There have been a number of replies there that I find both depressing and infuriating, as well as ultimately and honestly
worrying.
My ultimatum was to push things, because I think this is a question that absolutely needs to be solved, and I think you're capable of it, if only after reasonable and balanced judgment and thinking.
First of all, Mike.
Mike DiCenso wrote:I agree. I think this setting of ultimatum threats won't sway JMS, and if SWST is truly trolling, then it plays right into his hands to disrupt the board.
-Mike
This... is just not believable at all.
After all this time, you really have to ask if he's
truly trolling?
Following all the hard work you went through, is it the lifting of decisions of banishment which make you doubt so much what has been fairly obvious to everybody?
Do you think asking for his gentle and nice person to be kicked out of this place, once and for all, helps disrupting his board, instead of, I don't know... letting him disrupt this board with excess of naive and touching tolerance?
Get a grip. You do know he's trolling. There's no if whatsoever, and there never will. If you doubt that, if you need to refresh your memory, just take a look at how he bumped the BDZ thread. See what he's really trying to do and what he really wants to avoid doing. Do you see any honesty in that? Can you?
KDM,
Kor_Dahar_Master wrote:Just to say that Mr O and the rest of you are allowing his trolling to cause problems on this board and that you are better than this.
I would hate to see this place turn into a SDN parody where people get banned for disagreeing but id also hate it to become like SB.com where the mods behave like spoiled children.
If we cannot deal with one asshole then we deserve everything we get tbh.
There is one single way to deal with the guy, it's the permaban. Anything else is simply nonsense and a great deal of disrespect towards honest and decent members here, who will have to cope, in a way or another, with the same troll when he will return, and go through the same idiotic process of cats and mice, gathering information like some lunatic secret service repeatedly, restarting the same absurd verbal dance and forcing ourselves through hypermnesia, just to be sure that we're fair towards our Holy Slow Learner.
Let's consider ourselves lucky, people, that this little community has been tormented by only one serious troll, because there's like a shit ton of them out there, probably far more ferocious and cunning. The modest size of the website also explains why his misbehaviour stuck out like a sore thumb, and I'm pretty sure no one here wants to run a collective experiment by welcoming a handful more of them; because that website is presently not suited at all for such an event.
Currently, a troll invasion would make this board collapse.
The greatest lesson isn't for SWST to learn, but for mods and JMS.
There is still no sign of permaban despite most of us wishing for SWST to be dealt with once and for all.
Surely it's not a democracy, but it's not a gulag either. People can leave at any time.
We've already lost l33telboi and Mith, WILGA* as well, plus that other bloke from SDN. And others.
*By the time I started writing this, WILGA had not posted yet.
Now Praeothmin. This is easily the harshest part of it all. I'll establish my point of view, again, perhaps in more details, and not take gloves in order to point out what I find wrong with the way you handled things.
Praeothmin wrote:And by issuing ultimatums, you're acting like a child...
I'm not saying the idiot will go away, but you can easily scroll over his drivel when you read replies...
Simply put, I've already been over this, and it's just not so easy. It isn't just about me, but about all other members willing to discuss here, who have gotten, or will get caught in the same turdfest again and again. Lucky you, that you're both not a moderator anymore and that we don't get many new members, because you'd have had to explain to honest people why they shouldn't debate with he who they see as honest and provoking enough (as simple methods of baiting work), and they'd break their teeth on his mace of madness, and then they'd ask you why the hell did you take so much insane pleasure in letting total punks post in threads and even pollute them. There's no pleasure in having to filter shit. SBC forced you to do so, and it sucked. You weren't allowed to openly ignore a debater, and you had better not show that you had problematic people on your ignore list.
Here, the question needn't be asked, as there's no ignore list system, and I can only wonder how good it would be on such a small community. There's barely enough debate to begin with!
Even the mere fact that
I have to scroll over SWST's pseudo arguments, as you suggest, is already
too much of a price to pay. It's a waste of
my time.
I nor any other member here should be asked to make an effort to sort out his drivel from proper, constructive and intelligent posts.
I am very tolerant, I even went through the process of bringing up enough information before anyone else, even before mods (who mojo said should have been doing it first) so you guys could at least act appropriately and send some glorious warnings. I am very tolerant, yes, but there are
limits. I knew SWST was a troll from the first days he started posting. It was absurdly glaring, it was an insult to us to let him try to prove how he was a honest-to-god debater after so many bans. 1 day, 2 days, 4 days, a week, two weeks, a month, blah blah blah and every time we had to go through that same crap over and over again.
Forcing decent members going through this was, and still is just shite. It's retarded. It's totally irresponsible, and only a sign of weakness and disrespect. That is all.
I merely hope that one day you won't have to experience, in real life, the meaning and consequences of such utterly nonsensical tolerance, as you obviously seem to enjoy it, because you'll learn that it does not pay off.
I don't want to see you go, Mr. O, but I don't care for childish ultimatums either...
Well the problem is that you're not really above reproach you know -- nor am I, but I'm making things even here, I don't like getting cornered just because I'm being vocal on something which needs to be solved. You think that I'm impressed by mods resigning at the slightest sign of the local admin overturning one or two of their decisions, and preferring to feign ignoring a troll when they actually couldn't even help but engage said troll for another round of pointless arguing?
You're the one saying to offended members that they should ignore him, and yet even you couldn't refrain from replying to his posts. You just can't, because you're here to debate, you like it.
So just drop that hypocrisy of yours, please. It's just out of place.
Besides, I don't believe that walking (crawling?) away from your responsibilities, silently, to "save that place", did anything good. What we needed was debate, confrontation, to settle this matter,
not silence.
