Dear staff and fellow forumers!

In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a lot of insulting on the board. People who do not react well to criticism, people who have a different opinion or just statements other people make. I think it is time to really react to this, 'cause the board will be a mess if we don't.

There are two sites that I frequently use, but I do not make comments on them. Those are YouTube and IMDB. On both sites, you can commend stuff and read other comments by users. There is no one supervising those comments, so people can pretty much insult each other with the worst things you can ever imagine.
We have a nice community here with people who can and in my opinion should supervise it.

Forums are made for people to discuss, and the board should always allow people to discuss, but someone needs to make sure that it stays nice. If we don't react now, things will get out of hand and the board will eventually turn into an IMDB/YouTube kind of community where everyone is insulting everyone.

My proposition:
We need better moderation. More people who read the forum to make sure that everything goes well.
We also need a warning system with penalties if someone misbehaves. If you get too many warnings for misbehaving, you'll get a week ban, after that a month and after that a final life-time ban.

Just my thoughts. I'd hate to see this board become unfriendly. I really like it here, but in my opinion, we need to act!

With TDKR coming up I think the forum needs two things:

- Mods who are frequently active and get involved
- Mods who watch everything and have the power to edit members' posts to insert spoiler tags

Insults are negative comments aimed at a member rather than at his or her comments or opinions. This can usually be resolved by reporting the post and stating one's complaint. It's not as urgent as hiding spoilers that crop up outside of a designated spoiler area.

There's no problem here, from my perspective, with the effects of moderation. I think it just needs to be quicker at responding in some situations.

In any case, shouldn't this be posted on the forum suggestions thread?

On one hand, one of my first impressions of this forum was how nice everyone was in here. And I loved it. I thought 'man, this joint barely needs moderation'. It was so nice being here (not that now isn't) and having nice and cool conversations and disputes and everyone was patient and so on.

You said that has changed a bit and maybe it has but...

On the other hand... Words are words and I also never liked the idea of censorship. I called another user an 'idiot' the other day and I didn't think too much of it because I really had reason to do it and I waited long before I finaly decided to do it. It wasn't impulsive and I don't think it was really that agressive. My point is there are limits and I'm just saying that politeness and patiency are nice, but that doesn't mean I want to see people's posts deleted (or mine) just because someone got a big angry. And I don't see that going on now (I mean there are people fighting and maybe I'm one of em, but I don't think it's that bad right now).

Conflicts are something natural and not everyone can find the strength to restrain himself and that is understandable. Moreover they are something good most of the times. I've always thought of conflicts as a win-win situation. Either you prove your point and know that you're right or you realize that you're wrong and gain useful knowledge.

So unless we see some really grotesque occurances I don't think there's really a need for serious measures. Not right now at least. I say we wait.

I'm not a fan of censorship, if someone wants to call someone a moron then they have the right to do it. I just have a problem when the whole thing becomes a pissing contest, which there have been like 5 (+/-) incidents of that recently.

There is a forum rule on here:

1. Respect your fellow forum members.

--Refrain from using insults and starting flame wars.
--Use the Private Message [PM] features to settle personal arguments.

So yes, I think warnings should be implemented whenever someone starts that crap up again, and maybe like 5 warnings will result in a week ban, like you suggested. But if it doesn't turn into this huge flame war, and someone just calls someone an "idiot" and everyone else ignores it, it should be fine.

My main problem, and I probably sound like a broken record , is the duplicate threads in the Entertainment section and the Inception section. Those two are the messiest sections on here because they are the most active. Members are free to report these duplicate threads to the moderators, if they'd like, but I think there should be more active moderation so that members don't have to do that as often.

I do agree with you guys, but there is a difference between having a conversation and an insult.

Let's take this conversation as exemple.
http://www.nolanfans.com/forums/viewtop ... =17&t=4508

We start with a disagreement. RomanM says Halloween was the first slasher movie, Robin calls Psycho the first. No one has given any evidence to state their opinion. Look at the last post on the first page.
"So get your film history shit together." We can start a discussion wetter this is an insult or not, but let's don't. We can agree that if this was not ment as an insult, it is a very provoking and hospital remark. I guess we can also agree that there wasn't really a call for a remark like this. He could have said it in a nicer way.
RomanM's reaction:
"No it's not Mr. Aggression. Halloween is widely...
...attitude elsewhere fucknut."
Again, Mr. Aggression is on the edge of an insult, but if we let Robin get away with his comment, we can let this go too, except that the last word is in fact an insult.
Then Robin makes an insult again, RomanM insults Robin again and it's on!

This happens a lot lately and we need to stop it!

Well yes, those kinds of cases look like a warnhammer to me.

I notice it's always the same few members who get in to this stupid bickering matches.

Erik wrote:This happens a lot lately and we need to stop it!

Why?

If one member is offended by something another member posts then they can report the other member. The mods might have a discussion behind the scenes as to whether it breaks the rules and what the punishment should be, but otherwise let them duke it out for themselves.

I don't think mods should be restricting discussion, even if the discussion is negative. Mods should promote discussion - get more posts, more threads, more members. The only qualifying factor should be to maintain a positive image of the forum and I don't think a bit of heated discussion or controversy is at odds with that.

The more members you ban the fewer want to join.

Anne Elk (Miss) wrote:

Erik wrote:This happens a lot lately and we need to stop it!

Why?

If one member is offended by something another member posts then they can report the other member. The mods might have a discussion behind the scenes as to whether it breaks the rules and what the punishment should be, but otherwise let them duke it out for themselves.

I don't think mods should be restricting discussion, even if the discussion is negative. Mods should promote discussion - get more posts, more threads, more members. The only qualifying factor should be to maintain a positive image of the forum and I don't think a bit of heated discussion or controversy is at odds with that.

The more members you ban the fewer want to join.

No one will get banned unless they're a menace to the forum (and we're not even talking about permabann here, 5 warns per week means 1-week bann so even you would agree that people that would do worse than that would deserve punishment)

I skimmed through it, and I have to say those guys seemed like they stopped with the arguing but started back up again when you tried to intervene (not that its a bad thing, I've done that a couple of times, but maybe we should do warnings through private messages?).

Again, I'm not a fan of censorship. Both Robin and RomanM had valid points, and although they ended each other their posts with an insult, they still had a discussion no matter how mean and nasty they got. I'm just worried about when people go off topic, starting to call each other morons and idiots and trolls without paying attention to the thread topic anymore. That's where I think the admin/global mods/mods should draw the line.

We should keep order in the forums, I agree, but I don't want us to be Mod Nazis, you know?