Regarding "The Controversy"

[Blue Lemma]

Then why don't you? Sometimes it's better to just nip some things in the bud and if the best way to prove your innocence is by posting proof then I think you should. I just hope it doesn't inspire any more blow outs like the last one.

I haven't because it would dredge the whole thing up, and that's not constructive in everyone being able to move on. But... I don't know if I can just ignore what she's saying about me and PyTom.

[lordcloudx]

Blue Lemma: I think you should ignore it. She's doing it on her own little part of the internet. Whether people believe her claims or not is up to them. In any case, people will always believe whatever they want to. No need to make statements in your defense. (personal opinion)

[Kittylove]

I... I don't know if you can. If you, PyTom, and them don't come to a compromise or level playing field people will continue to see their post and think badly of you. I think it's terrible that someone's reputation can be dirtied so easily, but not everyone is willing to judge the situation for themselves. Some people will just take someone else's word about what's being said about people in Lemma as a whole, not just you and PyTom. This can give Lemma a bad reputation which is sad because this has got to be one of the calmest(excluding this incident) and nicest forum I've been to in a while. And I would hate to think that people are avoiding it without seeing how things are here for themselves.

But this decision is a hard judgement call and there might possible be no happy campers in the end.

Edit: I wish you luck with whatever you choose to do though.

[Blue Lemma]

@Kittylove: Thanks. On the other hand... I'm not sure we *want* people here who will just believe anything they hear online and not investigate for themselves. We are probably better off without them.

Then again, let's be honest - that's probably 99% of the population these days. I'm sure we all do it, at least sometimes. Accusations tend to be taken as truth. Defenses or other sides of the story tend to be written off as lies or excuses. It's not fair, but it's our unfortunate reality.

[MaiMai]

My feelings about this whole incident can be summed up as:

After some thought and discussion with lot of members of the board, I'm going to say that a "Controversy" section is what we don't want. First off, any thread can turn into a heated discussion

I agree with this. Although this forum can churn out some very nice discussions, making a "Controversy" section seems to be more trouble than it's worth. The main thing about LSF at least to me is the discussion of making games and the elements that contribute to it whether they be story, art, and programming mechanics with an off topic subject or two in the General Discussion section to connect to other members through smaller less focused discussions. What happened was just vaguely related to what I just mentioned, but it got way too personal and frankly discouraging. I can see the same thing happening in a 'controversy' section. It might just become all about "I'm right, you're wrong."

[Aetheria]

That could be a problem if it results in an offensive statement sitting unchallenged in a thread because people are only talking about it in PMs, and then other people wandering by think that the statement is apparently endorsed by the entire forum because no one's complaining.

It seemed to me that that was actually one of the problems with the original thread - if both sides in an argument think that the other is being offensive, and whoever has the last offensive word in a thread "wins" and gets the implicit support of the whole community, the argument will never end. Why would having the last word mean that people think the whole forum agrees with you? I'm sure that most people know not everyone in a forum comments on every topic, and many prefer to stay out of controversial discussions.

[papillon]

It seemed to me that that was actually one of the problems with the original thread - if both sides in an argument think that the other is being offensive, and whoever has the last offensive word in a thread "wins" and gets the implicit support of the whole community, the argument will never end. Why would having the last word mean that people think the whole forum agrees with you?

Didn't say the last word, I said it would be a problem if the thread was entirely unchallenged.

Imagine that someone comes in and posts in a thread that, say, "Women cannot write computer games, they are genetically inferior." This is self-evidently nonsense. However, if everyone is so terribly afraid of stirring up controversy that the only people willing to post in that thread are those who say "Yeah! Right on." then anyone who passes by and sees the thread might think that this is the official forum opinion.

I intentionally didn't propose a solution, though, just pointed out the difficulty with things like "ooo, you shouldn't disagree in public!" Were I to attempt a patch, it might go along the lines of "PM someone first, if you haven't heard from them in X amount of time, post a statement on the thread to let everyone know that a discussion is taking place." But I'm not sure if that's best either.

Calling out of problems need not always lead to a flamewar. There's a WIP thread (I don't want to point to it in this discussion lest the context of this discussion cause it to be blown out of proportion) in which a non-english speaker describes characters using words that are highly impolite in English, as well as applying negative stereotypes to those characters. The first response is basically just stating the obvious. "Um, that's a slur and these are stereotypes, this project could come out being pretty offensive. What are you trying to do with this game? Maybe we can fix this." I fail to see how this reaction can really be considered a bad thing.

Not to mention that being PMed by a bunch of strangers trying to lesson you can to some people feel more 'aggressive' than an impersonal public statement.

You may not always be able to avoid accidental offense. You also can't avoid being accidentally seen as aggressive, because you don't know what's going to set everyone off!

[Friendbot2000]

@Lemma You are absolutely right with leaving this alone. People like this feed off of other peoples reactions to their antics. If we respond to their claims then that just solidifies us as an enemy in their mind. This is not a situation where fighting back would have a positive result. Kinou has very strong feelings about this situation and she has already drawn a line in the sand for a fight. This means that she won't stop until she is satisfied that she has beaten her enemy. It is best not to feed the conflict! This whole thing will die out in a couple of weeks as does all Internet disputes.

[Alera]

Oh, come on...lets leave this topic alone already, wasn't it enough? I mean about Kinou. :/

People are just repeating the old things- no need to bring this up again. It will end up in the same way or maybe...ever worse?!

So lets just forget or at least pretend now and change the topic???

