I'm not really disgusted anymore, more just facepalming at the situation.
I've grown tired of =10 and the same new posts being made every week. I check it on Happy Fridays for the comic now (you rock, Thayos). The job forums pertaining to me have 1-2 new threads every week, sometimes less, and it's always a short discussion about whether +1 This is better than -1 That while fighting Whatever.
10K was a fun thread, everybody posting and reading it was having a good time. It gave me reason to check Alla multiple times a day, instead of once a morning. We're off in a little tiny corner of Zam in a rarely-visited server forum. In the past, Lakshmi boards have gone days or weeks without even a post. Before the Valdan thread and since it's demise, Lakshmi board has been a deserted wasteland.
Finally a fun thread comes along, craving an unobtainable 10K pages. "Is it possible?" it asked.
"No! But let's have fun trying!"
We agreed to do some massive spamming while trying to behave. We were cheered on by one admin(my signature is totally relevant here
), and accompanied by another. We told some jokes, shared some ASCII, got fat on cookies, watched RDD get stoned and drunk, shared snippets of RL, complained about work, bragged about conquests, and had a lot of contributors. Because of 10K I have /befriended 4 native Garudians and 2 native Lashmians
that I never would have met otherwise, and I now proudly display them in my in-game Friends List. There's even a few more I've been meaning to add.
There wasn't a single case of flaming, nor a single troll. There was no speak of third-party tools or other illegal in-game activities. We were out of everyone's way, not causing a bit of harm. I even agreed with Fynlar once.
Did the thread need a bit of moderation? Perhaps.
Did the thread need to be
killed? Absolutely not.
We made no attempt to hide our +1ing, and even cheered each other on. Hell, it was practically the theme of the thread since the first few pages. But why the lock? A simple "C'mon guys. This is getting out of hand. Cut it out." would have worked just fine. But in 32 pages we never received a warning, even with admins contributing to the thread. Instead, it gets locked.
Over-moderation has been a massive source of complaints in Alla forums (ZAM, whatever) for a long time now. I don't really think the term fits; I would call it
overly-aggressive moderation. I've only been a regular poster on Alla for 12-18 months or so, but I'm quite sure I've seen hundreds of posters complaining about it. Threads get locked or nuked because of a single poster or even a single post. Often times it's a completely innocent situation, but the admin doesn't play that specific game and therefore doesn't fully understand it; so apparently the solution is to just kill it instead of passing it on to someone who does understand.
/rant off
tl;dr version: Everybody's fun didn't have to be ruined because a couple of us were naughty.
Edit: took a testy part out lol
Edited, May 23rd 2010 9:59pm by chewzer