am trying to talk about this politely and you won't even look at the olive branches. Look, it's utterly obvious that the community has some serious problems in some places (otherwise this thread wouldn't even exist) and if they are to be fixed they're going to have to be talked about. There's no sense trying to fix things if people aren't going to even talk about what the problems are. I thought I made it very clear that I was not trying to paint you as an evil person. Apparently my efforts failed utterly with you, so I'm not sure how else to say it at this point. I agree that in light of how you seem to irreparably feel, it seems to not be a very productive conversation.


    Call me crazy but I'm funny that way. I take a dim view of being blamed for someone elses antagonism especially when the person casting that blame has also been hostile and antagonistic. But as it never seems to matter what I say on the subject, because somehow I'm always wrong, enjoy yourselves. I've had enough of this.
    0.0/83