Forum Etiquette

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FISHMANPET
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby FISHMANPET » January 5th, 2013, 5:33 pm

I'm wondering if just out right deleting posts is the best choice? I've made a couple posts that have been outright deleted, and there's no notification to me that my post has been deleted, and no notice to me that "hey, that was a dumb thing to say, don't post like that."

In the specific case I can think of, most of my post was a personal attack so I can understand why it was deleted, but if I was a bit more dense it would be nice to have gotten a PM or something to not be such an asshole, and possibly a temporary ban or something like that.

I always go back to somethingawful when I think about how a forum should be run. If you make a bad post, it will probably stick around, but you'll get put on probation, and other posters will be able to see that my post resulted in a probation. If the post is really bad it might get edited out (if it was illegal, etc), but otherwise it stays. If the post was really bad, or another in a long documented pattern, then I'd get a ban. If I was truly awful, I'd get a permaban.

On SomethingAwful, it costs $10 to open an account. So if you're banned, you can pay $10 and reopen your account. If you're permabanned then you can't reopen your account period.

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Nick
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby Nick » January 5th, 2013, 6:02 pm

I pretty rarely will outright delete a post unless it's terrible/clearly designed to incite other posters. Not including that civilization poster I got rid of a while back, I've probably deleted about ten to fifteen tangents in the past six months, out of over 13,000 posts. Nasa will generally pop into the forum every two or three weeks and write "This is stupid, I hate it" or "This is stupid, I hate it" on the 222/Southwest Corridor/other threads, which I just delete. Likewise, if someone pops into some topic and makes a blanket statement about all cyclists/motorists being assholes who need to die, I generally will just get rid of that.

I do move stuff around a decent amount though, which I should probably be more clear about. It may look like I'm deleting stuff, but I'm just moving offtopic conversations around to the appropriate area once they've about wrapped up.

There's kind of a balance between letting all people do all the things they want all the time and the fact that most people shouldn't be able to do most of the things that they want most of the time. As I've said before, the problem with making a crappy post usually isn't the crappy post, but all the over-serious response to that crappy post that throws the whole conversation off.
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FISHMANPET
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby FISHMANPET » January 5th, 2013, 6:26 pm

That all makes sense, and SomethingAwful as such a wildly different culture in comparison to here.

I think a lot of what SA does is a result of using a heavily modified version of VBulletin 2 (VBulletin is currently on v5) so they don't have access to a lot of the features we do here.

All that being said, these would be my suggestions, based on my experience and what I've seen other people post in threads:
1) Feedback to a poster when their post is deleted or edited. Maybe sometimes the poster doesn't realize what they've done wrong, or maybe they're just trolling and won't change, but it would eliminate some confusion sometimes
2) When threads get heavily split (like seperating the Vikings thread into development and financing, or moving Nasa35's posts about future development plans into a rumors thread) it would be nice to have a note in the "old" thread saying "hey, these posts got moved over here."

In both cases, the problem I see is silent moderation, without any indication of what's going on.

And to be clear, I think you're doing a great job at keeping everything in line, I just think there's always room for something to improve.

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Nick
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby Nick » January 5th, 2013, 7:01 pm

Yeah I've been meaning to be more clear for a bit, but sometimes there's some mental effort involved with letting people know why they shouldn't tell anyone to die :lol:. Now that you've brought it up I'll try to be more clear.
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Le Sueur
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby Le Sueur » January 6th, 2013, 1:44 am

sometimes there's some mental effort involved with letting people know why they shouldn't tell anyone to die :lol:
So Louis CK, not for everyone, but your comment totally made me think of his standup at 1:50 from SNL in November.


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Nick
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Birthday Note

Postby Nick » May 31st, 2013, 6:50 pm

Today being the forum's first birthday, along with some recent arguments in a couple places, has inspired me to write a bit reminding everyone to please try to get along if possible. I think I wrote a pretty good summary of my feelings on that back in January, but that database hiccup we had unfortunately erased it. twincitizen posted something that I more or less agree with here.

