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That response is a clear example of what people are talking about. It's pure antisocial, fratboy behavior for its own sake. Acting like a jerk just "because I can" (by the way, anyone who uses this phrase should expect a punch in the mouth from someone "because he/she can". Just saying).

I'm a few credits short of my Psychology degree, so I cannot venture a guess as to how the concept of civility has somehow been tied to a lack of masculinity, as the above quote implies. I can say, though, that it says a lot about the warped view people have about what's masculine these days.

Listen, professor, I wasn't calling anyone a girl.

I just don't understand why anyone would want bad info presented nicely, vs. good info from a douchbag.

I just don't understand why anyone would pretend that such a dichotomy exists when, as I've already stated, that is not the case. You're being deliberately obtuse at this point, and judging from your last post, trolling.

No, cupcake, sometimes it really is one thing or the other. Don't expect someone's personality to change just to meet your needs. And really, contrary to what you may think, not everyone who disagrees with your, or even disagrees with the majority, is trolling. But feel free to toss out that card again anytime you have nothing better.

Are you talking to steve? Really? I was going to stay out of this, but seriously, lol. He may not always be the nicest person, but i mean hell, usually he is. Even when the point he's trying to get across is "you're a @#%^ing ******", he still does it at least relatively respectfully.

Also, i am seriously disappoint in how badly a feedback thread has derailed, at the hands of an admin.

Edited, Dec 19th 2010 12:57pm by ThePsychoticOne

To the people running it, yes, it is. I don't give two ***** about what goes on over in FFXI main, but it's asinine for people to claim that scaring away new posters isn't a problem for a website which depends on ads for the majority of its revenue. I couldn't care either way what happens to Rog, I just stepped in because of the illogic at play here.

I didn't respond because my point was that you can be knowledgeable and nice at the same time. If those other people are being a problem, then they should be moderated as well. But for the most part, the karma system is doing its job in those places. The other reason I didn't answer was because I thought that was more of a sidenote on your part than the meat of the post, so my mistake.

Once again, being deliberately obtuse. I never argued to get rid of Rog because I "don't like" him. I said that if anyone - not Rog specifically, but anyone - is being such a problem that they're costing a lot of moderation time, it's in the site's best interest to get rid of that person. How you manage to equate a simple question of cost vs revenue with racism and bigotry is beyond me, but keep pretending that I'm somehow persecuting Rog due to some personal vendetta I have.

Oh, I missed this gem:
Obviously you don't, that's you're posting again and again in a thread about it's moderation. That's closer to trolling than the near Godwin's that I used.

It would be hilarious if a person in this thread stepped on a hepatitis needle. Not anyone in particular, of course. I guess some people could draw conclusions, but putting this in the context of the thread, but then again, putting Majivo's posts into the context of this thread, on would assume she is talking about a specific person.

Alright, I'm going to leave this unlocked for now, but lets try to keep the personal attacks at a 0 level. The feedback forum is for reporting, giving feedback, and reasoned debate within limits. If it goes to a full on flame fest i'll shut it down.



Banning of users is something we try to avoid. Think of your user base as a forest. Once you cut all the big trees down, it takes along time for the little trees to grow big enough to replace them. Even if said trees are crass, cantankerous and sometimes act out. Once you ban a user, you don't get that user back. So you really have to weigh everything and determine what the pros and cons are of that act. Sometimes that calculation occurs quickly. If you are spamming a forum with new threads to try and disrupt the site, you are gone immidiatly, I don't care who you are or how many posts you have. If on the other hand you are a jerk to people in the FFXI forum, I'm probably not going to ban you for that, but I am going to laugh in your face if you ever complain to me about being karma camped.

The forum rules are here: You can also find them at the bottom of every forum page: https://everquest.allakhazam.com/wiki/Forum_Rules
In that document we outline what will will get you banned.

Taking ThePsychoticOne as an example since he started the thread, if you look at his posts in a typical thread, the rates are about evenly split with a slight downward trend. That indicates to me that about half the people who care one way or the other think he should stay. The other half are annoyed at him and wish he would go somewhere else. Thats really not a strong overwhelming majority one way or the other.

We do keep a log of moderator actions on each and every account. ThePsychoticOne is probably up there amongst the highest number of administrator actions on an account who have not been banned. He also has some notations for being particularily helpful in finding bugs and site issues and reporing them. Something which is of use not only to us, but to the forum users as a whole. So the one does somewhat mitigate the other in my mind at least. Nevertheless if he were to do something to cross one of those lines in the forum rules at this point, we would probably ban him because he is out of chances. I think he enjoys the nuclear brinksmanship aspect of it though. Seeing how far he can push things. I get it, but I also know that really pisses off administrators. This story can be repeated about several of the other forum users in FFXI who have been named.