[JamesH]

Oh, come on...lets leave this topic alone already, wasn't it enough? I mean about Kinou. :/

People are just repeating the old things- no need to bring this up again. It will end up in the same way or maybe...ever worse?!

So lets just forget or at least pretend now and change the topic???

yeah, your right

[PyTom]

Honestly, I think it's important that we don't overreact to this single incident.

We're a discussion forum, and I think it's important for us to discuss things. IMO, it's hard to think of something "so offensive" that it should be off-limits here. That's not to say we have to discuss everything - something like "Women cannot write computer games, they are genetically inferior." tends to be contrafactual, and probably not worth spending a lot of effort on. And I think that the issues we discuss should be vaguely on-topic. But fundamentally, I don't like the idea of there being something so controversial we can't hash it out.

And I think everyone's opinion should count - I don't like the idea that only the members of group A or people with an education level of B should be able to participate. The great thing about the internet is that we can have people of all sorts of backgrounds coming together to talk about things - and every post looks pretty much the same.

I think we still need to work on how we can keep these discussions civil, while having them. People didn't like the 12 hour rule because it tended to stop discussion - I didn't think it would, but it seems to have. How about a 3 hour rule, or maybe a superko rule, that says that a posts in a controversial thread must explain how it is distinct from previous posts in the thread, so the discussion advances. Brainstorming a bit, I kind of like the idea of a set of "civility rules" that anyone, from Blue Lemma down to the newest newbie, can invoke in a thread, so we don't have to wait for an admin or mod to notice that there's a problem.

So I think there are ways that the forum can be improved, and that we should hash them out.

At the same time, I wouldn't worry too much about criticism of the forum or myself. When you have a former user special-pleading that content- and user-neutral civility rules shouldn't apply to herself - I don't think that's really a criticism that we can satisfy. So you just have to ignore her and move on, and hope that people will read the whole thing and decide for themselves.

[JamesH]

Honestly, I think it's important that we don't overreact to this single incident.

We're a discussion forum, and I think it's important for us to discuss things. IMO, it's hard to think of something "so offensive" that it should be off-limits here. That's not to say we have to discuss everything - something like "Women cannot write computer games, they are genetically inferior." tends to be contrafactual, and probably not worth spending a lot of effort on. And I think that the issues we discuss should be vaguely on-topic. But fundamentally, I don't like the idea of there being something so controversial we can't hash it out.

And I think everyone's opinion should count - I don't like the idea that only the members of group A or people with an education level of B should be able to participate. The great thing about the internet is that we can have people of all sorts of backgrounds coming together to talk about things - and every post looks pretty much the same.

I think we still need to work on how we can keep these discussions civil, while having them. People didn't like the 12 hour rule because it tended to stop discussion - I didn't think it would, but it seems to have. How about a 3 hour rule, or maybe a superko rule, that says that a posts in a controversial thread must explain how it is distinct from previous posts in the thread, so the discussion advances. Brainstorming a bit, I kind of like the idea of a set of "civility rules" that anyone, from Blue Lemma down to the newest newbie, can invoke in a thread, so we don't have to wait for an admin or mod to notice that there's a problem.

So I think there are ways that the forum can be improved, and that we should hash them out.

At the same time, I wouldn't worry too much about criticism of the forum or myself. When you have a former user special-pleading that content- and user-neutral civility rules shouldn't apply to herself - I don't think that's really a criticism that we can satisfy. So you just have to ignore her and move on, and hope that people will read the whole thing and decide for themselves.

Are you saying that the forum should have ground rules?, and that we can object if the rules are broken?

and can you delete my post that says "post deleted" if you could

[PyTom]

forum should have ground rules?, and that we can object if the rules are broken?

I'm not sure about "ground rules", as right now the vast majority of threads are useful, on-topic, and non-controversial. I don't want to burden such discussion with an abundance of rules - that would slow things down, with no real benefit.

But I like the idea of having "second-floor rules", that anyone can call in when they think things are starting to heat up.

[JamesH]

forum should have ground rules?, and that we can object if the rules are broken?

I'm not sure about "ground rules", as right now the vast majority of threads are useful, on-topic, and non-controversial. I don't want to burden such discussion with an abundance of rules - that would slow things down, with no real benefit.

But I like the idea of having "second-floor rules", that anyone can call in when they think things are starting to heat up.

This is just a suggestion, but listing the kind of language which must not be used could help

[LateWhiteRabbit]

People didn't like the 12 hour rule because it tended to stop discussion - I didn't think it would, but it seems to have. How about a 3 hour rule, or maybe a superko rule, that says that a posts in a controversial thread must explain how it is distinct from previous posts in the thread, so the discussion advances. .

I don't think any type of "time-out" rule is good, regardless of the length of time. Like I posted before, it just seems to make people "simmer" at a boil, hotter and madder than before if they are truly passionate about an issue. I'm reminded of the quote - "The hotter the fire the faster it burns." Sometimes it is just better to let things flare up fast and hot and exhaust themselves.

I think a Superko rule sounds good in theory, but would quickly dissolve into separate "lawyering" arguments with people pleading the case for their posts or against others. Besides, sometimes it is important just to see who agrees or disagrees, regardless of adding new things to the discussion. Again it could get into a case of posts seemingly being given implicit consent or agreement due to no one else speaking up because their reasons for approval or disapproval are covered by a previous post by someone.

I'm not sure of solutions. If we had them we could probably market them for a bundle to the rest of the Internet.