I rarely go there anymore either- and when I do, it’s pretty much always through some filters to limit the spread of what I see.
It does appear there are been a number of new writers brought on fairly recently- and I wonder if that’s a sign of some sort of shakeup? Maybe another manifestation of the thing many of us were feeling?
I don’t really know (and don’t really care), as I’m not interested in opening up myself on a place that treats community members that way.
Meh.
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The parts where:
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the longterm visitor the landlord was friendly with for a time gets locked out for a decade because he was taking an extended,emergency dump in the bathroom while the landlord was yelling at where the visitor usually was,
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and where a well-behaved visitor gets shoved out more than once with her aggressors because she’s defending herself against unwanted attention,
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the landlord executing extreme retributions for actions not expressly against the code of conduct or guidelines (“he mocked my ficus”), and tossing or ripping up appeals to reconsider the uneven and injudicious severity of actions
are missing. [Edited for parallelism]
Crusty isn’t the word I’d use. Not without “spiteful” and “unhinged.” Some left because if someone who was on the good side of the landlord got kicked out for what appears to be eternity for a minute offence, what can the lesser-regarded and unknown visitors expect?
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Liked for the Tom Waits reference!
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I’m beginning to realize that the BBS is a lot like cable TV. Yes, it’s convenient to have a lot of the things I’m interested in available in one place. But, I never stopped reading elsewhere too, and in the process I would see virtually all the same things (in fact, usually over and over again). Now that I’ve cut the cord – because of the ethical issues – I realize that I’m not actually missing anything by not using them as my chief aggregator.
There are some excellent posters over there still, but mostly they’re here too, so I don’t have to worry about that part.
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I do miss them as an exaggerator site. I would love to find another place just for the “Here’s the news that interesting” aspect. I think this does some of that, but they did have some well written content unique to their site.
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Freudian slip? Did you mean aggregator, or are you thinking of some certain BoingBoing contributors: “Proposed legislation might mean the end of X, which means WE’RE ALL DOOMED!!”
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lol. I mean aggregator. It’s funny though. I’ll leave it.
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This question merits topic status. I don’t see obscurity and invitation-only helping to achieve critical mass. Invitation-only, if done by individuals, can still let in disagreeable elements.
What helped me rein in my worse impulses was the understanding my IP address would be blocked if I were banned, but I shared it with a regular. Other communities use invitation after a group discussion, with the guideline that the sponsoring inviter be responsible for the behaviour of the candidate invitee, who the inviter knows or trusts to be good, kind and loving and mature, calm and effective in handling misunderstandings and disagreements.
Incentives to look at the Community Guidelines could be promoted. I was shocked to learn that the percentage of accounts created on bbs.boingboing.net that had read the Community Guidelines was a little over 9% (as of this typing, 1048 have read Community Guidelines and 11357 accounts have the Basic badges).
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3 posts were split to a new topic: Welcome to (the) Elsewhere Cafe [Meta]
That seemed like a good jumping off point.
There’s community guidelines?
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Keep in mind those are just the defaults that ship with Discourse.
If I’m understanding correctly, both @KeisterButton and @Daveb were referring to the Other place’s community guidelines, and statistics about them.
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It’s listed as FAQ (rather than guidelines) on the other site as well. And, I mentioned it because I spent 5 minutes looking for the community guidelines and I couldn’t find it under that name.
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That’s a really great example of IT miscommunication in particular and mass miscommunication in general. “You didn’t read this thing we told you to read using a totally different name for it.” And they wonder why people fall for phishing attacks.
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It looks like it is also available as https://bbs.elsewhere.cafe/guidelines, which points to the same topic. It’s linked that way in the message you receive when you first create an account. It’s also linked as part of the discobot led tutorial in a similar way.
There are certainly ways to improve the visibility of that, and the main menu is probably one of the easier ones. I’ll see if there are any options with that, but my very brief search through the settings didn’t turn anything up.
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Busy sleeping!
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