I get where Pikko is coming from too. She sees a user who makes more work for her on a regular basis. One that does not fit her ideal view of the forum. Who she sees as a disrupting element that is preventing new users from finding and enjoying the forum, and prevents people from posting out of trepedition. FFXI has had some ******* insane posters over the years, Godraiden being a perfect example, and people do react differently when a very strong forum personality ruins their day in a thread. I guess strong may not be the best word there, but rather "forceful". If you knew that one jerk who always ruins your day was going to be at your office every single day, you might develope somewhat of an aversion too.

The hardest lesson to learn as an administrator though is we can't just remove people becuase they annoy us. Or rather we shouldn't. When you remove a longstanding forum persona, you change the dynamics of the forum. In most cases, your secondary annoyances now become your primary annoyances, and some of the people who championed having that person removed tend to feel they themselves are untouchable after that, and proceed to fall into the very same roles they rebelled against in the first place. Others find that with their nemisis vanquished, they lose interest in the forum. People watch dramatic movies for a reason. The boring ones don't do too well at box office...

I've banned more users from these forums than anyone else. I actually have a higher ban count than post count if you factor in the thousands upon thousands of PM spammer accounts that we had to weed out. I like to think that I have a fair amount of experiance with this topic, so please trust me when I say that unleashing Karmageddon on the 4-5 "problem children" in FFXI without them doing something worthy of being banned specifically at that time is not the way to proceed. You get backlash from users who wonder if they are next, you get people leaving because the people they came to watch in the zoo aren't there anymore, and you get an overall less entertaining forum.

I'm not sure what the answer here is, but we're saving the ban hammer for a last resort.

Administrator Kaolian

I read around 99.9% of the posts made in =10. I may not always agree with most people there, but i absolutely know basically what most posters there think. It's kind of hard to miss when i spend more time here than i do doing anything else.
Considering you do not spend any time in =10, and i've only been reported some 30 times (admittedly that is far more than anyone else, but still, i have 8.5k posts in =10 alone (2.6k since july, in which time you've made 23) you can't possibly know what really goes on based on so few posts), i really don't understand how you could know that. As spoonless mentioned before, I get blamed for derailing threads left and right, but the fact of the matter is, i very rarely do so. I may help keep threads off the rails often, but only after someone else derailed it first. You have perfectly demonstrated exactly what happens in =10 all the time, with your first posts in this thread. I make a post that couldn't possibly offend anyone (or even one that might, really it doesn't matter), and someone who hates me decides that instead of saying something useful, they're going to take a stab at me. And just look what happened. Out of 50 posts, only like 3 of them are on topic. It took exactly one post for this thread to get entirely out of control. And i mostly stayed out of it this time, AND it was in =3 which is not a forum most people that hate me frequent.

Take a look at how this thread spiraled out of control, in a thread where the only people who seem to hate me are you, erecia, and posisbly majivo. The majority of the rest of the posts in this thread are by my friends. Just think about how this thread would be different if it were in =10, where there are much more people that would have joined in to say they hate me.

Here's some examples if you care:

http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10&mid=129246078726611520 I make one statement about sam, which wasn't even false, and there are people calling for me to be banned. I made a single post entirely on topic, and while i'm not even around, the thread gets derailed because people don't like me.

http://ffxi.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=10&mid=1292749437137214643#msg1292790618210562812 Catwho makes a statement i thought was entirely untrue, so i responded as such. Then Xypin decides to take a stab at me, and then later RDD does as well.

There's two instances of it happening, and that's just from the first page. This really does happen all the time. Just because a lot of people seem to think that i like to constantly derail threads, doesn't mean it's true. I may be mean, but i am not the only one, and i very rarely derail threads, even unintentionally, let alone intentionally.

It has become acceptable to attack me for anything i say. And while won't complain that people do to me exactly what i do to them, i do have a problem with you thinking there are only a few people causing problems in =10. It is a widespread problem, among a large amount of users. If you recall from the wegames thread that resulted in you muting me for a week, there was even a person who registered an account, just to say how much he hated me. It really isn't just a few problem posters. When a large number of posters frequently attack someone even when they do nothing wrong, isn't that a problem, regardless of what the person does other times? Why is it ok for a large number of people to be mean to a single person, but when a single person is mean to a large number of people, that's completely unacceptable? It just seems hypocritical to me.

Edited, Dec 20th 2010 2:05am by ThePsychoticOne