But in summary, everyone should really recognize a couple things. First, there are obviously many different types of posters who come here for many different reasons, and that's okay. There are folks who visit to look at photos, there are folks who come to talk about transit, there are folks who just really like big buildings, there are folks looking for apartments, and all sorts of things. Within those groups, there are people who will write a ten paragraph borderline academic post about the inequitable distribution of transportation infrastructure in the Twin Cities, and there are folks who don't do that. And that's okay. But certainly the majority of us can agree that skewing more towards the academic (and as a result, hopefully more civil) side of things is good for the forum. The old trope about us all enjoying the MinnPost comment section more than the StarTribune comment section is a little played out by now, but it still applies.

Second, this is technically "just an Internet message board", but it's also a legitimate community. I went through and removed spam members a while back, so the current ~530 member number is about right. Within that, only maybe forty to fifty people post super often. But we also have many thousands of unique visitors every week. UrbanMSP is just an Internet message board, but it is something that people outside the regular group of posters are aware of. I know that sounds silly, and obviously Governor Dayton isn't pouring over the State Transportation Financing thread looking for ideas. But as twincitizen alluded to, many of us actually do work in the fields that these conversations pertain to, and so I'm just throwing that out there.

So I would just again remind everyone to try to keep in mind that we're all pretty much on the same team. There are posters on here who contribute a lot of awesome opinions and information that I know I'm smarter for reading. The higher quality of the forum, the more high quality new posters we'll get, and vice versa. And not that I don't otherwise enjoy the exercise that I get from taking pictures for seven hours on a windy January afternoon, but I have personally put a lot of effort into the forum. It's a really good resource for all of us and many others, and let's keep it that way going forward.

Nick
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twincitizen
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Re: Birthday Note

Postby twincitizen » May 31st, 2013, 11:03 pm

Hear, hear!

And a Happy Birthday to UrbanMSP. Next year at this time we'll be planning the first UrbanMSP Green Line pub crawl (and still disagreeing about the Southwest extension, and thatz okay!)

MNdible
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Re: Birthday Note

Postby MNdible » June 1st, 2013, 2:08 pm

(and still disagreeing about the Southwest extension, and thatz okay!)
I don't know. I'm pretty sure that if I make the case for 3A one more time, really well, I'll convince everybody that I'm right.

helsinki
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby helsinki » June 3rd, 2013, 9:30 am

Happy belated birthday, UrbanMSP!

Although a sporadic poster, I am an avid reader. It's an excellent forum. Many thanks to those of you that keep it going.

beykite
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby beykite » June 6th, 2013, 12:57 pm

First off I'd like to say thank you to Nick and Sean for saving the site and maintaining it. I know it is time consuming and a lot of hard work and I and many other users greatly appreciate it.

I'm noticing a trend of the same 4 topics or so having the only new posts (especially in the downtown section), and having them be almost completely uninformative of actual development occurring in the cities. We waited so long for the construction drought to end and now that we're booming we waste our time bashing each other and all the developments going on. My God a few years ago I would have been happy to have any single one of these developments happening. I've pretty much given up on posting pictures because (more so on certain projects than others) it just leads into a tangent of how much certain people hate the development and how much better they could have done it. What I don't understand is that there is a topic for almost every argument repeated on this board (roads vs stroads, what makes a good skyline, fantasies and speculations, cars vs bikes, rails vs busses) yet somehow almost every discussion for actual development wonders off topic and into one of these back and forth arguments.

I'm not sure what the solution is, or the point of this post. But I just wanted to get that out there. I'd rather see heavier moderation (even if that means offending some people and people playing the fascism card) if that means it makes the site more credible, more informative and less of a constant flame war that scares people away from joining in. Urbanmsp has a couple paths to go down, and I think its time to decide which one to take. With the streets.mn partnership I would hope it'd be a path of credibility and less back and forth arguments about whether a yard is a park or a park is a yard.

gpete
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby gpete » June 6th, 2013, 1:34 pm

Beykite, I agree with your assessment. With so many side conversations going on, relevant project info gets buried (site plans, status, etc). Is there a way to put a summary of each individual project in one easily accessible spot? For instance, if there was a quick blurb about the project, a rendering, and its current status, that would be amazing. Kind of like a sticky thread within each given thread.

twincitizen
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby twincitizen » June 6th, 2013, 1:47 pm

Mods can definitely go back and edit the original post to contain whatever information is needed. We haven't really done that as standard practice. Maybe we should start, since threads often begin well before actual proposals and site plans are released.

