In Regards to Wild West

[Elvis Starburst]

*INHALES*

I mean it is a shame but really everyone who brought enjoyment to the WW through shitposting threads or other weirdness pretty much moved on. All we were left with was a few people actively bullying while trying to maintain an outward veneer of "fun" in the face of their own apparently endless aggression.

Whatever the WW brought to the site pretty much ran its course. Passive aggressive snarking isn't fun to deal with but the WW hadn't been helping reduce that for a while. The worst culprits just willfully engaged in both areas.

Pretty much. I know it had some entertaining threads, and stuff I felt like posting in. But by the end it was a total mess for a lot of reasons.

And having all discussions be productive and moderated will ensure that this site's remaining days will be better.
It's easy, just don't be bad person. I see no downside.

That's the part I find amazing. I know I'm no perfect princess with my attitude sometimes, but even I won't go out of my way to make threads to harass other users and call them out. Some of the stuff I saw in the WW was insane. Though, R&P is no better either.

I do truly believe this forum is a lot worse off without it. Furthermore, people complain that the forums devolved into slap-fighting, but this is just not true at all. If anything, there was always fighting. It's just that in the days without the WW, it was veiled in subtle insults and passive-aggressiveness. And you know what? That's fine. But with the WW, we at least had a choice.

Perhaps a good compromise would be to lighten up some of the rules, but if the mods were really agreeable to that, I don't think they would have removed WW in the first place, so that's probably not gonna happen.

It's always had fighting, yes. But when certain things like call-out threads weren't gonna be dealt with in any fashion due to the WW's lawless nature, I feel like that took the fighting issue of the site to way too high of an extreme. I voted initially to remove the WW, but in my post in the thread (After reading it all) I changed my mind to a point, and thus I was on the fence about it.

I'd like to see a potential compromise on the rules here, because there were some legitimate things the WW brought to the table, for better or for worse, that I think had at least a tiny amount of value. Being able to speak your mind in ways the normal forum won't allow was one of them. But on the flip-side, we had people who decided to make it their mantra to be the worst people they could, to people they hate, all while making the choice to just not leave the site, cause of course the lawless nature of the WW lets these types of 'people' run rampant and sit in baby's first /b/.

Why stop there. How about closing R&P if you wanna clean out the repugnant shit? The place where the people who acted like rancid pieces of shit in the thread go to fester and be horrible? That's the everpresent source of toxic assholes on the site.

Better yet, permaban them. Not like the rules matter all that much anymore. And y'know, 'cause their behaviour is nothing new, only slightly more overt. Less passive more aggressive in WW.

[Snip]

And then these same people go make a big smelly shit in WW, and you close the forum as a solution? Here's an easier way to solve this. Fucking ban them. Oh look, you solved things permanently. Sources of unpleasantness gone. Oh, but it's not the Zontar types doing it, it's on the other end where the users who mock him act like filth. Can't do anything major to displease them. God fucking bid.

[Snip] You're willing to shitcan an entire subforum, clearly, you can do whatever you want at this point. Why not just ban the people raking the shit in that thread? They crossed the line enough for you to nuke WW, then they crossed the line where you can excise them from the site. But you won't, 'cause that would actually remove toxicity from the site, instead of doing jack shit.

[Snip]

Hit the nail on the head big time for all of this, but I wanted to highlight these specific parts. I'd love to hear a mod's opinion on all of this specifically

 

[RaikuFA]

Why stop there. How about closing R&P if you wanna clean out the repugnant shit? The place where the people who acted like rancid pieces of shit in the thread go to fester and be horrible? That's the everpresent source of toxic assholes on the site.

Better yet, permaban them. Not like the rules matter all that much anymore. And y'know, 'cause their behaviour is nothing new, only slightly more overt. Less passive more aggressive in WW.

There are people in this thread that regularly break the "Don't be a passive-aggressive, baiting, disrespectful shitheel" rule outside of the WW, that never get reprimanded. There are instances when people who are less disrespectful than the person blatantly insulting them gets shit on when they respond. If the bar for reprimand is the level of my last infraction, people like UndeadSuitor could get banned any given week.

