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I have frequently asked the guys if they think we need another moderator and they have always told me that they aren’t overworked or burned out and enjoy doing it. I have recently considered adding another as the forum is getting busier but nothing past that stage. To me it’s at least one person having eyes on the forum all the time.
I thought Apparition was one?
 
Threadbans vs. Thread Closures
Kicking the people flaming it up instead of closing it sounds like a good idea, but...how many closed threads have been reopened and the discussion salvaged, including the by people who were flame warring it?
It seems like either way, it should be a temporary timeout, unless the whole discussion is obviously unsalvageable or the person who comes back from timeout jumps in and start swinging.
 
There’s not a single one of us that hasn’t spent thousands of dollars and hours into this hobby if not several thousands.

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I have frequently asked the guys if they think we need another moderator and they have always told me that they aren’t overworked or burned out and enjoy doing it. I have recently considered adding another as the forum is getting busier but nothing past that stage. To me it’s at least one person having eyes on the forum all the time.

I'm glad to hear that. Frankly, I think the personal PM is effective, but also prone to Mod burnout. Then again, maybe we really aren't that bad of assholes.

It seems like either way, it should be a temporary timeout, unless the whole discussion is obviously unsalvageable or the person who comes back from timeout jumps in and start swinging.

I do like this. I feel like the timeouts have been working pretty well.
 

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True, I have a few thou just in 40k armies, not counting paints. Tristam has probably sunk more than that just into Skaven.:gunslinger:

Still, I didn’t want to start actually counting, because no one wants to think about the car, boat, or house they could have had instead. :brokenheart:

think about all the pirate ships and castles and vorpal swords you've had instead. I don't regret it for a minute.
 
True, I have a few thou just in 40k armies, not counting paints. Tristam has probably sunk more than that just into Skaven.:gunslinger:

Still, I didn’t want to start actually counting, because no one wants to think about the car, boat, or house they could have had instead. :brokenheart:

My wife doesn't want a house that's too big to take care of, I have no desire to own a boat, and all I want from a car is good gas mileage and paid for.

#GuiltFree
 
I have frequently asked the guys if they think we need another moderator and they have always told me that they aren’t overworked or burned out and enjoy doing it. I have recently considered adding another as the forum is getting busier but nothing past that stage. To me it’s at least one person having eyes on the forum all the time.
I
While not opposed to the idea, there really isn't much going on most of the time. We often will go months without the need for mod intervention. I think we had one flare-up of activity just after the holidays, but unless it continues (and the last few days seem to indicate otherwise), it's probably just dismissable as a fluke. The Pipes needing to be flushed out once in a while, as it were.
 
True, I have a few thou just in 40k armies, not counting paints. Tristam has probably sunk more than that just into Skaven.:gunslinger:

It wasn't too bad until I decided I needed to go back and own a copy of every Jes Goodwin Skaven sculpt from the 80s. And then I decided I needed an all-80s army. And then I decided I needed one army themed around each of the major clans, as well as a general mixed Warlord clan army.

Last count (about 2 years ago, so grown since then), I had over 6000 metal skaven miniatures. That's on top of a 5000K plastic Skaven army.

Oh, and that's just 28mm. I also have 10mm and 15mm Skaven armies.

Oh, and the figures & bitz for a planned converted 40K "HRUD" Skaven army as Dark Eldar proxies.





My Chaos Warror, Lizardmen, Undead, Fimir, Wood Elf, and Empire armies are smaller at least.
 
I
While not opposed to the idea, there really isn't much going on most of the time. We often will go months without the need for mod intervention. I think we had one flare-up of activity just after the holidays, but unless it continues (and the last few days seem to indicate otherwise), it's probably just dismissable as a fluke. The Pipes needing to be flushed out once in a while, as it were.

That is pretty common, I mean all the food over the holidays tends to wreak havoc on the digestive system...

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Maybe I read the wrong threads but I really haven't noticed many fights breaking out here.
There are certain posters I've identified as being kind of 'touchy' and I try to resist rebutting them when I disagree... but no one I think is a consistent problem.
 