In truth you saved precisely zip and didn't take the opportunity to highlight the very problem of this forum.
My ultimatum was precisely to counter act said destructive nonchalance.
You think my ultimatum is childish? I don't think so. It was needed. It was mature and responsible, and don't ever think that because we're dealing with something as silly and futile as versus debates that the truth behind what has been going on is equally silly and puerile, because it isn't, really.
I'm puzzled at how you can't understand that the one and only way to go to get rid of a troll, is a swift permanent ban, especially after countless attempts at being nice and allowing the man to be more trouble than what he was worth.
Now, if you think that the real problem was how the enforcement of rules wasn't absolutely clear, then that, I could understand.
JMS quite admitted recently that he didn't put up a system clear enough for his mods, and even admitted that I described the proper concept and application of this very system better than he did. That's... worrying, and very problematic.
I was willing to help, but only if I saw some understanding coming from the other side. There was nothing. Breetai snapped, Mojo as well and got a ban. Well now I snapped and told you the things you needed to hear.
I really hope that SFJN doesn't turn out to be the exact opposite extreme to SBC and SDN when it comes to moderation. Allowing oneself to debate properly and freely, and defend one self's opinions is a good thing. No. Let me stress that. It's a VERY GOOD THING. But dishonesty and trouble shouldn't be met with ever loving tolerance. If only for the sake of clean debate, which always was the point of this place: few discussions, but good ones.
Otherwise my only option should be to get out of this sanitarium and leave you to enjoy your trolls all you want, "educate" them with your psychotic ban-o-thon therapies, since all you would prove would be that you simply deserved more of them.
Sadly, I'd consider all of that a failure.
Finally, JMS:
Jedi Master Spock wrote:I've spent some time thinking about this, and some time asking myself the question:
Would any persistently pro-SW poster be able to come here and not have a crowd clamoring to ban them? I think the answer, at this point, is no; and I'm not fond of this idea. I feel as if most of the complaints about SWST are rooted in the fact that he is outnumbered and stubborn.
Kane Starkiller did, and I don't remember anyone really having any problem with him, aside from heated debates, which probably earned both us some warnings.
KS left, and we can only speculate as to why (tiring of not winning ?).
Is our problem that we are just
too good?
Thanatos came here (I'm picking a pro 40K here) merely because he wanted to debate you personally, and that was just an effect of his temporary activity at SDN while SBC suffered some problems.
I think the real issue is pro-Wars debaters who are too glued with Wong-Saxton material as their basis will simply never come here. They just can't. Stuck in 2002, almost ten years, like if nothing happened, doesn't work anymore, and they had not updated at all.
Other SW fans either don't know about this place or don't care about that debate.
SWST was clearly outnumbered, but he also had all the time and tools necessary to deal with each point honestly and in a focused way. He simply didn't want to. It's all his fault. That is all.
I went against SBC's pro-wars plebe almost alone in 2007 with the huge Aethersprite Delta-7 thread, and I think -but perhaps I'm doing some self pimping here- that things started to change
massively from there. My works, despite all the bans I took in the face, bore fruits because honest debaters could see the value and sincerity of my argumentation, the strength of my evidence.
I had no quibbles in citing RSA when I considered that some of his work was worth it as well. That's the game, simply put. Truth and faith in my works was all I needed to win that game, and things started to change. Other threads were made, discussions were heated, some mods abused their powers and tried to stop the flood of truth, either by banning people they disliked without any defense possible, or tried to ban anti-ICS topics, but they ultimately failed. This adventure ended with a poll which completely settled the question, and reduced the ICS to forgettable gibberish only good for its drawings.
SWST failed because he just wasn't going to debate and had no good points, that's all.
Perhaps you didn't see it, but we did. We went through all his forms of twisted logic, fallacies, and it's abundantly clear that he had all the time and references he needed, and never wanted to use them intelligently. There just was no honesty. Simply none.
Two bans were more than enough. Intelligent people get it at this point: quit or improve. SWST did neither.
I also feel as if I am nearly alone in this. To judge from what I have seen in this thread, nearly the entire community seems lined up behind wanting to see SWST to go regardless of what justifications are used.
So I'm done. The experiment has failed. I do not wish to destroy the community; I will still host the website, update the board software, periodically delete spambots, and other necessary administrative tasks that the moderators cannot do, but I'm done trying to enforce a code that the community has stopped believing in. I am therefore walking away from my position as a court of last appeal and away from the helm of this ship.
Mike, since Praeothmin has chosen to resign, this leaves it your ball game for the moment while whatever policy modifications are being made. The Security Officer group has - or should have - full permissions to the Rules forum section. I will add or remove users from that group on request as seems legitimate. I can be contacted via PM or e-mail, but am not likely to be reading posts in this or the other forum sections.
I don't think you're alone, and shouldn't be, but you've been too lenient. Globally, one can feel when problems start to rise when even the meaning of words begin to be altered very rapidly.
Bans first become "temporary bans". Those "temporary bans" then simply get called "bans" by all, and then, in the end, what a real ban is -permanent ban- is stuff of legend, a thing of the past.
I also don't see why you should host this website if you don't even take any pleasure or responsibility in managing it. It's an antithesis you have here.
If you can't enjoy it, if you think it's time to close, then allow us to have all topics be archived or something.
Or, eventually, if hosting this very forum turns out to be a problem, then -and I'm not sure if I already suggested it- perhaps it could be merged or hosted by some other website, without losing anything of what's been previously written, of course.
But that's just a sad way to finish things.