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I'd rather he didn't return form his holiday to blame me for his lack of will and make it necessary. I'd quote it here, but it's been deleted.
Steady on, old chum. I've already reproduced the text above, having explained that I deleted it in the ultimately vain hope of averting a look-at-me fest, here. Might it possibly be an idea to call a bag of weed a dreidel, a baggie, a stocious, a patois, a paranoidwriter, a bit much? Seriously, old bean, I don't think these ditch sallies of yours make me as irritated as they do others, and I'm sure they do not stop you from being a lovely fellow in other situations, but they really do wear me down. As mentioned, it's a morale thing.
Anyway, time, I think, for one of my patented unconvincing appeals for calm. Let's take a breath, here.
Deja vroom: Something similar has been tried, and indeed something to that effect is being tried over at Liminal Nation. It is extremely time-consuming, and it is also a big ask - especially when the conversation on Barbelith at the moment is at the level of, say, MFreitas trying to shout down all who dare to talk seriously and with consideration about an issue arising from a comic. It simply doesn't seem right or reasonable.
Museum: That's approximately where I came in, and is probably the most functional system. The thing about that is that, essentially, it was tried and it didn't work, because while people are genuinely eager to help, or to enjoy the status of one-who-helps, actually getting them to do stuff is much more difficult. Keeping track of the appication with which people monitored applications was actually more hassle than just processing them oneself. That's one problem. Another problem is that, no offence, the number of people I would trust to fail to do the job is a chunk lower around here than it was the last time the community response failed.
A broader problem is that the requests to "open the board" fail to take into accout the actual character of the process. We don't actually have a registration. We have a security exploit, effectively, which is shared with people. Each time somebody is let in, the system becomes slightly less secure. I have proposed ways to make this more secure, and Tom has asked me to cleave to the original method; I am not convinced that this is wise, but it's his party. It would be relatively simple to "open the board" - one coud simply set the applications email address to share the details of the exploit with everyone who sent an email to it. This would, however, mean that banning was not simply somewhat difficult to verify, but that it would in all probability become functionally impossible ever to remove somebody from Barbelith again, with the technology in its current state, which is the only state it will ever be in unless it breaks further. In effect, it will become 4chan.
Now, that might work pretty well for a number of people here. Others would not care very much as long as they got to speculate about who the Black Glove is while a perpetual hate march goes on around them. It would certainly and quikcly remove the one thing that is arguably left to Barbelith - an attempt to rein in and discourage racism, sexism, homophobia and other such unpleasantness, and would let those of us who remain give up the long and ultimately uneven struggle.
Our current system is a fudge where people are let in even if they are clearly going to end badly (such as Fungus of Consciousness), if they can simply demonstrate their existence in a meaningful fashion. This luxury is vouchsafed by some sort of vague sense that we can stop people from getting banned and immediately coming round for another go. It may be a largely illusory sense but it has some basis in an approximation of fact. |
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