Rules of Engagement?

Discussion in 'Network Information, Suggestions and Feedback' started by canuck, Oct 19, 2020.

  1. canuck

    canuck Closed Account

    Sadly, wooley12 and KevinC have recently been criticized for their lack of military related postings. Oddly, I have never felt the compulsion to audit any forum members as to the suitability or frequency of their postings. In fact, I would intuitively think that most members and visitors are net consumers of content, not producers. I read far more than I contribute, or comment and I suspect that dynamic holds true for most. Is there tracking on the time spent on the forum or the threads visited and/or read. Everyone has a different motivation for visiting and one must assume some underlying interest in WW2. My business experience centred on the importance of securing customer engagement. How they chose to engage was of far less importance.

    If the forum respects the free will of participants to comment where they see fit, then it smacks of unfairness to call them out for having a specific interest in a ‘chit-chat’ thread. The obvious question is: If multiple posts on 'off-topic' subjects are frowned upon, why allow the thread to start? As far as I can tell, they were engaged in permitted activity until the rules suddenly changed. Must I now contribute a quota of compulsory, relevant posts to secure my entitlement to comment on chatty stuff? If so, then I believe you have a duty of responsibility to spell out the acceptable rules of engagement more clearly.

    Given that any forum is a collection of people with a shared interest, I would think that the chit-chat is a great way to foster a community and help members develop some form of on-line relationship. Particularly when they are from different countries with diverse backgrounds and lives. The war ended 75 years ago, and we live in contemporary times.

    The mods make the rules but IMHO this was heavy handed.



    I have not commented yet but who doesn’t love that Ram Kangaroo thread.
     
  2. Robert-w

    Robert-w Banned

    Hear hear
    Otherwise smacks of cyber bullying.
     
  3. von Poop

    von Poop Adaministrator Admin


    cry.jpg


    The irony here blows my mind.
    You've triggered more reported posts & pile-ons than any member of the last decade.
    More background activity & attempts to smooth over have gone on than I recall.
    I've found the pile-ons distasteful, as if we binned people for being 'rude', then I fear we'd have to ditch some of our most knowledgeable & even entertaining members. Don't like banning, and nobody gets to demand banning anyone else. Ever.
    Last straw, Robert.
    Cheerio, mate.

    - - - - - - - - -

    I temporarily closed an off-topic thread, and reminded everyone we're a military history site. Very minor deal.

    - - - - - - - - -

    Saying yet again - nobody that helps run this free site is paid, or obliged to do so.
    Hours & hours are put into steering a rickety oil tanker of a place that has nearly disintegrated several times over the decades.
    The virus & lockdowns seem to have triggered months of increased grumbling. More hours of work, more piles of reports & grief.
    In my opinion forums with a heavily set list of rules are not what I've enjoyed. (And yet more days of work to create, and yet more complaints when someone transgresses a set of codicils. We know, we tried proper hard & fast 'rules' years ago.) Our rough constitution with its human basis works reasonably well.

    'Rebel Leader' all you like. Disagree with how it's run? Then there's an exceptionally simple solution beyond trying to stir up yet more discord.
    Many have even departed to start their own sites - brilliant; the more out there sharing WW2 history stuff in different ways, the better - but they quickly find out what it's actually like trying to hold a diverse group up in some usable form, and what a peculiar slog it can get as the place grows.
    There are three people with a true awareness of the emails, reports & general 'administrative' chatter that goes on. (And of course there is Otto, paying the bills. The monthly, hefty, bills.)
    We make decisions, often flawed, often on the fly, and with the best of intentions for a large, pretty unruly, website.


    It is what it is.
    Don't like it?
    Seriously: Tough.

    Last word from me, as this is another ten minutes spent on a virtual eye-roll.
    ~A
     
  4. timuk

    timuk Well-Known Member

    I, for one, greatly appreciate the background work that Admin and the MODs put in to make this extremely informative and helpful site run smoothly. :cheers:

    Tim
     
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  5. papiermache

    papiermache Well-Known Member

    I find the place stimulating, also a way of putting over 80,000 words of transcripts which has brought me further information. Fepow researchers never see eye to eye anyway. I just wish that some would post a file reference when they proclaim something. I know that others do do this, and some just describe the flight of the latest bumblebee. I once sent a cheque to Otto but I resolutely do not pay for things online. I do get fed up with constant references to "Adolf". However, "Adolf" and "Agatha Christie" dominate the Freeview listings in my Radio Times, and there is only so much Angela Lansbury a soul can take. So I'll just have to return to the war room for more hunt and peck transcriptions of files I photographed at Kew back in 2008 ! I may even share some here.
     
  6. idler

    idler GeneralList

    I don't envy the mods. They have all the same stresses as us to deal with, plus us and ours.

    Hopefully closed accounts can be reopened...
     
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  7. TTH

    TTH Senior Member

    Wow. What the hell happened?

    I hate to see experienced members go, but sometimes I suppose it has to be done. That can't be a pleasant duty for the mods, but this is the internet.
     
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  8. Rich Payne

    Rich Payne Rivet Counter Patron 1940 Obsessive

    How many of us had a quick butcher's to see if we mostly only posted a lot of cobblers in 'off topic' ? I may have. :sleep: The world that we thought we knew truly has turned lax and sour. I'm surprised that more of us aren't going off the rails.

