Over-active party users, crude and offensive, a proposal ...

Sep 8 12:23 UTC 2000

Greetings.  I would like Grex's governing body to consider doing
something about the recent rash of antisocial behavior that can
frequently been found in party.  A small example:

 rodamala:  lots of bulging viens and shit
 cb311:     i cant draw detail
 cb311:     only crude images
 rodamala:  you suck
 rodamala: shitzzdick
 rodamala:  eat my cumwad burrito avenger!
 ashke:    wern't you comtemplating leaving, willard?
 willard:  I find your language offensive, and if you do not stop, I
           will leave.
 rodamala:  fuck you cocksucker
 <ashke pokes willard to find the alien>
 cb311:     cool
 rodamala:  willard is the alien
 ashke:    Good god, they have transreversed his brain!
 <ashke chuckles>
 cb311:     yeah we can add willard into the zzdick cartoon series   

I'm concerned at how a new Grexer might interpret this kind of
conversation if they happened to join party during one of these
spats.

Some ideas that come to mind include:

1) Appointing party moderators that can forcibly remove a user from
   the conversation when they feel it is necessary.
2) Setting up an automated monitor that disconnects users who use
   profanity, or are otherwise disruptive.
3) Setting up a reliable system for handling this kind of
   expres^H^H^H^H^H^Habuse, including a designated staff member with
   the ability to block hosts and remove user accounts as necessary.

What say you?

response 2 of 23:

Sep 8 13:14 UTC 2000

This is as bad as richard'ss suggestion in the previous item :)  Good one,
willard!

response 6 of 23:

Sep 9 04:28 UTC 2000

(I think willard was trying to make a joke, 'sall.)

response 8 of 23:

Sep 9 07:24 UTC 2000

(I would be, but I consider the source.)

response 10 of 23:

Sep 9 13:12 UTC 2000

Yeah, that makes the ton of litter you dumped on Agora smell all nice 
and sweet.  Feel better now?

response 12 of 23:

Sep 9 23:26 UTC 2000

This isn't America -- this is Grex.  If we don't like what people say
or how they say it, we don't sit back and fold our arms and be
grown-ups about it.  We make policies.  Or, at least, we propose them,
talk about them, eat some granola, and then realize we're a bunch of
idiots.  (And by we, I mean you, Grexers.)

Those people make party all but un-usable.  They're destroying it for
anyone new who might come along, and especially for those of us who
have been around for hears, and don't care to come back.  Let's do
something about it!

response 14 of 23:

Sep 10 05:41 UTC 2000

I disagree with #12 on the grounds that no one can "make" party unusable. It
was never really usable to begin with.

response 16 of 23:

Sep 10 08:48 UTC 2000

Regarding #0.  One of the persons quoted has a history known to staff.
I don't want to go into specifics, because I really don't think it's
appropriate or necessary to do so in a public forum such as this.

So far as the idea of a party "moderator".  A while back, when I had a
lot more free time, I spend a long while hanging out in party.  It is
indeed possible to make a difference in party, merely by participating,
and with some work, it's possible to end up with a cadre of friends who
regularly log in.  It doesn't take any special tools or god priviledges
to do this; all it takes is the ability to type.  The ability to go to a
different channel, and :ignore are also occasionally useful when dealing
with a particularly noxious clod, but this is rare.  Creating an
"official" position would be something of a problem, both simply because
of the time it would take, and also because this would bring in power
politics, not necessarily a good thing.

An automated monitor for "profanity" is ridiculous.  It won't take long
for people to figure out how to say f**k or merde, and I don't even want
to think about how many indians we have on who know dirty words in
languages we never heard of.  I know there are lots of people in the
world who believe the powers that be ought to impose some sort of
standard of acceptable word use on people, but I'm not one of them.  On
grex, I think it has been just as effective to let people's desire for
acceptance drive their language choice - people who actually want to be
understood figure out fast enough that shit, fuck, dick and cunt aren't
the way to gain other people's respect and care.  In party, of course,
we have a high % of foreigners, which makes obscenity even less useful.
We in american might call someone a fucking idiot, or perhaps even a
"dumb fuck".  A brit might call that same person a bloody moron, and to
a brit, the word bloody is somewhat more shocking, so commmunicates the
same intent.  In sweden, the word fuck just doesn't translate, it
strikes their ears about the same way we might say "love-making".  So,
"dumb fuck" would be "stupid love-making".  Huh?  I think the Indians
who encounter the sort of language quoted in #0 probably merely find it
incomprehensible and bizarre - and a dictionary probably doesn't help
them to understand "viens", "cumwad", or "transreversed".

So far as blocking hosts, removing user accounts, etc. - I can guarantee
you that is not a useful solution to dealing with "social problems".
This strategy is effective in business, educational, or corporate
systems where there is limited access, and also a strong incentive ($,
parents, etc.) to conform.  Since we all have lots of exposure to that,
that's the solution most people think of first.  However, it's not an
effective strategy here, and I don't think it takes much in the way of
brains to figure out why.  That's not to say that grex never block
hosts, etc.  In fact, staff *will* block a host, lock a user account, or
write to the ISP in the case of people who log into grex and do truely
malicious stuff.  These might include credit card theft, stealing
passwords, sending spam, filling up the disk, fork bombs (once, but not
today), &etc.  The effectiveness of these strategies varies.  Since
these people typically *aren't* part of the grex social system, but are
strangers, they don't feel nearly as attached to grex, so very often,
they just go away and are never heard of again.  Writing to the ISP is
very time consuming, but can sometimes result in the most effective
response (if the ISP is a school, very often they'll send somebody to
sit down and educate the person as to why what they were doing was a
really bad idea).  Locking the account sometimes results in mail from
the person, and an opportunity for staff to educate the user.  These
solutions aren't always effective even for these problems.  For fork
bombs, the effectiveness was going *way* downhill.  Installing a lkm to
detect fork bombs right off the bat has turned out to be a much better
solution - less work for staff, less fun for them.  Unfortunately, most
problems aren't as easy to nip in the bud as a fork bomb.  Which
solution staff might use depends very strongly on the situation.  For
purely social problems, however, these solutions are generally *not*
effective, and only make the problem worse.

response 18 of 23:

Sep 10 13:53 UTC 2000

It *does* make him feel better about dumping all that rubbish on 
Agora.  Huh.  I thought he was more on to himself than that.  Whatever.

response 20 of 23:

Sep 10 18:25 UTC 2000

<snicker>

response 22 of 23:

Sep 11 04:50 UTC 2000

Scg has the right of it - the dynamics of party are a bit different than
the conferences.  Party gives *much* more immediate feedback, but the
conferences have much more history in them, so the two appeal to
different sets of people (but there is some overlap).  Another
difference is that party is, by & large, single-threaded, while
conferencing is multi-threaded.  With the right people in party, it is
actually possible to talk about 2-3 different things at once, but not
everybody can do this, and some people actually get annoyed by this (too
much thinking required?)  Using :ignore is one way several different
sets of people can share the same channel - this isn't necessary in the
conferences because things naturally divide into separate items.
:ignore is also useful for twits who thrive on immediate feedback, even
if it's overwhelmingly negative.

One property both picospan and party share, though, is that indeed, the
best way to get interesting conversations going is to go start them.
Doing good is the best way to get good happening.