Rant and Flames...

[Runningfish]

Was recently thinking the same thing.. I'm all for freedom of speech but a lot of the drama and discontent that we're dealing with is coming from RnF. It doesn't really serve a point aside from a place for people to fight and bitch. I also think we do need a bit more moderation here. This a lot of times is the public face of the server.. This is what people see before they actually download titanium and start playing. I guarantee that people will be turned away if all they see is drama, trolling, and bitching. Obviously everyone wants freedom of speech but personally I'd rather be able to play classic EQ than troll on a forum.

[Mcbard]

Rants and Flames isn't the problem, the people that post there are. Rants and Flames is just the effect. Stupid people saying stupid shit. Not worth losing developers and players over Rogean, I agree!

[booter]

Originally Posted by Humerox [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

RnF serves its purpose. It's a very good thermometer.

It's kind of like the idea of a free press, mixed with some National Enquirer. Sometimes you just want to know.

Flawed logic. The only stuff you see is from the same 5 - 10 loudest people who post hundreds if not thousands of times each week. It's an absolute echo chamber.

[Barkingturtle]

Originally Posted by Runningfish [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Was recently thinking the same thing.. I'm all for freedom of speech but a lot of the drama and discontent that we're dealing with is coming from RnF. It doesn't really serve a point aside from a place for people to fight and bitch. I also think we do need a bit more moderation here. This a lot of times is the public face of the server.. This is what people see before they actually download titanium and start playing. I guarantee that people will be turned away if all they see is drama, trolling, and bitching. Obviously everyone wants freedom of speech but personally I'd rather be able to play classic EQ than troll on a forum.

The obvious solution is to remove RnF posts from the "Recent Threads" area on the home page, then. That way, new users have to navigate to RnF purposely. Hell, include a disclaimer in the forum description even, for folks unfamiliar with how message boards work.

And frankly, a lot of people would be turned off if they came to a message board where everyone was getting along, giving one another reach-arounds and behaving perfectly civilly. It would be boring to a lot of people, myself included. You'd still have your nostalgia machine, but it would be far less organic and authentic. That's what censorship does: it turns everything sterile. RnF needs an enema, not a lobotomy.

[toddfx]

I 100% agree and for months have felt R&F is a stain on our community.

R&F is just glorifying the work of trolls, and that has boiled over into the rest of the forum and community long ago.

To be honest I pretty much stopped visiting P99 forums for quite a few months because I couldn't stand the tone that goes on around here. I attribute that to R&F folk. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Malrubius]

Originally Posted by Barkingturtle [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The obvious solution is to remove RnF posts from the "Recent Threads" area on the home page, then. That way, new users have to navigate to RnF purposely. Hell, include a disclaimer in the forum description even, for folks unfamiliar with how message boards work.

That would be a start. In the past, I have decided NOT to point people to Project 1999, because I knew what they would see on the home page.

Personally, I'd still like to see it go away. Maybe it is organic, but so is cancer.

[Rais]

@lol at the idea RnF should be required because of Freedom of Speech.

[Humerox]

Originally Posted by Rais [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

@lol at the idea RnF should be required because of Freedom of Speech.

Who said that?

[Labyrrinth]

Silky Venom also had a pretty pervasive RnF forums, aptly titled "The Volcano"

A lot of the people didn't like that forum, didn't even want to acknowledge it's existence. A lot of others felt it was needed. What we ended up doing, which really did help appease both sides was we put it near the very bottom of the forums list, with a warning, and probably the most important was we suppresed the last post "at-a-glance" view.

It's an idea that may work well here too.

[Barkingturtle]

Originally Posted by Malrubius [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

That would be a start. In the past, I have decided NOT to point people to Project 1999, because I knew what they would see on the home page.

Personally, I'd still like to see it go away. Maybe it is organic, but so is cancer.

You realize of course that RnF is not some malignant growth forcing posters to behave in a misanthropic way, right? The "cancer" is people. Honestly, if someone had breast cancer would you just cut off the whole boob?

Poor example.

Really though, I get what people are saying. The RnF section here is crap; no debate here. But again, that's not the whole board's fault. It's a handful of posters. So ban them. IP ban them and when they make sock accounts do it again. If it's more than a handful, then it's the community itself, and those asking for more civility and less random, meaningless vitriol are deluding themselves into thinking they themselves are not the gentle, cuddly minority.