And then these same people go make a big smelly shit in WW, and you close the forum as a solution? Here's an easier way to solve this. Fucking ban them. Oh look, you solved things permanently. Sources of unpleasantness gone. Oh, but it's not the Zontar types doing it, it's on the other end where the users who mock him act like filth. Can't do anything major to displease them. God fucking bid.

ffs, the people who acted like ferocious assholes in the thread that sparked this are people who wanted the subforum gone. You gave them what they wanted. You backpedalled a bit now, saying oh, it's not specific and shit, but before that you in your initial post you bring up a 'bullying' complaint, that clearly had nothing(/s) to do with the big thread ganging on Zontar for the last few days. You're willing to shitcan an entire subforum, clearly, you can do whatever you want at this point. Why not just ban the people raking the shit in that thread? They crossed the line enough for you to nuke WW, then they crossed the line where you can excise them from the site. But you won't, 'cause that would actually remove toxicity from the site, instead of doing jack shit.

Cherry on top, you bring up the vote people made to keep it, and you deciding to completely ignore it. What the fuck.

This pretty much sums up my thoughts on the situation.

 

[Red Sentinel]

What they shouldn't be able to do though, is take a vote, then act against said outcome of the vote.

Hmmm, that does seem messed up though, holding a public vote for something and then just deciding down the line that actually, you don't care and are going to do what you want anyway.

Cherry on top, you bring up the vote people made to keep it, and you deciding to completely ignore it. What the fuck.

The vote was in favour of keeping the WW open, there should have been community discussion and a revote before any action was taken!

I'm surprised so many people still think this place is a democracy. Your "votes" mean nothing.

 

[Fiz_The_Toaster]

Just to clarify, the Wild West was not my doing, nor was it anything that the moderators wanted. A 'higher power' ordered that it be implemented.

If y'all are going rogue just say you're going rogue

 

[Bedinsis]

And the change happened one day before the one year anniversary of one of the game threads. That's unfortunate.

Which one?

Finish the sentence. I don't know if you remember or saw it, but one of the last posts I made in that thread was one where I alluded to this by starting a sentence with "In another two days..."

 

[EvilRoy]

I know you think that not taking it seriously makes how you acted okay.

I don't think it says anything one way or the other, honestly.

Dude it says when you are un-directed you gravitate towards bullying. That's... that's kind of a lot. If you seriously don't notice it yourself you might need to talk to someone. I honestly always assumed you were doing it intentionally as part of the fun, but if not then wow dude.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Wasn't this decision enacted against SJWs? For the benefit of a conservative? The SJWs doing the hate Speech? I'm personally for hate speech laws ONLY if it applies to everyone. Anyone calling others Nazis or Racists included. It's seems to me like the mods benefited conversatives so they can be protected.

snip

*INHALES*

snip

I know you think that not taking it seriously makes how you acted okay. That by not showing emotion and making other people upset, you proved yourself superior and your views correct. But in reality, it actually makes you a bigger jerk. The fact that you bully people and don't even care about what you are doing is worse than if you were actually emotionally invested.

I don't get it. All these arguments about bullying and nasty fights and my name isn't even brought up once. I'm flattered. :3

Apparently, blatantly and openly calling someone a "fuckass" isn't enough to get people to be angry with you but posting about politics is. I thought I'd be the person everyone would be citing as an example of toxicity.

C'mon guys. You know I'm the edgy tryhard girl you wanna hate.

 

[Ironman126]

Awwww, man. I never got a callout thread made against me. And I tried so hard.

Thanks, Obama.

I feel like we've all let humanity down. You've got a goddamn Donald Trump avatar, by all rights you should have been the target of 15 call-outs a week. This is my fault. I knew I should have made a "CM156 is a wingcuck" thread. I blame myself.

 

[Tayh]

So, a forum dedicated to shit-posting and posting of irrelevant spam got infested by shitposting and posters of irrelevant spam.
Gee, who would have thought?

 

[Squilookle]

Good- nothing of value was ever put into the WW.

I was actually sick of seeing thread suggestions pop up, and start reading them only to find they were just more Wild West garbage.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

So, a forum dedicated to shit-posting and posting of irrelevant spam got infested by shitposting and posters of irrelevant spam.
Gee, who would have thought?

