BRING BACK OFF TOPIC SECTION

[LoST RaiNDRoP]

I bring you this messege from Cloud Clone...

Cloud Clone

"They best interests of the people should the first priority for any type of pastime, including the mediums of hosted sites. A hosted site is meant to draw people in to it, not push them away. That's why this suggestion portion of the forums is here, to make the site better for the people that come to it. lf the presented medium doesn't attract people, they will find other places to go, and in turn, this site will be plunged into the depths of meaningless data that floats along the endless sea of cyberspace that is the internet. People will not come to a site that doesn't meet their needs, and that's the simple truth. If the one in charge don't take the appropriate actions necessary to take care of the ones beneath them, their support will falter and everything they have worked hard to build will crumble beneath them. As I am personally affected by an unjust act of selfish retribution, I can, from my new viewpoint, say that the system of power has taken a turn for the worst, and if things do not change, and people such as I, who mean no harm in providing humor in the content of my posts, will go with their needs unmet and will at some point find another place that is better. Again, I will say that this thread is for the betterment of the site as a whole, and "better" is what satisfies the people. I liken myself to the honest man who has needed to steal bread for his starving family because his government is not looking out for his welfare because of their own greedy ends. I have posted Off Topic because there was no thread that supported that type of posting. Is it my fault that the government (The Webmaster and Moderators) has not provided the means (The Off-Topic Thread) to feed my starving family (My need post about something not completely anime-centered?) The answer is no. It is the duty, the responsibility, of those in charge to provide for the needs and requests of the people (We, the org members) If that is not the course that is brought by them, then the Moderators have failed in their duty. That is all."
-Cloud Clone
_______________
You're lucky... I've decided to let you live to see the day when I will rule the world!
-Prince of Spam

...i agree on it 100%!!!

[azulmagia]

Bringing OT back will not solve the spam problem in General Anime (the forum where it's currently worst). More mods paying better attention -- and taking action against offenders faster -- will. The site gets more users every day, and nearly all of them have enough background to start posting in General Anime, which has almost no rules on allowable topics; spam is the *inevitable* result. I'm not going to go as far as EC's old "delete GA" rec, but it should be recognized that this particular forum has a congenital problem and needs regular pruning of spam posts by definition.

How on earth can we know that the contention that there aren't enough mods is so. How many mods are moderating GA now, I wonder? As well as the other forum? What is the total number of mods, period?

No need to use names in explaining these things, aliases (e.g. "Mod X mods General Anime, so does Mod Y, who is also mod of Episode Discussion, etc.") will do fine if the mods are still to be anonymous.

Another thing is: where have we heard this "not enough mods" argument before? During the purge & lock, that's where. It's one of the reasons some people were (and remain) skeptical about the "official" rationale of the lock & purge - lack of info ensured that the "they were too difficult to police effectively" allegation was impossible for the "off-topic" party to either corroborate or refute. In other words, the "defence" side did not have access to the same "evidence" as the "prosecution", to use the metaphor of a trial.

Oh yeah, Raindrop, if you do check out that thread, since you weren't there at that time, the thread was pruned/redacted several times before it took its present day shape.

[Jonathan02us]

Let's put this into perspective. Most of the members here are retards who couldn't possibly post anything other than "insipid spam".

Quite possibly true. That said, sometimes this "insipid spam" can be fun/amusing. Until threat from mods happen (never to me, fortunately).

Yeah ... i think the only way to get back the OT forums and stuff is for the AMV community as a whole to act as one and ease off the excessive spammage and maybe in the near future we can get our OT forum back ...

But i hear what the mods are saying that the OT threads get spammed alot and they want that to a minimum, so we need to stay on topic on the off topic threads so it wont just be utter caos ... . That doesnt mean that we cant talk about anything, its just that we cant put useless things like what the mod mentioned before.

I think this is the only way to get our OT forum back, the mods are bent on not letting us have it because of what happened in the pass. So we need to learn from our pass and work this whole mess out.

Well thats all i gots to say about that ...

[paizuri]

Too many people to respond to so I'll forego trying to quote them all.

- I'm somewhat confused by the candy analogy. This forum is not the sole purveyor of bad spam, or any sort of spam really. I bet there are plenty of other places you can find/make it on the web though.

- A spam-only forum may solve some problems, but it's not our duty (or desire) here at a-m-v.org to supply it.

- The burden of proof, or whatever this should be called, of this suggestion for an off-topic forum lays on the people suggesting it, not the administration. Without providing a solid reason, there is no justification for creating something which would only use up more resources without adding any noticeable benefit.

