Reminds me of policies I've seen where areas get rid of trash cans and just tell people to hold their trash and take it elsewhere for disposal. The end result is always a bunch more littering.
Just another glorious day here in Off-Topic
- Thread starter Squilookle
- Start date
It was an incomprehensible decision made for the seeming benefit of no one and time has not made things clearer.
I think the thing that bothers me is we're allowed to post political stuff so long as its labeled. So obviously they didn't care about political topics, just that there was a designated subform for them?Drathnoxis said:
I got some kind of impression from blue posts at the time that R&P may have had some kind of relaxed moderation, so possibly they did this to normalize standards across the board. I imagine its done SFA in general considering how slow everything moves now and the lack of notable new topics. If you were gonna get banned over any given "trump did this thing and now I'm ANGRY" threads it probably would have happened before this.Silentpony said:
The cynical part of me is leaning more towards this being some kind of "we're still here and doing stuff!" statement than anything else. Little if any visible progress is made on the new front page, the content plods on at a so-so pace... Better do something to make sure people know we're still here! Kind of reinforced by the fact that the only time we see the mods or CM making any particular posts about anything, in spite of the fact that they either know nothing or aren't allowed to say it if they do, comes after this. Then the posting fades to the normal background state of almost zero a couple days later after a few trivial posts about this or that topic very distinctly not about the issue that woke them up. Thank goodness they know we're still here, we can relax again.
I dunno. Considering its become obvious that the team is gonna do whatever they want regardless of the forum opinion, and the fact that no effort was made to preserve threads or even just give warning before the axe fell so those who cared could do it themselves, why even bother with these changes? It just creates vague annoyances, in exchange for vaguely annoyed people. Its like they know they're gonna spike the forums but haven't come to peace with it so they make due by quietly carving bits of it away.
There are two ways to look at this.
That there is too much R&P in the Off-topic forum is one perspective. But the other is that there's not enough non-political off-topic discussion - so get thread-making and talking about non-political stuff.
That there is too much R&P in the Off-topic forum is one perspective. But the other is that there's not enough non-political off-topic discussion - so get thread-making and talking about non-political stuff.
Close Gaming Discussion next, and if you want to discuss games you can create a topic here with a neat [GAMING] in the title. That should fix the problem.
I said it at the time and I'll say it again. They thought they were closing R&P but they actually closed Off-topic
Certainly seems that way. I sort of wonder if they only did it this way because they were sick of manually transferring political threads made in off-topic to the R&P forum, and this was their band-aid solution.Silent Protagonist said:
If I remember correctly, one of the mods for the R&P forum did not have a positive view of the place. I assume modding R&P was also seen as a not favorable thing to do. And given that they got rid of the modless WW, I guess they didn't want to keep a violate forum open without moderation support.Squilookle said:
I thought they nerfed that a while back.Marik2 said:
https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.1055929-Publishers-Club-discontinued
I think the options were to combine extra subforums or get rid of them and I will take combining them any day over completely losing them.
I do think putting the [TAGS] makes it worse though than just having all the topics mixed up together. Just posting normally would make more sense. With just about anything being considered political you would have to put "[Poltics] Asshole Kicks Puppy" these days just to be safe.
Then why didn't they just hold R&P to the same standard as everywhere else? That would've required 0 extra work and been a lot better for everyone else who want to keep politics out of their sub-forumsObsidianJones said:
Because the people there would complain. And they're really good at complaining.Elvis Starburst said:
Pshhh.. Wherever gamers go there is complaining. Wherever people go there is complaining. Wherever you go there is complaining.crimson5pheonix said:
...which is the whole point in the first place. Perhaps if there was a dedicated place for R&P, then there wouldn't be so much complaining in Off Topic.crimson5pheonix said:
It's kind of been the entire gist of this thread since the start?
- Feb 7, 2011
- 8,692
- 3,259
- 118
- Country
- 'Merica
- Gender
- 3 children in a trench coat
I think we should have a sub-forum for complaining, or at least a tag in off-topic.Squilookle said:
[Complaining]
ObsidianJones said:
R&P has always been a contentious forum, both among users and among moderators. When I was moderating last year, most moderators had given up on trying to enforce rules for anything but the most extreme infractions (death threats, porn, malware linking etc.) because the idea that R&P operated on its own laxer set of rules was pretty ingrained and a lot of people there would pick a fight anytime someone got a warning. It took a lot of extra work to keep R&P to the standards of the rest of the Escapist, mostly because a rather large subset of R&Ps population actively resented any moderation that fell on people they agreed with. As another comparison there was maybe 2 or 3 people in Gaming Discussion and Off-Topic that would actively insult other users repeatedly, for the first few months of me moderating the same number was around 10 in R&P.Elvis Starburst said:
I like to think that R&P was a better place when I stopped being a mod, partially because I tried my best to get it actively moderated again and partially because the revival of the Escapist meant that it got both a sense of a future and that someone was actively watching again. With that being said, it was till a contentious forum and the archaic infrastructure of Escapist v1 can cause all kinds of trouble, so I wouldn't be surprised if this is a move to make it easier or even possible to acquiesce a move to a new forum infrastructure.