Side conversations often do get moved to separate threads, or just outright deleted if they're really bad. In the case of the Strib blocks thread, pretty much everything in there technically is on-topic, even if it's petty bickering about the name "yard" or what ever (I'm guilty of getting involved in that one myself).

Viktor Vaughn
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby Viktor Vaughn » June 6th, 2013, 2:02 pm

Thanks for the post, beykite. I think being credible and informative are good goals for the forum to strive for. And yes, there are a lot of tiresome debates on repeat in unrelated threads.

I know some people would like threads about developments to simply be plans, renderings, updates, and construction photos. I like that information, but it's not why I check the forum everday (or let's be honest, throughout the day). I'm much more interested in ideas. I come for the constant back and forth about the future of our city, what's working and what isn't. I like that when someone posts something incorrect, or that just doesn't quite ring true - it's not allowed to stand. Free and open debate among informed people coming from many perspectives is the best way to really understand an issue from all directions.

And I see how people get annoyed when threads get off topic, especially when it's the same ol' divergence. But again, my personal interest is not neccesarily with THAT building, I'm interested in that building's connection to everything else. How does that building interact with the street it's on? How did the zoning code influence the design or location? How will transit serve that location? Should a transit route be adjusted to better serve that location? Should development follow transit or transit follow development? And pretty soon we're off onto a seemingly unrelated philosophical chicken or the egg argument regarding transit system design. And some people aren't going to be interested, I get that. But for others, that debate will be more interesting and enlightening than some construction updates about a six story stick apartment building with virtual clones all over the city.

Nothing exists in a vaccuum. Meaning -- everything is somehow related to everything else. Housing, transportation, the economy, history, government, tap rooms, restaurant leases, and debates about bke lanes are all interrelated. For a self-educating student of cities like myself, the relationship between all those things is what really tells a compelling story. Routing a lightrail line through Theodore Wirth isn't interesting. What's facinating is how that decision was made, from community meetings over North, to a reversed Golden Valley City Council vote, to off the record conversations between Target Executives and Hennepin County Commissioners. Those are the stories that tell us how our city works. I really don't know how to contain those discussions into neat little threads.

So yeah, I would not like to see a heavier hand of moderation. I think doing so would be arbitrary and harmful to the discourse that makes this forum interesting.

gpete
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby gpete » June 6th, 2013, 2:07 pm

For me, part of the frustration is that the project info is mixed in with the discussion. The discussions are usually very informative for me (especially as a non-development professional), but with that being said, it would be helpful if the nuts and bolts project info was separated out from some of the more rambling discussions. When a thread gets to be 40 pages, it can be difficult to find a rendering or info about an upcoming public meeting, etc.

mattaudio
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby mattaudio » June 6th, 2013, 2:13 pm

Some backstory here... Originally I had started a Wordpress blog for UrbanMSP that was supposed to be a curated track record of things happening. Basically, things that were useful information in the forum would get cemented into the annals of UrbanMSP history on the blog. Unfortunately it was a lost cause for just one person to edit, but maybe that's an option down the road if we had collaboration or if it could somehow accept posts promoted from the forum.

Viktor, I'm right on with you about the usefulness of the ideas. I think that's why the publications "of record" often seem to get their insight and angles on a story from our forums.

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FISHMANPET
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby FISHMANPET » June 6th, 2013, 2:49 pm

Matt, I'm not sure a blog would be the best tool for that. Maybe some form of Wiki that only select people could edit? I suspect there's enough IT nerds here we could get something going if we put our mind to it.

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Nick
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby Nick » June 6th, 2013, 5:59 pm

There are a few different things at work here. This, for example, is an inability to understand Internet sarcasm:
I see three new pages in this thread and excitedly open it, expecting some updates.

