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God, I go away for a week... thank God I locked the knife drawer.
First up: Anyone who voted to delete the posts in the birthday thread - you should probably think very hard about what being a moderator entails, and whether you are able to discharge that. What it does not entail, I suggest, is moving to delete posts just because you think that they are mean or rude. If it did, then others could by now have moved an _awful_ lot of posts by Dead Megatron in which either he has been personally insulted or an offensive statement has been made to or about somebody else for deletion, and in most cases could have had at least a fair-to-middling chance of having those posts deleted - compare here. This did not happen because, despite the basic lack of accountability this system tends to provide for moderators, the integrity of the thread and of the people posting to it were respected. Even if you think someone is being beastly, if that beastliness is not threadrotting or related to Holocaust denial or racial hatred, is not in the Revolution fora and the person posting it has not received any notification from a moderator alerting them to the possibility that it will be deleted, it should not be moved for deletion. This is pretty basic.
Second up, on hetflirting - I think there are more issues here than whether or not it is icky, or at least whether or not it is icky for a particular reason. Some of those issues are about rather more than its appropriateness to Barbelith. However, since Kali said:
I'm sorry if flirting with DM pisses you off, but wouldn't it be better if you avoided this thread altogether?
I assume that means that this flirting will be restricted to Dead Megatron's birthday thread. Speaking personally, I would be grateful if it was. I'd also like it to be done with less inline posting of potentially NSFW content - I'm a bit surprised that the moderators who saw fit to move posts for deletion as a matter of personal taste at no point thought to tidy the Betty Page up.
Ganesh, I don't think worth to the board is as nebulous as you think. One could, for example, look at engagement with threads, level of ontopic posting, contribution to the parts of Barbelith that make it different from other Internet bulletin boards (see in particular the Revolution fora) - just to select a few examples.
That said, this animosity is clearly getting out of hand. Speaking personally, I would be happier if Flyboy laid off Dead Megatron, possibly by putting him on ignore. I would be happier about this because it makes it harder to make a clear distinction between when Dead Megatron does say or do unacceptable things, and when he is just being effusive. Also, it often makes threadrot more likely.
I would also like Dead Megatron to have a really good think about what he gets out of posting on Barbelith. I would go further, actually, and suggest that he thinks about what he gets out of posting to the Conversation and to threads outside the Conversation, and what he gets out of posting to threads he has read and at least believes himself to understand as opposed to threads he has posted to without reading. And so on.
Ultimately, however, Barbelith is meant to be more than just a chat site. Particularly during low-traffic periods, high-traffic posters have the means to change the flavour of the board, and if hey do so by making it more like a chat site, that's a problem.
I would like to point out that I have actually been making an effort recently to treat Dead Megatron with a degree of civility - more civility than I can expect to get from him, anyway, it seems, given his recent unsolicited contributions to "Burning Down the Haus" - and I'm pretty depressed that he's trying to goad me into turning up on his birthday thread (no attention is bad attention, I realise...) or describing my feelings for him as "hatred" in this thread. I don't think that this is good behaviour, and it does not raise hopes that after a year DM is much closer to setting into the routine of reading, comprehending and responding that I would generally see as entry-level for productive membership of Barbelith. That's a separate issue, however. |
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