This is essentially what Goodaltgamer quoted as his reason for leaving the forum after that thread he had hoping to get suggestions for you to work with.

There's definitely grounds for concern on that count, but from my own personal experience, whenever there's legitimate nastiness that breaks out -- be it personal attacks, or hate speech (being speech which actually conveys hate towards a specific group), it's justified or defended by people saying either, "Oh you're just being too offended over nothing", or "Well, I have the right to say whatever I want." Usually the latter comes about whenever talk about forum abuse leads to any talk about moderation.

And as others like skeletonbow have pointed out, I've come to see that that's what people are trying to defend: their right to say whatever they want, to whoever they want, with no consequence whatsoever. As if their "freedom of speech" (combined with the near consequence-free anonymity and audience afforded by this forum) absolves them of any personal responsibility or obligation to have any common decency.

What's promising is that fables has tried to be as open and transparent as possible with the community about moderation. They could have just shown up, put up a forum sticky, and then started closing threads and banning people left right and centre. But they didn't. Even now fables is trying to be as open as they can about the rules and how they'll go about moderating things.

Fair enough but that's where transparency and consistency will be important. If I start getting nasty with someone for holding homophobic views that should get me just as much censure as someone who gets nasty with someone who's LGTBQ.

Carousel discussions? Yeah, it's very dizzying. Seems a bit like a vortex too, as I always get myself sucked into them.

Also, how dare you address us as 'you people'? XD

You mean [url=http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Pyramids_(Civ2)]they[/url] [url=http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Pyramids_(Civ3)]weren't[/url]?
Ninja'd. Hard. With the same link, even. :(

Well that clearly isn't the fucking case in this instance.
We have had plenty of agitators and the professionally outraged causing trouble in an attempt to bring extra censorship and judging by this thread they have succeeded. So by definition the rules are obviously open to manipulation.

Maybe if you had pulled your finger out of your butt and stopped them shitting on that thread then we wouldn't have the problem now unless GoG was wanting an excuse to turn this forum into another neogaf. The selective interpretation of those rules is what will concern most posters. at least the rules below are being broken in this thread.

Yes. It's very definitely not just you. Such discussions are highly polarized with many on both sides of the stance that they will essentially continue endlessly until the other side concedes. That never solves anything ever of course, so the options end up being to let it go on endlessly, or put an end to it more or less.

Whatever brings an increase in civility and reduction of hostility gets my vote whether there are any votes being cast or not pretty much.

There's no point putting yourself on the front lines, answering users directly and attempting to justify yourself. It won't change the opinions of users

Indeed. The best option would be to close this forum entirely and adopt a new good forum engine.
New forum - new rules. That will be fair. And people won't feel that they've been robbed.
If i won't like forum rules - i will not register. Problem solved.

It isn't "whatever reason". It's 0.000001% enforcement over the past 8+ years. That lack of enforcement has set up expectations. Yes, it's your place. We get that. But this is a clear case of giving rope, and giving more rope, and more rope on top of that, and then saying you're suddenly going to start jerking it back. However one chooses to see it, the reality is that there should have been a drag on that rope all along so there were no surprises.

We'll see how it goes. I'm not expecting a big change, but please understand why there's griping. You're proposing taking away something that shouldn't have been allowed in the first place, but that behavior was given tacit approval by a near-complete lack of enforcement of your (gOg) own rules over nearly the entire life of the forum.

It's no different from parking all the time in the same No Parking zone, BSing with the cop at your car while parked there, not getting ticketed for all that time, and then he suddenly starts writing tickets because "It's a problem". Would you WTF a little bit? It was a problem all along.

CDPR has far superior forum software, so in theory GOG could adopt that since well... just since.

Accurate criticism, my dear, accurate abrupt criticism.
There has been no insults and no one asking for hate speech, abuse, and intimidation here.




p.s maybe it would be better if there were just game forums with game topics.

I would so park in a no parking zone. Rules are made to be broken. Haha.

For example we could discuss how other forums have went down this path and the problems that come with it.
A handful of posters including the OP have described problems and offered a few solutions.

Obviously there are many reasons not to follow your thinly veiled attempt at shutting the discussion down.