Instead, it is a three page debate over the semantics of "yard."

You guys are right. Rybak is an abhorrent human being. So glad he's out soon.

Now, I think anybody participating in this tete-a-tete has officially forfeited his/her "Please-don't-derail-the-thread post" card, no?
does anyone else take offense when someone calls another person abhorrent? because of his or her political beliefs? I sure do. You might not agree with a persons every decision... but does that really make them a horrible person? let's save these political attacks for fox news blogging... please. This type of stuff makes me want to stay away from this site.

way to attack all those who were derailing the thread with political statements... whilst making your own political statement.

I'm probably done on here.
Some form of this issue pops up a lot--many of us posters know each other and know each others' senses of humor. For example, redisciple is kind of abrasive in a lot of his posts, but I know him in real life and I understand the sarcasm. Similarly, MNdible is also very sarcastic, and also disagrees with a lot of people, but is also one of our most knowledge and readable posters.

I'm going to be a little more specific in a point I made in the birthday post: There's clearly a divide on the site between those who view this as a quasi-academic resource, and those think it's closer to a 1998 AOL chat room. It's time to start veering more towards the former. Some off topic posting is fine, because as Viktor Vaughn said, most of these subjects overlap. But I feel like I need to start addressing some quality issues here. It's a free country--if you feel that you're being censored because you called someone's opinion pathetic, you're certainly welcome to take your web expertise and credit card and start your own forum. I'm kind of over it. I'm tired of reading it, tired of trying to process it, and I'm sure I'm not alone. Let's make the forum better.
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612transplant
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby 612transplant » June 6th, 2013, 6:11 pm

I can take personal responsibility for that. I *don't* post here very often, so it is short-sighted for me to assume that others will "get" my sarcasm in text.

That being said, as somebody who reads a lot, but only posts occasionally, the updates on actual projects are very much appreciated, whereas the sidebars are a bit frustrating. I'm not in the Twin Cities anymore, and can't drive downtown to see the cranes....can't banter or speculate about things that might be happening in the Minneapolis development world, even, since I don't know any other Minneapolitans, and doing it with Pittsburghers would be a sort of futile exercise.

I have plenty of opinions about the dynamics of cities in general, about transit, walkability, built environment, the legalese of it all, etc. But I refrain-- for the most part-- from sharing those opinions on this site, because let's face it, people here have strong opinions and I'm not going to convince anybody. And what I get out of the conversation-- although interesting-- probably isn't enough pay-off for me to justify getting into these intense discussions in the first place.

So, I'm all for heavier moderation, or for what other posters have mentioned: consolidate the actual development news in one place so that those of us who want to access it can. I understand that it is a fine and thin line between what is germane/on topic, and what is not. I don't think anybody here wants anybody else's opinions suppressed. Moderators could choose to be very strict about this, or very liberal, but whatever the decision I think there is some room here for everybody to get what they want out of the site....

David Greene
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby David Greene » June 6th, 2013, 9:39 pm

I have plenty of opinions about the dynamics of cities in general, about transit, walkability, built environment, the legalese of it all, etc. But I refrain-- for the most part-- from sharing those opinions on this site,
That's really unfortunate. I certainly have strong opinions but I also know that I don't have most of the answers. I've learned a lot of things reading this site and I could benefit from your ideas.

What I object to are the personal attacks, whether toward board members or toward people who don't even read the site. That's something I hope we can clean up.

I tend to prefer as little moderation as possible.

612transplant
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Re: Forum Etiquette

Postby 612transplant » June 7th, 2013, 9:20 am

David, maybe I should clarify that I don't mean any animosity by that statement, and I'm sure that my opinions would be welcomed, respected, and not repressed. It's just a time thing: posting something long about my opinions on this-or-that takes some energy and effort, and it's not really why I come to the site in the first place, so I refrain.

Maybe I'll start taking some more time to read through some of the longer, more in-depth discussions that go on, and try to articulate my own responses, because I agree that it can be fun and I could certainly learn a lot from the opinion exchange if I chose to get into it...


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