On forums and the OOC

All out of character announcements and news about the channel and site.
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Wolfram
Esquire
Posts: 21
Joined: Fri May 11, 2012 9:27 pm

On forums and the OOC

Post by Wolfram »

Hey, folks. With all the various projects (7, at the moment) going on in the channel revitalization, there are a few things that we feel need to be addressed in a pseudo-official manner.

The first point I would like to discuss here is the use of the forums. Since we're taking on new ops, we want to keep the communication and group knowledge as consistent as possible. Right now, the sum of op knowledge is the PM window between Margo and me (705 kb and growing). In the past, the op mailing list was the discussion forum for ops, and when that began to fall out of use due to the clunky nature of mailing lists in general, communication broke down, and we ended up with several snafu where one op was unaware of what another had decided. Preventing this means a heavy reliance on the BDI forums, and we will generally trust the things we find on the forums over things that players say to us directly in the channel.

This means that your weighing in on topics is important. No longer should you feel that your opinions are a burden, cluttering up inboxes of people who will simply say "tl;dr". The forums have been active for only a couple months and already we have had trouble with people feeling that they were marginalized because their opinions were not recorded, despite our directly telling them to post on the forums. If you have an opinion about the channel, post it on the forums. Seriously, don't just tell an op and hope it gets through. Post it on the forums. If you have a setting idea that you want to spitball with people, post it on the forums. If you have a debate about channel policy, post it on the forums. Post post post forums forums forums.

The word "forum" looks and sounds weird after typing it 20 times.

The second thing I would like to say is something that I said in the OOC on sorcerynet before we moved to DarkMyst, but as per my own rules, here it is on the forums so now it's gospel: Don't troll newbs. Some people deserve it. They really do. But the OOC channel has gotten into the habit such that it is its default mode when dealing with the uncertainty regarding new players. It's probably no big loss to the channel when you chase off someone who is clearly trolling it, but even the most experienced troll-detector is going to record a false positive at some point, and in that moment you'll chase off someone who may have been a good player. When one person in the channel is actively attempting to help a new person and everyone else is throwing bile, it sends a terrible signal, and will prompt the new person to probably respond in kind. Don't do that. If they are a troll, their true colors will be revealed soon enough. Don't rush to beat everyone else to be the first one to call them on it and chase them out of the channel.

I had a third thing, but forgot what it was.
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