Scared of posting on siteFollow

It seemed like SE kind of had a DADT policy regarding Windower, though their official position was that it violated their TOS and using it was a bannable offense. I'm pretty sure Zam's policy regarding Windower discussions was basically that since it was officially against SE's rules and its use could result in a ban, discussion promoting it should be disallowed. Eventually, squabbles over this resulted in not being allowed to mention it at all (with how active the board one, it's much easier to just blanket ban the topic instead of having to review each individual case), though references to "that thing we can't talk about" were pretty frequent. It was a CYA tactic, similar to why we can't talk about selling accounts or in-game currency for games.

While you can make the argument that the basic Windower was harmless, it was also a platform for many more severely game-abusive tools. If it were just a stand-alone mod, I don't know that it would have been so strictly policed.

One person's striking conversationalist is another person's troll.

As a general rule, I rate people solely on the content of their posts. Is the question legitimate? Is the argument or response logical? Did they put any effort into spelling and grammar? (You may have the greatest post in the history of ZAM but if you spell like a certain poster in the XIV forums, who has repeatedly said he doesn't give a crap about how many typos he makes, you're not gonna get a green arrow from me. I probably won't actively downvote someone for spelling, but I certainly won't upvote them.)

The Internet has a larger problem, one that is more evidenced on less moderated places ... like Facebook. People have lost their internal censors. They say things in a public space that they would have previously kept to themselves, or only to their inner circle of closest friends. Like gossipy housewives on the telephone, they spread rumors or talk about people behind their backs - only they're talking directly to them instead since it's the Internet. This behavior is incredibly destructive in the long term, if someone lets their conversation escalate out of control and they're giving death threats.

Thing is, some people enjoy that kind of banter and back and forth. In ZAM, though, it's supposed to be kept to the Asylum.

The karma system also gives forum posters the ability to assist with moderation. Threads that are really bad drop sub filter before they are nuked by the admins. Threads and posts that are rated up get left alone when we might have otherwise moved them for beign off topic, etc. Once you are up near a thousand or so posts (which is trivially easy to get these days it seems) you personally are pretty much immune to the effects of the Karma system anyways, so the only people it really has a major impact on are new posters, which are some of the primary targets to begin with. It's a system. Like any system, there are people who work to game the system, people who abuse it, people who benifit from it overmuch due to errors, and areas that can be tuned. The administrators are the checks and balances of the karma system. For example, I can at my discretion reset the karma of any sub default individual back to system default 3.00. All administrators can also apply unlimited up or down rates to an account to adjust for "Karma camping" system abuses, errors, or other such karma events. And we do correct things when we find ratebots or karma campers and the like, but otherwise we rarely intervene. It's my board to run, but the overall content, feel, direction and what is liked or disliked and rated as such belongs to the forum as a whole and all the people who post in it. Us administrators can shape and guide that, sometime quite forcefully, but we usually don't, because it annoys people.

Are there Cliques? Sure. Do they have an impact on day to day forum operating and ratings? No. If you could see the rating history of a given thread, you would be suprised to see who does the rating, why, and how frequently. I almost garuntee that the people you think are rating your posts, aren't. We don't care about why they rated it, Their reasons are their own. All I care about is that it doesn't become an attempt to artifically inflate or destroy a base karma across an entire person or thread, it isn't done via ratebots, and if two people want to rate eachother into oblivion that's fine with me.

It really does work pretty well overall, and where it doesn't, we fix it.

Administrator Kaolian

I think the term "public" in this sense uses the legal definition of the word, and means under the authority of the Government. Public vs Private schools, etc.

The default filter is set where it is to protect our more sensitive new users from potentially objectionable content. We will not be adjusting it, but thank you for the suggestion.

Check your glasses. You've got a green title with very few posts. That means you've been rated up - pretty significantly, and certainly more than you've been rated down.

The arrows are only for decoration - as is your karma score. But hey - be afraid, be very afraid that some anonymous person somewhere is going to click on one of your posts and ....rate it.

Elinda, it grinds some people's gears more than others'.

Call it OCD, but when someone rates me down, I'd like to know why. Language barriers and various other obstacles that come with text-based communication often result in misunderstandings. When I see an anonymous rate-down, I can't help but think that it probably could have been avoided if the person on the other end had said something rather than mashing the down-arrow. This is where the OCD comes in, because knowing it might have been avoided can drive me @#%^ing nuts.

And while being rated down doesn't prevent you from posting here, as Kao just pointed out, it will drop you below the default filter at some point and then you're effectively blocked by anyone who hasn't changed the filter settings. The filter settings aren't exactly visible, so I imagine a lot of people don't even know you can change them.

Since we can now put people on ignore lists, and considering most spam threads disappear before or immediately after they go sub-default, I really fail to see how the arrows do anything except act as a release for frustrated people who wish to punish other posters.

The pedagogue in me is cringing.

Edited, Jan 28th 2014 10:16pm by Mazra

At the very least, it's faster. I find myself wishing for arrows anytime I'm on other forums.