Guys,
This could have been a nasty flamestorm, and I
appreciate how people are at least making the effort to
be civil, instead. Thank you.
CyberTiger,
Let me address a couple of points, not to refute or argue,
but just to try to explain where I'm coming from.
* I don't think it's fair to arbitrarily make people move from igossip,
and that is not what I'm advocating. People are used to ig
for random chatting, and that was pretty much what I set it up for.
* What I *do* think is fair is to enforce the rules, which
are basically the same rules that gjs had.
* I am *not* asking people to be polite on ig, or refrain
from swearing, or withhold their questionable political beliefs.
* Given that these are not new rules, I think it's fair to
have the position that if the rules don't suit someone, they
can simply avoid the channel. This isn't an arbitrary forced exodus, in
my opinion, but rather an individual choice that mud admins can
make, if they really really need to feel free to make racist comments.
I think that one of the biggest sources of FUD here is that people
don't know what happened.
I kept things quiet, not because I'm trying to hide anything, but
simply because I wasn't interested in public denunciations. My feeling
was that if the muds in question wanted to go public about the
events, fine, but in the meantime, handling things privately was the
Right Thing To Do.
I'm still inclined to think that's a good policy. But I recognize
that the general good may be best served by transparency.
In the interest of that transparency, here's a summary of what happened.
Haven and Nanvaent each have a person who is known to make racist
remarks. For the past couple of months, whenever I see it happen, I
have been using tells to ask them to knock it off. I've been using tells
because I am not that comfortable with thundering publicly from above.
I preferred to keep things collegial and avoid public confrontations.
My conversations with Duuk@Haven on the subject have not been very
fruitful. I've been unable to get a commitment from him to stick to
the rules, and he's continued his behavior. Since he is admin of
his mud, there's nobody else to appeal to. There's no means to get
him to stop locally. As much as I disliked doing it, I felt that
there is no point to having rules if all you do is warn but not
enforce. So after the dozenth or so violation from him, I banned Haven
from intergossip.
Note that I didn't kick him off the router, and his other muds aren't
banned. I sent him an email telling him that all he needed to do to
get back on was ask. This is because this banning was not intended to
be "punishment". I wanted to get his attention and make him realize
that I really did mean it.
It was a very limited ban...just one channel, just one mud, in order
to emphasize to him that racist slurs really actually won't be tolerated.
The attitude of Corvin@Nanvaent has basically been the same. I've
nagged and warned, to little apparent effect. I went so far as to
email the admin contacts for Nanvaent, asking for help, but got
no response. Eventually I decided that, as with Duuk, enough was
enough. In this case, since there seemed to be no admin supervision
at Nan willing to deal with Corvin, I decided that banning them from
intergossip would be the only way to get things to change.
Again, as limited a ban as I could make it. Just one channel.
CyberTiger, I have very much been trying to handle this in a way that
avoided bans. It is the very last resort, and I could think of
no other way that would be effective in getting those muds to comply
with the channel rules.
Obviously, if you don't recognize the fairness of the rules in the
first place, then that whole story I just told is moot. But at
least it should be a little clearer that I didn't go on a rampage
because Duuk voted the wrong way or Corvin insulted my parents.
There is one other ban I should mention, while I'm unloading here,
and that's a person named Zaroth. As well meaning as he apparently
is, he seems incapable of controlling himself on the ds channel,
and creates arguments, spam, and generally interferes with the
stated topic of the channel.
Yes, I've spoken with him countless times, explaining what he
needs to do, what he needs to avoid. But in the end, his behavior
does not change, so his mud has been banned from ds.
Again. A limited ban, for reasons explained to him, which he was given
numerous opportunities to avoid.
My actions have been aimed squarely at enforcing the stated rules,
which I think are a *BENEFIT* to the community. This is why it's
staggering to me to hear again the notion that I'm destroying
anything. Let me re-extra-emphasize: swear, be rude, be wrong
on ig. I-don't-care. But I will enforce the router rules, *not*
because "it's my router, nyaah", but because I truly honestly
think that the community is best served by it.
Someone mentioned before (on the log I think) a point which
bears repeating. The yatmim router exists because I felt the
gjs router was 1) unreliable 2) toxic to new muds. So, like a
good netizen, rather than complain, I made my own. Showing up
and telling me I have to make yatmim be like gjs because
tradition dictates it is not reasonable.
Yes, things are a little different. But that's a *feature*,
not a bug. And it blows my mind that I'm accused of destroying
the I3 community, when all I'm doing is enforcing rules
everyone knows and have been around since well before I showed up.
I'm not responsible for the death of gjs, and I'm not
responsible for resurrecting it. yatmim isn't destroying anything.
It's just six channels. My little brain cannot accept the
premise that it's better to shut down yatmim than enforce rules
on six channels.
Anyway, this probably came off a bit more hostile that I
meant. I'm not addressing that hostility at you, CT, honest. It's
just a general frustration I felt while writing.
-Crat
http://dead-souls.net |
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