Rule Change (New Staff Power)

[Thumpalumpacus]

At TAF, I wrote the last set of rules, and one of those rules was indeed "Don't be a dick." It didn't mean "don't ever be a dick", it meant "If all you are is a dick, you're not welcome", and that's how we applied it.

Like here, our moderating decisions were almost always subject to vote (outside of spam/porn or other egregious violation). We had some vigorous discussions about what "being a dick" meant, and the general consensus seemed to be if you're being clearly antagonistic while adding nothing to the conversation, you're being a dick. Of course, we had an area called "The Pit" for  flamefests and such, so if it was kept in there it wasn't dickishness. We also had informal warnings as well as formal -- myself, I'd just PM a guy: "Isn't that a bit past the rules there?" and give him a chance to edit,  or "You're adding heat but no light to the conversation." Then on to formal warnings and bans which were always voted-on in these sorts of cases.

We also had a subforum called "The Oubiliette", where if someone broke the "don't be a dick rule", they could post, but only in that subforum -- and anyone in a bad mood could come by and shit up any thread the dick had started. A taste of his own medicine, if you will. They could come out after a week or two and hopefully understand better how it feels.

I need to get back over to TAF.

It's not there any more. Wayne had a shitfit one night when Nefan posted a link to a 4chan board (not /b/) and banned Nefan. Us moderators discussed this banning and confronted Wayne with his act, as being unfair. He then decided to sell the site, with the hopes of pulling the rug out from underneath us, but we found a sponsor with a little dough and his own server and ran the site for over a year on a communal basis, all the while racing against time to rescue archives Wayne was destroying daily out of spite -- until he realized what we were doing (under guise) and deleted his entire serverful. We estimated that we'd lost some forty thousand pages of posts running from its inception at Aug 2009 to the fracture in Dec 2012. The forum limped along for another 18 months but that was simply because no one had the heart to simply shoot the poor beast and put it out of its misery.

A very sad ending to what was a great place. Poopshoot stills occasionally posts at a guitar forum I frequent, and I get his FB feed, and I see iAtheist on AF.com when I go over there for my biennial "yep, I was right to leave" visit. I miss Beatly and Fyzxs and the rest ... it was a neat little spot while it lasted.