Forum Rules Discussion

A general chat area, here you can post anything that doesn't belong in another forum.
Ceilick
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Post by Ceilick »

For instance, a couple of weeks ago, there was someone arguing about copyright pretty much by saying "this is obvious" then insulting anyone who tried to explain otherwise. This is, I think, another example of abuse of the goodwill afforded by our current rules.
This person was disciplined as soon as I caught wind of it.
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Post by KeenEmpire »

Ceilick wrote:
For instance, a couple of weeks ago, there was someone arguing about copyright pretty much by saying "this is obvious" then insulting anyone who tried to explain otherwise. This is, I think, another example of abuse of the goodwill afforded by our current rules.
This person was disciplined as soon as I caught wind of it.
Oh, I guess I was away at the time :dopefish
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DukeNukem 2417
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Post by DukeNukem 2417 »

Can we have a rule that all General Chat threads related to music and artist popularity have to be cleaned out every 3 weeks? On another forum that I'm a member of, there's this trend of starting "appreciation threads" for artists, and they usually get out of hand quickly because half the forum HATES the artist mentioned in the thread.
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Post by Keening_Product »

DukeNukem 2417 wrote:Can we have a rule that all General Chat threads related to music and artist popularity have to be cleaned out every 3 weeks? On another forum that I'm a member of, there's this trend of starting "appreciation threads" for artists, and they usually get out of hand quickly because half the forum HATES the artist mentioned in the thread.
Not really an issue here imo, and there's a whole heap of ckguy's, TerminILL's and Tulip's posts from ages ago that I'm yet to get time to check out. Deleting these will lose us a valuable resource of good music!
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ALMN
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Post by ALMN »

There's really only one little thing I'd like to see in terms of disciplinary actions.

Always start with a warning. Always. Unless it's something so terrible that a perm ban is automatically necessary, warnings are really good. Why? Not everyone reads the rules. Most people who are active on any number of forums might probably think that rules are similar enough across different forums that they won't bother reading (I didn't for that reason :v, course I've learned now). At least 1 warning will give the offender a chance to realize they've done something wrong and avoid doing it in the future.

Another neato thing would be if like the 3 most important rules were displayed on the post page, so that someone who is thinking about saying something can look up and be like "oh hey that'll get me banned."

Also word filters are your friend. I'd advise the administration to think of every dirty word they don't want on these forums and create a filter for it.
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entropicdecay
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Post by entropicdecay »

ALMN wrote:Not everyone reads the rules.
They probably should.
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Post by ALMN »

That's not the point I was trying to make...
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Post by Keening_Product »

The rules are mostly common sense things, so unless someone has behavioral issues they should naturally consider checking the rules if they think what they are posting might offend or annoy people.

But then again, this is the internet. Thankfully no one has linked us on 4 C h aaaa n yet. (At least that I know of.)
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Lava89
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Post by Lava89 »

Keening_Product wrote:Thankfully no one has linked us on 4 C h aaaa n yet. (At least that I know of.)
Somewhere out there, I think a troll just accepted your challenge.
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Flaose
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Post by Flaose »

ALMN wrote:There's really only one little thing I'd like to see in terms of disciplinary actions.

Always start with a warning. Always. Unless it's something so terrible that a perm ban is automatically necessary, warnings are really good. Why? Not everyone reads the rules.
I like this idea a lot, and I definitely think it should be implemented. It is, however, each poster's responsibility to read the rules.
Another neato thing would be if like the 3 most important rules were displayed on the post page, so that someone who is thinking about saying something can look up and be like "oh hey that'll get me banned."
It is a cool idea, but it's perhaps a little difficult to choose the top 3, and more importantly, it would require a lot of coding that I don't think Andy Durdin (the board's owner) would be interested in doing.
Also word filters are your friend. I'd advise the administration to think of every dirty word they don't want on these forums and create a filter for it.
Filters are updated when a "new" word comes up, but we aren't nannies. There is an expectation that people will avoid using offensive language on their own accord.