I'd actually like to take a stand in favour of the practice of teasing people who get too worked up. No, it doesn't make them calm down, but it does reinforce a culture where starting flame wars over meaningless crap is regarded as a bad thing. Nerds are depressingly prone to fanaticism. Pushing back against that tendency seems like a very worthy thing to me.
 
Factchecking...isn’t the right term, it implies research. Refereeing, as someone (I think tenbones put it), however, is kind of the Moderator’s job. Not everything is subjective. They’re not there just to break up fights but to call fouls and rules violations. It’s a fine line though, to be sure, which is why they get the big bucks...or at least get the final word when they want it.
What sort of things do you see as being on which side of the line?
 
It has come to our attention that certain people do not like our moderation style here at the Pub and would like us to be more hands-on. Meaning, that we should step in and stop thread tangents, or thread-crapping, as some people would call it, before they get carried away. That we should not let people drop memes in threads as they call it a form of passive-aggressive attack, and that we should "fact check" arguments to see who should be warned about crossing the line. That we are too nice with people and let too much slide around here.

I want everyone who reads this thread to share your thoughts on what we do right, what we do wrong, how we could improve. As the owner, I am biased in that I think we take being moderators very seriously and have discussions about major issues before we decide to do anything about it. That we expect people here to act like adults and sort things out for yourselves before we have to get involved. That people can make mistakes from time to time and that we shouldn't jump all over you at the first sign of trouble. That if we warn people, we do so in general terms before being specific so that we don't single out and embarrass people. That we want this place to be as friendly and accommodating as possible. We don't want members to bring their baggage from other sites and we don't prejudge people based on their behavior elsewhere. I can go on, but I think we do a pretty damn good job and I think I have two great mods who share my views about how we do things here.

So I open the floor. What do you guys think?

My thoughts...

Thread tangents - I'm generally up for a decent thread tangent except when it's the same people bringing in their same agendas and flogging the same dead horses over and over again. This I find deeply tedious and it will usually kill my interest in a thread. Whether it needs to be more heavily moderated I dunno. In my mind thread entropy is just a thing that happens...

Memes - Memes seem to get dropped into threads for all sorts of reasons. Some people seem to enjoy them, I'm fairly indifferent to them. They are a way of communicating and I don't like the idea of a blanket ban on them. And I don't think banning them is a particularly effective way of stopping people from being passive-aggressive.

Fact-checking - I don't see how this needs to be made an added responsibility of the mods. And 'crossing the line' in my mind would be more about how a person was communicating rather than whether or not they had their facts right.

Too nice - Yes you are all way too nice and that's what I really don't like about this place :tongue:
 
True, I have a few thou just in 40k armies, not counting paints. Tristam has probably sunk more than that just into Skaven.:gunslinger:

Still, I didn’t want to start actually counting, because no one wants to think about the car, boat, or house they could have had instead. :brokenheart:
My spend on role playing stuff isn't all that high, although it was about 25 years ago. Computer equipment, on the other hand ...

Well, when I was throwing the last of the fibre channel disk arrays away into a recycling centre in Bracknell, I did some rough mental arithmetic and came up with about £40,000 between 2005-2009 when I did some hard cuts on spending. In 2012 I bought a W-series thinkpad for about £3500 including some third party solid-state drives (the SSDs cost more than the laptop did). This didn't faze me too much as I had about £10,000 worth of software on it, about two thirds of which was Visual Studio premium.

OTOH, I've been quite pleased with my £250 travel laptop. It runs Adobe Illustrator swimmingly. These days I can do anything I need on a secondhand laptop, perhaps twinked out with a bigger SSD. I bought a HP Z420 that somebody had twinked into a gaming box with a GTX670 card. This cost £350, plus a SSD for about £110 and a joystick for about £50. It runs Kerbal Space Program swimmingly, although perhaps it could benefit from a bit more RAM.

I do spend a bit on RPG stuff these days but it's about two orders of magnitude less than what I used to spend on computer equipment.
 
