TheAmericanSpirit wrote: ↑8 months ago
You're a good mod. Believe me, I wouldn't kiss your ass about this. I'm just well acquainted with absentee and/or powermad mods elsewhere.
Re: The Gutter - it was absolutely atrocious and a disgusting place. It's not even worth repeating some of the posts and content topics discussed there. Suffice to say it was a place where sexism, racism, and other repugnant ideas got a voice and drama raged in ways that should never be repeated online.
Certainly I agree that it's content should never be reproduced, but I think its history demands examination. Whose idea was it in the first place? Why? At what point did the metaphorical camel's back break? What did the mods think about it? Most importantly, what lessons can we glean from the Gutter to avert the same situation elsewhere?
All I have is hazy memories and reverse-engineered context with which to work. I suppose I could go fiddle with the Wayback Machine, but even that wouldn't really make sense of it all.
Maybe one of the old guard can help me
Oh great and ancient @ISBPathfinder! Hear my cry! What do you remember of your time as a Sally mod?
There was a lot of drama in my time as a mod at sally. Its important to mention that there has been a massive shift away from forums in general in the last 10 years but if you look back to like the early 2000s - like.... 2014 forums were still a very popular place to find discussion for magic. The upside of this is that it was very easy to approach and contribute as a random reader which I am still a fan of where as things like facebook and discord can be a little more closed off but my big dislike of them is that you can't ever really track a single conversation over time with those mediums. I like forums for a place to continue a single topic of discussion as well as tracking deck updates and changes. I know a lot of people use things like goldfish for deckbuilding which it is better for deckbuilding but horrible for discussion and tracking changes.
In short I guess its me saying that forums are constantly losing popularity and it was a real shame what happened to salvation (aka the change of ownership and then informing us that it was going to be taken down and saved at the last second). Feyd has done an amazing job over here on nexus but the problem is still that forums are dying and we somewhat divided the salvation crew coming over here even if we got most of the commander crew I think that also ultimately sub divided the sally crew.
As for the drama of salvation.... yes..... there was a lot of it. I spent a few years as a global mod and I was an admin for a time as well there. I used to get done with work and come home to review something like an hours worth of discussion among the admins essentially daily most of which was fluff talk but as they communicated via a chat tool I was always playing catchup as most of the other admin team at the time were EU guys. I spent a lot of time with eyes on the convo with the gutter closure which to be honest it never should have existed in the first place and it was mandated to be closed by the new owners when curse gaming was buying it. I believe I was a global mod at the time. I also remember a good bit of trolling on both sides of people who trolled those of the gutter community as well as the gutter community creating alts and stirring up %$#% with us back. It wasn't really cool and it was awkward in that some of the staff was inciting them with some of the higher ups sort of protecting those users. It was...... awkward.
Most of what I remember about sally though was the damn bots though. HOLY hell did salvation get a %$#% of bots. Like, on a daily basis I would probably ban 10 bots over there whereas with nexus I have barely seen them. I don't know if it was due to the google popularity of salvation which was a lot higher than here on nexus but it likely was also a hell of a lot less secured against them given how little development attention we got going from hans to curse and off again.
In short, we had to be a lot more responsive on salvation but it was due to higher activity, bots, and some extremely angry users that we had moderated. I still can't believe that we modded
@Jivanmukta because holy hell I was like 60% sure it was a matter of time before we were going to have to ban him lol. We also fought for years over keeping the cesspit that was the banned list thread contained to one thread but a lot of the anger of that thread seemed to die off when it became a subforum with separate threads for each topic. We had issues in the past that someone would bring up some valid discussion on a banned card or card they thought should be banned and it would two posts later have a "but sol ring is the problem" and it would just devolve into nonsense and rage comments.