To be fair, no one with pattern recognition or critical thinking.

 

[CyanCat47_v1legacy]

Awwww, man. I never got a callout thread made against me. And I tried so hard.

Thanks, Obama.

But don't you see? The entirity of Wild West was one giant callout thread against you the whole time, a reality created to call you out while rendering you blind and deaf to this fact, knowing that if you ever realized it would mean the secret world order of gay frogs would no longer be able to pacify their strongest enemy. You are the one CM156. Welcome to the wasteland of reality

 

[RobertEHouse]

This is unacceptable! You had no right to do that on your own! This isn't the mod's site any more than it is anybody else's, the mods just ended up being the one's who were handed the keys when Defy stopped caring. The vote was in favour of keeping the WW open, there should have been community discussion and a revote before any action was taken! You just couldn't stand having a section of the site where you couldn't enforce your powers, just like you couldn't stand not being able to punish Epyc Wynn.

Edit: Also so much for that "April Fools" joke. Each part of it is coming true. First the site gets fixed, and now the WW is canned. I guess we can start expecting the draconian moderation next.

Hello all.

As some of you may have noticed, the Wild West sub-forum is no longer accessible. This is not a glitch, nothing Defy did, but something that we, as a moderation team, have decided to do, and this was something that was not done lightly nor without group consideration and discussion.

Yeah, yeah, we saw what "group consideration and discussion" looked like when Epyc Wynn's Pub Club was removed. It was a joke. Completely unprofessional with only a cursory amount of discussion. Not anything like the line we were fed at the time about how the decision was "not taken lightly" and the vote was "unanimous". I don't buy that this discussion was any more professional than the last.

At the very least make the WW visible, but disallow posts in it so that we can still view the old threads for posterity. There were A LOT of fun threads there, and I don't remember what they all were and you gave us no warning before you decided to shut the west down on a whim!

Whether or not you believe any of that is really up to you, and I really have no reason to lie. We've had discussions before in the past about WW, and we did listen to the community and left WW well alone. I know I hardly went in there since it's the kind of place that doesn't interest me, and, as a mod, I can't do anything about it. So, no, it wasn't on a whim. We didn't collectively decide that WW was going to be shut down one day.

While it's true that I've made my opinion of WW known, and it is known, I went along with the users that wanted WW around since it was their call and not mine. In the end, WW ended up being a place that wasn't fun and it was turning into a place where people felt they could get away with being assholes and go after users. Sure, you and I may not like some users but that doesn't excuse the behavior that went on in there, fun threads or not.

So, no. The WW will not be readily open to just view, unless the CM says any different.

This isn't a power trip, this isn't an effort to control the site, nor is it some grand conspiracy to meddle in the affairs of user just for giggles or whatever. And, again, whether or not you choose to believe myself or any other mod is really your choice to make.

I am not saying all the member of the WW had the best judgment in mind when they wrote anything. Some in fact should have been pushed to the winds years ago because of not understanding the world "limits". This was clearly the case when reading a few of the responses to a few call outs posts. Yet, i would not say that ever member participated in such bulling that it required the full shut down of the WW. Just a removal of "bad" members whom at this point appears might have gotten off lightly with the destruction of the WW.

Ironically while typing i found out one which is still able to exist on this site and comment on this very post...Why?

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Yet, i would not say that ever member participated in such bulling that it required the full shut down of the WW. Just a removal of "bad" members whom at this point appears might have gotten off lightly with the destruction of the WW.

Ironically while typing i found out one which is still able to exist on this site and comment on this very post...Why?

As moderators it is a quite major catch 22. The Wild West had very few rules (don't break the law or the site was basically it), so people could be just as bad as they wanted. Now, if we as Mods had gone around revoking access to WW or banning members that were living out the "no rules"-decision to the fullest, that would have backfired on us (just as the closing down is apparently doing). So we could punish people for acting out when told it was alright, or we could remove the playground where acting out was alright. We choose the latter.