Here is a slightly modified rules list (I've also updated the first post). What do you think?
  1. Your administrators are Ceilick, tulip, and Flaose
  2. Avatar size shouldn't exceed 160x160px, and signature pictures shouldn't exceed 100px high. Don't distort the forum with huge location entries, large pictures, or by using too many lines in a signature.
  3. Use only a single account. Don't create dummy accounts to use as "sock-puppets", to impersonate others, or just as a joke.
  4. Don't post sexual, racist, or otherwise obscene comments or images. This is a board meant to be used by minors as well as adults. Don't intentionally bypass the word censor. While using swear-words is against the rules, words that are pejorative towards a person's gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, or other personal traits, will be dealt with much more severely.
  5. Keep discussion civil. Don't deliberately annoy, offend, antagonize, or bully other members. Conflicts will arise but if it is something serious keep it to private discussion. If you feel that you are being bullied, let an administrator know via private message. Don't allow yourself to be dragged into a fight, or try and take the law into your own hands, or you may also be punished.
  6. Don't create intentionally irrelevant posts. If you're about to upload a one- or two-word post, first ask yourself, "Does my post add to the discussion?" If the answer is no, reconsider posting it.
  7. The PCKF is still a mostly text-based forum. As such, posting only images on a regular basis is not okay.
  8. Don't double-post on a regular basis. Instead, consider editing your last post in order to add the new information. Likewise, avoid posting in topics that are more than 3 months old.

    Remember: You are a guest, act like one.

    Punishments for breaking the rules include (in order of severity): warnings (either on the forum or via private message), post deletions, temporary bans, and permanent bans. Unless the violation is intentionally and severely flagrant (e.g. posting child pornography), you will receive a one-strike private message warning for bannable behavior. A second violation of the warned behavior will result in a ban.
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KeenEmpire
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Post by KeenEmpire »

5. needs to be more obvious. You know 100% of the users won't read that far.
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Rorie
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Post by Rorie »

to stop the spambots including fake acccounts and spam posts maby the mods should look into setting up a captcha option for everyone who posts as a guest but not those who have registered an account or maby again for new member registration?
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Post by Benvolio »

One should in my opinion be wary of such security techniques as they can fail to load. For example, I tried to open a Ubuntu1 storage account recently but couldn't because it persistently failed to load the captcha.

Closer to home, do any of you guys find that if, on the pckf, you click on 'profile' from the options at the top of the page, the form in which you make changes to your profile asks you to "Please select the two other occurrences of this creature:" followed by a range of pictures and checkboxes, all of which are broken links, rendering that task impossible. While I'm here, might I suggest that that gets looked at?!?
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Post by TerminILL »

I've found that it doesn't really impact on anything I've tried to change. A hangover from the old anti-spam measures which is obsolete and not wired up to anything on the back end, as far as I can tell.
As for getting it "looked at", we may as well ask adurdin to upgrade the forums while he's at it. (I can't find a proper eye-rolling emotikeen to put here. Oh well.)
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Malvineous
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Post by Malvineous »

I'm not sure whether my two cents counts for much given that I hardly ever visit any more, but for what it's worth, the reason I stopped frequenting the PCKF was because it seemed like 90% of the posts were in the 'Miscellaneous' forum and had nothing to do with Commander Keen. It became a chore trying to keep up when so many new posts were, well, irrelevant.

Now that's fine and all if people just want a place to hang out and chat about music or whatever, but then maybe the forum shouldn't be called the Commander Keen forum if most of the posts have nothing to do with Keen! Just looking now, the Misc subforum has at least twice as many posts as almost every other subforum.

If it were up to me, I'd put an informal limit on how frequently you could post in Misc, remove The Theater, and set up another forum somewhere else to keep it all separate, for those who wish to continue the non-Keen topics. Posts in Misc would have to be somewhat purposeful ("Look what I did today") rather than aimless discussion ("What's your favourite ___?")

That would hopefully return the forum to the days when almost all the content was somehow related to Commander Keen!
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