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I think what we might need is something in the way of a social contract in which we all agree that we don't want the pub to turn into a place where you can't really discuss anything because somebody will be offended and start a crusade. Nor do we wish it to become a place where you can just say anything and everyone is just screaming at each other as loudly as they can. We have already seen those things happen elsewhere and wish to avoid it here by the only means possible: civility.
 
Currently Ive a very nice Glenlivet 18 year reserve from Xmas I'm trying to make last. Normally Glenfiddich is my brand of choice, though
I've not tried Talisker

If you’re into peated scotch, it’s a classic. If you’re not, well, it was my gateway into peat.

I have a bottle that’s been open for nearly two years and I hope to drink it dry in order to open up the next in line — Redbreast 12 (my first single pot still Irish, that I’ve been meaning to try for a while) or Bunnahabhain Cruach Mhona (another peated malt, from an Islay distillery that’s actually famous for its non-peated core line) — looking forward to trying both!
 
I think what we might need is something in the way of a social contract in which we all agree that we don't want the pub to turn into a place where you can't really discuss anything because somebody will be offended and start a crusade. Nor do we wish it to become a place where you can just say anything and everyone is just screaming at each other as loudly as they can. We have already seen those things happen elsewhere and wish to avoid it here by the only means possible: civility.

Sort of like The Pub Creed.
 
Glenmorangie is my favourite. Balvennie double barrel is also a very good one.

Two of my all-time favorites!

Balvenie 12 DW got me into whisky, really.

And the Glenmorangie 10... recently had it at a tasting, and between sherry bombs and peat monsters, it was a breath of fresh air. (Not that I don’t love peat or sherry but there is such a thing as palate fatigue.)
 
Thanks to High School and college clusterfucks, I couldn’t touch tequila or scotch for almost a decade. Finally my body stopped classifying them as deadly poisons and let me have them again. Love Glenfiddich and Glenlivet. Heard a lot of good things about Glenmorangie, gonna have to try it.
 
Go price a saiboat.

I stopped worrying about $200 for a model locomotive.

Gah, at least the model locomotive might appreciate in value over time. Good luck reselling yer boat.

And get prepared for weekends spent cleaning algae. And revarnishing the surfaces. And spending hours online looking for somewhere in the world to order that one engine part that needs replacing.

Boats suck.
 
What sort of things do you see as being on which side of the line?
Well, for example, look at this thread.
Talking about Tristam’s moderation...
Brings up his art...
Leads to him drinking...
Boom, we’re in Scotch mode.
This is totally organic thread drift. This is Swotime.

It’s pretty easy to tell this kind of thing from memes or jokes out of nowhere, or deliberate attempts to mock people discussing certain topics.
 
My parents had a couple speed boats. I don’t remember my dad having too much of a problem keeping it well-maintained. He ended up selling the last one when we got an in-ground swimming pool and never looked back.
 
For me, it's really just a passport to membership in the Yacht club. Because they've got damn fine food. And sometimes they rent entire theatres for movie nights.
Sounds pretty sweet. I don't suppose you could get into the club by strapping an outboard on a rowboat? "Yeah, the SS Putt-Putt is going to be under repair for, oh, a few more decades."
He ended up selling the last one when we got an in-ground swimming pool and never looked back.
The way you connect these two incidents makes me think that your dad tried something really unwise in your new pool.
 
My parents had a couple speed boats. I don’t remember my dad having too much of a problem keeping it well-maintained.


Those are a little smaller scale than what I'mdescribing. Plus, probably not docked through a Canadian winter....
 
Those are a little smaller scale than what I'mdescribing. Plus, probably not docked through a Canadian winter....

Yes, that’s true! He kept it in the garage I think. I actually thought boating was kind of a pain in the ass for the enjoyment you get out of it. Not for me.
 
I actually thought boating was kind of a pain in the ass for the enjoyment you get out of it. Not for me.

That's generally my conclusion as well.

But then, I've gotten that way about leaving the house for anything.
 
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