1 hour ago, frob said:

The rule about no personal attacks is a defining feature of the board and something that helped build the community we've got.  We can disagree about topics, we can hold views that are at opposite ends of the spectrum, and that's okay. 

I'm not sure that's as cut and dried as it might seem. There are various discussions where the views at the end of the spectrum represent existential threats to those on the opposite end of the spectrum (racism, gender discrimination, trans rights, abortion, to name but a few).

One can't really justify using "civility" guidelines to moderate a discussion wherein one party is politely stating a view that would, if implemented, limit the rights to life and/or liberty of another party.

Whatever the Mother of All Topics was (my guess is it related to the Mango Mussolini), you can't pin it on me as this is my first post here in a decade. Ha! Hope all is well with the og's.

1 hour ago, LessBread said:

Whatever the Mother of All Topics was (my guess is it related to the Mango Mussolini), you can't pin it on me as this is my first post here in a decade. Ha! Hope all is well with the og's.

Don't be such a stranger.

6 hours ago, frob said:

These certainly can be the case.  That is exactly what we moderators watch for.

In my experience moderators often just end up supporting the side they are most inclined to support. They may not even realize they are doing it but I think it's human nature, and it's near unavoidable for all but the most introspective mods.

Go to any left or right leaning website with a forum and this becomes obvious. While mods typically punish the most blatant violations on either side, they definitely show their bias with the edge case.  After a while the regulars understand this and they use it to draw their opposition over that fuzzy line to get them censored or banned. It becomes a big game.

On 9/9/2018 at 9:17 PM, khawk said:

 

On 9/9/2018 at 3:41 PM, deltaKshatriya said:

Do mods want to chime in on why the thread was shut down so we can get some clarity?

For violating my paragraph above about "respect". When I visit the GameDev.net front page and see the summarized contents of replies where members are attacking each others' intelligence, the thread has to stop.

9 hours ago, frob said:

When it has lost control we shut them down: at that point it is no longer a discussion.

If "respect" is violated, its usually some few perpetrators. Why not eject the perpetrators, usually a minority. Its not fair on those who have striven to maintained a civil discussion, to shut down the thread 

And @mikeman I don't you are one of those who behaved badly. No need to feel guilty(as your post seem to indicate) or ban yourself from such discussions

7 hours ago, swiftcoder said:

One can't really justify using "civility" guidelines to moderate a discussion wherein one party is politely stating a view that would, if implemented, limit the rights to life and/or liberty of another party.

This is still subjective

Take a topical US issue - gun ownership - for instance. 

If I make a statement, (for simplicity):: "Ban gun ownership for all who don't need it for a profession, and mass shooting will cease"

To a right leaning moderator, my view if implemented will limit their rights and liberty to gun ownership. To a left leaning moderator, my statement is absolutely fine and not contentious 

8 hours ago, grumpyOldDude said:

To a right leaning moderator, my view if implemented will limit their rights and liberty to gun ownership. To a left leaning moderator, my statement is absolutely fine and not contentious 

I don't personally see that as an existential threat, but at the same time, I don't have any problem with us never having another gun control debate here. It's not exactly furthering the cause of game development.

There are quite a few of these topics that do intersect game development (as well as the broader tech industry), around diversity, representation, harassment/abuse, etc. On those discussions I tend to agree with @khawk that they may be worthwhile to discuss, but only insofar as we can start such discussions from a place of acceptance that the problem at hand actually exists.

Whenever discussions have occurred around these issues in the past, they have tended to regress to a few extremists shouting about the problem not actually existing. Which represents a significant black mark on our reputation across broader industry discussions of the same topic. This isn't the unmoderated morass of 4chan or reddit, and extremist agendas can not receive equal weight during moderation.

As someone who posts from a pro Trump viewpoint, which is in the minority among the moderation as well as userbase, I think overall the moderation team does a fantastic job in allowing speech from both sides, so worrying about over moderation isn't something that's really valid as of now. 

I don't think the moderation team closed the thread because there were more pro-trump posters, I think it was clear that it was pretty much done running it's course. The following thread that was opened was clearly a circumvention of that valid closure, so locking it was warranted as well.

For the reputation system, while it's true some members seem to use it as a punishment mechanism to keep you from expressing your opinion, more moderate members in the community tend to correct the ratings to be neutral when they see it happening, and even then they're just virtual points, so whether it's removed or not in the lounge doesn't matter much.

Posted from a phone, Swype sucks on here, so some words may be wrong

I'm not really interested in politics, but seriously, kudos for discussing about this stuff, making an effort to make it possible, and actually taking feedback. Super impressed by this community again.

I know that this has been settled, but, in case it's helpful, if I may make a suggestion regarding the front page:

Instead of either showing posts from the Lounge, which may lead to the problem of certain threads flooding the page, or hiding posts from the Lounge, which may hide interesting content, perhaps change the front page to show threads, rather than posts. It might still show recent activity by indicating the content of the most recent post in that thread, perhaps along with the time of the most recent activity, and an indicator of whether there is content (or the number of posts) not yet read by the visitor, if feasible. This way no one thread can dominate the activity list, because each thread has only one entry in it.

Even aside from the question of potentially off-putting threads, this might allow for a greater number (and perhaps as a result a greater variety) of threads to be easily visible.

All of that said, I'll confess that I don't generally use the front page myself, and so may be ignorant of an element of its usage!

Just now, Thaumaturge said:

Instead of either showing posts from the Lounge, which may lead to the problem of certain threads flooding the page, or hiding posts from the Lounge, which may hide interesting content, perhaps change the front page to show threads, rather than posts. It might still show recent activity by indicating the content of the most recent post in that thread, perhaps along with the time of the most recent activity, and an indicator of whether there is content (or the number of posts) not yet read by the visitor, if feasible. This way no one thread can dominate the activity list, because each thread has only one entry in it.

I'm entirely on board with this, if only because I remember the "unread content" page previously working like this and I was slightly put off by the "firehose" of the current front page when it first showed up.