- There is a distinction between a fun thread for all and a fun thread for 1 or 2 people. I would like to call the latter "spam". Other examples of spam are long strings of emoticons and nested quotes. Off-topic posts which are total non sequiturs like "I'm so sleepy!" or "What am I doing up so late?" or "I like this thread and would like to keep it alive without actually presenting new information or viewpoints towards the subject" may also fall in this category.

- If you would like to consider yourself a retard, that is your prerogative. Personally, I think most of the people that stayed after the OT forums were closed are intelligent and adaptive people, but there are a few who seem to be unable to move on in life and accept that things do indeed change. Hopefully this failure to adjust doesn't carry over into other facets of their lives.

- I asked Cloud Clone nicely to reduce the amount of spam he was producing. He didn't and was banned for a week.

- I also asked Jonathan02us nicely to reduce the amount of spam he was producing. He replied back politely saying he would and followed through. Notice, he is not banned. Furthermore, he posts in the Mod Drop Box when there are bad threads and even suggests that perhaps we would be more inclined to put the OT forums back if we could be shown that the past would not repeat itself and that the forum citizens themselves would act to prevent excessive spamming. Not only polite, but perceptive too! Personally, I think I like the guy. If only more forum users here were like him. Not necessarily perfect and squeaky clean, but cognizant of when they go overboard and willing to make amends.

I see the word "community" bandied around a lot, but I don't see many people sticking together. Mostly I see complaints about things or yearning for days long gone. Well, I don't think things will ever be the same, nor do I really want that. I want for things to be better. How can this be accomplished? Well, the moderators can prune threads and warn/ban violators. But the regular users can also notify moderators when people go astray and point to the threads where this happens so we can clean them up faster. It's one thing to say "Oh, you guys weren't doing your jobs", but really, were YOU doing anything either? How can you stand there and criticize and speculate about bad we are when you don't show you can do any better? If you want to be a community, than be active in the community and not just use it for your own self-gratification and then just drop it when it no longer suits you. That's all I'm saying.

If I neglected to address anyone, send me a PM.

[Flint the Dwarf]

Well, I'd report all that stuff if I ever saw it in great quantity. But as I almost never browse GA, I don't see most of it. And the spam in GAMV is usually kept to maybe two or three consecutive posts. Announcements has gotten more off topic ocassionally, but I don't generally see it as a big deal. So it seems that GA is the biggest problem now, as myself and many others figured would be after OT was hidden.

So what about a few of the regulars being GA-only mods? I think that several members have proved their reliability in other communities as mods, and some people really don't have much else to do. I don't remember hearing a good reason why more people haven't been made mods... and I think it would help for these GA-only mods to not be hidden. If there's some reason that Phade is reluctant to make some people mods, I'd like to hear it.

Personally, I think most of the people that stayed after the OT forums were closed are intelligent and adaptive people

I like to think I'm one of those. Though, in all seriousness, I do go off topic a lot. But as no mod or admin has ever warned me in any way, I don't think I've ever crossed the line.

[Kai Stromler]

How on earth can we know that the contention that there aren't enough mods is so.

It's not that we need more mods; it's that more of the ones we have need to look more at GA (apologies for inclarity in the original). If you look at the post stats on GA, it's got ~75000 posts, which is almost twice as much as GAMV (~40000) and probably in the neghborhood of all the tech forums put together. It just makes sense that the forum with the highest traffic has the most (abstractly) spam; it was also the only board (as of the last time I checked) with two locked threads on the front page[1].

A lot of people read it, and a lot of posts are made, so even if the spam rate isn't worse, percentagewise, than other forums (though I suspect it is), a lot more spam is going to build up and annoy more people. Down in General Music we get horribly off-track all the time, but nobody cares as few GM threads even get to a second page.

Due to the nature of GA and the scale we're operating at (see my first venture into this topic), it's probably not possible to get the spam down to the same absolute level that, say, the tech help forums run at. It's just not going to happen. But it could be a little cleaner; the lack of spam in the rest of the site gives us unrealistic expectations.

--K

[1] Full disclosure: only one of the locked threads is due to spam. The other was locked for Mroni posting about his typical subjects.

[Mroni]

Just how many what is your favorite char,show etc topics can be put in general anime. We need off topic back!!!! Besides I remember some very nice conversations I had in off topic and some fun political debates/arguments I had too. And less mods would be nice too.


Mr Oni

[Mroni]

Boy my typical subjects are more interesting to discuss than most of the crap posted in General anime right now.


Mr Oni

[LoST RaiNDRoP]

paizuri,
well.. i havnt reached the OT section before so i dont know how bad it got... im sure it got bad like how it was on the general anime section last week.. but let me ask you this, if you can maintain the low level of spam in the general anime section, why cant you maintain the OT section too?

and about cloud, i never saw him spam again after he told me that he got a warning..

[fyrtenheimer]

...i dont think the GA is nething compared to the OT.