    I alternate between obsessing over that wretched virus and pretending that I'm actually having a nice time. But I'm not. It's shit. I drove to Leuven yesterday though, past all those evocative place names from the 10th to 17th May 1940 war diaries and for a short while all was well with the world again. :pipe:
     
  9. High Wood

    High Wood Well-Known Member

    I, for one, am guilty of going seriously off topic on the Covid 19 thread and therefore must be partly responsible for the direction that it took, leading to its temporary closure. We were largely in lock down at the time, and our daily dog walk was so uplifting that I wanted to share the photographs with others. At the time, the response was largely positive, but I apologise, if I have caused any offence, particularly in my most recent addition to the thread.

    Simon
     
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  10. CL1

    CL1 116th LAA and 92nd (Loyals) LAA,Royal Artillery

    You are all lovely and we love each other.

    We always like to talk about disaster and this covid thing has been one hell of a one.
    Blimey coming from Welsh, in my childhood it seemed every week the front parlour (always kept for best with the chairs covered in antimacassars) had a coffin laid out on the best table(that was never used, the table not the coffin) with the talk about death and destruction in a cheery fashion
    Look into my eyes look into my eyes
    You are feeling happy,happy

    What are you feeling

    HAPPY HAPPY

    (hold on no snow white jokes)



    there you go fixed it

    my grammar and my punctuation is poor

    I blame this
    upload_2020-10-25_13-55-3.png



    ONWARDS AND UPWARDS
     
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  11. JimHerriot

    JimHerriot Ready for Anything

    "Doomed, doomed, we're all doomed!"

    Only we are not. I'm positive about that, and positive Adam does the right thing.

    To the last round folks, never give up.

    Kind regards, always,

    Jim.

    P.S. From memory, and Andy Capp and dear Florrie;

    "Only an idiot's positive"

    "Are you sure about that?"

    "I'm positive........... What flowers do you like?"
     
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  12. High Wood

    High Wood Well-Known Member

    Aubade

    I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
    Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
    In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
    Till then I see what’s really always there:
    Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
    Making all thought impossible but how
    And where and when I shall myself die.
    Arid interrogation: yet the dread
    Of dying, and being dead,
    Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

    The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
    —The good not done, the love not given, time
    Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
    An only life can take so long to climb
    Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
    But at the total emptiness for ever,
    The sure extinction that we travel to
    And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
    Not to be anywhere,
    And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

    This is a special way of being afraid
    No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
    That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
    Created to pretend we never die,
    And specious stuff that says No rational being
    Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
    That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
    No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
    Nothing to love or link with,
    The anaesthetic from which none come round.

    And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
    A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
    That slows each impulse down to indecision.
    Most things may never happen: this one will,
    And realisation of it rages out
    In furnace-fear when we are caught without
    People or drink. Courage is no good:
    It means not scaring others. Being brave
    Lets no one off the grave.
    Death is no different whined at than withstood.

    Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
    It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
    Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
    Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
    Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
    In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
    Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
    The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
    Work has to be done.
    Postmen like doctors go from house to house

    Phillip Larkin.
     
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  13. Owen

    Owen -- --- -.. MOD

    Can I just ask why would anyone join any special interest forum if the majority of their postings would be off topic ?

    I'm sure other forum admins would ban them for spamming .
     
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  14. von Poop

    von Poop Adaministrator Admin

    That's the thing.

    Nobody really gives a toss about off-topic - essential to kommoonity :unsure:, I think... (With the 'Jesus, online politicking has become mental & poisonous' caveat.) - but if that's all you do, it seems reasonable to query it.
    HW/Simon - you bring some cracking military history stuff here as well as other chat, so never a single solitary eyebrow raised. The radar only flickers (exceptionally intermittently) at people that haven't posted an on-topic thing since, eg,; July & August.

    It's all slightly awkward for me, as I'm a loopy libertarian free speech type, but also Admin of a WW2 forum that probably ought to focus mostly on... err... WW2.
    Been thinking about it quite a bit (up ladders... Conducive to thought, ladders).
    We're at core a members club, I think.
    The solitary unifying factor of said members being a maybe-ever-so-slightly autistic obsession with 'The Greater War' (Cheers, Idler. That'd be in the header if not for... reasons).
    The one subject we can 'legitimately come here to bore people that actually enjoy it' is WW2 (Rough paraphrase of a longlongago member). All else is filed under humans chatting, & curbing/closing such chat temporarily really isn't any sort of big deal in the grand scheme. Certainly not worth the cri de coeur this particular click generated (Sorry. Two clicks. Pedantry remains important).



    It wasn't my last word. Imagine that...
     
  15. Rich Payne

    Rich Payne Rivet Counter Patron 1940 Obsessive

    Less of the "...ever-so-slightly" please, Young Man !
     
  16. idler

    idler GeneralList

    It was actually meant as a compliment to the forum and its membership (well, most of 'em), but then I'm often accused of being too subtle...
     
  17. Rich Payne

    Rich Payne Rivet Counter Patron 1940 Obsessive

  18. JimHerriot

    JimHerriot Ready for Anything

    Cheers Rich.

    Any wonder I'm an insomniac.

    Kind regards, always,

    Jim.
     

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