As a personal aside, as the moderator who most closely monitors R&P, I've witnessed several threads that had to be locked and infractions handed out because of animosity that intensified in the WW and then spilled over to the rest of the boards. Sure, people might be passive aggressive and pissy against each other anyway, but WW took it from that to outright hostility and that hostility wasn't contained to WW alone.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

As moderators it is a quite major catch 22. The Wild West had very few rules (don't break the law or the site was basically it), so people could be just as bad as they wanted. Now, if we as Mods had gone around revoking access to WW or banning members that were living out the "no rules"-decision to the fullest, that would have backfired on us (just as the closing down is apparently doing). So we could punish people for acting out when told it was alright, or we could remove the playground where acting out was alright. We choose the latter.

As a personal aside, as the moderator who most closely monitors R&P, I've witnessed several threads that had to be locked and infractions handed out because of animosity that intensified in the WW and then spilled over to the rest of the boards. Sure, people might be passive aggressive and pissy against each other anyway, but WW took it from that to outright hostility and that hostility wasn't contained to WW alone.

Is the passive aggressiveness really better though? I mean, is the banishing of the WW really going to make people feel differently about each other? The answer is no, and this thread alone can attest to that. And you could argue that we only just got rid of it, but we all know that even before it existed, even going so far back to the Susan Arendt days, people were still nasty to each other even without WW to supposedly help it along.

And once again, people are saying there's so many problems with hostility, but in my entire time here during when the only content creator was and is Yahtzee, I haven't noticed any problems at all. Now to be fair, I haven't gone over to R&P ever, but that seems entirely irrelevant to WW anyway.

If some really can't learn to ignore a post, are they people who are really worth banishing the entire WW for? When does the responsibilities of the site team end and the responsibilities of the user begin? When is it no longer the site's fault concerning content that is posted? Is it really too unreasonable to expect a certain level of maturity out of our posters? Do we really need to be everybody's babysitter whenever others call them a mean name?

 

[Baffle]

I'm probably gonna get banned from here soon, but if I do, I'm probably not gonna be coming back. And that's not a threat or anything.

Well... that's the point of a ban. If it was a threat, it'd be a shockingly rubbish one.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Well... that's the point of a ban. If it was a threat, it'd be a shockingly rubbish one.

Nah, not the ban. The me not coming back. Although I probably should have said suspended instead of banned.

 

[Dr. Thrax]

-Snorp-

The entire situation is a no-win scenario for y'all, for which I do not envy any of you.

Can't simply remove problematic users - Wynn's case aside - as it violates the whole shtick of WW, no rules aside from "Nothing illegal" and "Don't break the site". Can't bop people for things they've said in WW, so you have to wait and creep around until they slip up out of WW, but some don't even post anywhere but in WW because it lets them get away with things they'd otherwise be bonk'd for.

People still want the WW around, so unless you've got a serious problem on your hands you can't just get rid of it, and even if you do have a serious enough problem, removing WW will still cause outrage because of that "community vote" business or "mod takeover" whackadoodle.. But keeping WW meant that all this toxicity was being allowed to simply fester and simmer and it would occasionally spill out into other forums that you guys had to hammer on. And since y'all don't have control over back-end stuff, it's not like you could simply hide the WW from view because its threads still showed up in the forums box on any of the non-forum pages.

You couldn't police it, the only options available to you was to just ignore it or get rid of it and bunker down for all the rage that's going your way. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

But keeping WW meant that all this toxicity was being allowed to simply fester and simmer and it would occasionally spill out into other forums that you guys had to hammer on.

FFS, where is all this "toxicity" that everyone keeps talking about? Is there some magical Toxicity dumpster in WW that sometimes magically floats into the other sub-forums and spews bad System of a Down lyrics?

Show me where the Toxicity dumpster touched you.

 

[The Lunatic]

This isn't a power trip, this isn't an effort to control the site, nor is it some grand conspiracy to meddle in the affairs of user just for giggles or whatever. And, again, whether or not you choose to believe myself or any other mod is really your choice to make.

So, it's not a power trip despite the fact:
A. It's not what the community voted for.
B. It's not what the original staff of the site implemented.
C. It's doesn't appear to have any oversight from anyone above the mod team and Basement.
D. Was against things which were said in the past about WW by the current mod team and staff.