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Ahem. Quoting other people's PMs out of context, or indeed in context, without their consent is rather bad form. Arguably worse form than vetoing a moderation request aimed at your own thread, thus depriving anyone without a personal investment in the thread of the opportunity to make what you are maintaining is a perfectly reasonable decision and thus surely well within the powers of the moderators who are not you to make. Also, your thread is basically an advert. Is that any cop? You decide. Is it to be placed in the Creation or the Comic Books? As it turns out, you decide that as well. See the problem?
So, what do people think? To look at another and possibly easier forum, how about Books? At present, let's say, raelianautopsy is posting chapters of his novel in the Creation. If we get rid of the creation, then we plonk those threads in "books". But they aren't books. Even if raelianautopsy posts the entire thing, it isn't particularly a *book*. It's a novel, but is it a book? Perhaps it is an ebook? But it does not, in all probability, exist as a book in the same way that, say, "The Secret History" is a book. *If* you assume that to count as a book something ought to be published, reviewed, distributed etc. The Books forum at present is for people to discuss common reading experiences or to recommend potentially available reading experiences, or to discuss the world in which those reduplicable, sharable experiences of independently created and disseminated works. We can change that, and also make it for people who want to write and display things that in an earlier time would be bound in paper and sold in WH Smiths (novels, short stories, poetry, whatever), just as we can make the Music a place where people can share their creations, which in amn earlier age would be distributed as CDs or tapes or records. It's a democratisation of the means of production, but also a fragmenting.
If this as what we want to do, to some extent or other, then it also makes sense that anything involving images telling a story shoudl go in Comic Boooks, no matter its creation or dissemination. That creates a very broad forum remit, from Wolverine fighting the Hulk to Kegboy's magician drawings (for example), but it could be done. If it is meant to be reserved for discussion of, say, the printed output of a number of presses that constitute "the comic book industry", the characters and the history thereof, then self-published work by people outside that industry and those presses may not fit there, and citing lots of examples where moderation has failed to take that into account, or has erred on the side of caution, does not alter that.
So, if we make a rule that things created by members of Barbelith should go in the forum that most closely resembles the form in which they are created, then we have a definite inequality here, and should bust schmee, say, out of what has been identified as a ghetto, that is the Creation, which will then be left largely or shut down. Or we could decide that comic strips, comic books and other drawn stories have a distinguishing characteristic that means they should be excluded from the Creation and kept in the Comic Books thread regardless of their provenance, which is a possible, but whichever we settle on could do with some sort of logic behind it beyond either "this is where I want it to be" or the more compelling but still incomplete "this is where these threads are", since other drawn narrative has gone into the Creation... |
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