I woke up this morning a wee bit sad as I had to close a tab open to MSB on my phone, and reminded myself:

The forum was never the community. It was just where the community agreed to hang out. It could have been Reddit or Discord or a MUSH but - for a few years - it was the MSB forum.

If WORA was ever a thing, it is here now. The spirit of open, lively debate is here.

What we left behind are admin who admit candidly that they wanted us off their forum, so we are gone.

The people left behind on Derp’s forum are a separate community.

People can decide where they would like to belong. (Except for those of us who were banned but I also think that just reinforces what most of us had already chosen.)

I am happy to be part of this community. 🥰

@GF said in Bannings:

At some point, it has to become a vibes-based decision.

Honestly? At every point. Even looking down the barrel of logs and screenshots, you’re still gonna have to make a decision based on your instincts.

I’m not sure people grasp how much even the most flippant of us wind up agonizing over these decisions sometimes. “I don’t want to make a big deal out of this” is probably the most common phrase people say to me when they want to put someone on my radar, and that’s sort of a sad state of affairs. Even on GH, which was a hot mess, we only ever got a handful of actual complaints about behavior from people; most people who are getting harassed just leave rather than go through the whole process of reporting someone.

The only false report I’ve ever gotten on any game, to my knowledge, was from Ruiz. Who went right for the throat with a job to complain about the person it turned out she was harassing. Neither player got banned over it, though the other player eventually quit.

^ See above re: wrong way on a decision before. I should’ve banned Ruiz right then (or at least shortly afterward when her creepiness started to twig @bear_necessities), but no one had receipts and it felt somehow wrong to ban someone just because my co-admin thought they were creepy.

Which is just the dumbest rationale I’ve ever used, and it embarrasses me to this day.

tl;dr - be a good admin and swing the ban-hammer freely till you achieve the desired PEACE & QUIET

I forgot this thread was here. I stand by my “let Derp’s forum lie” mentality, but also…

Derp has been completely honest about why certain bans were lifted and others weren’t: He doesn’t like us.

Which is completely fair. I don’t like him, either.
When he was made admin, I had every intention of just bouncing. But I realize now that I fucking care about this community, and he doesn’t, so I’m glad I came back.

I don’t expect to ever be unbanned there. Derp can’t handle people speaking truth to him, especially women.

The community that was WORA - that Arkandel handed over to Ganymede - isn’t fractured. It’s right fucking here.

WORA has never been an immutable line in the sand. It’s always a party that’s popped up at someone’s house 'cause their parents were out of town.

When Nymeria threatened copyright infringement and we had to flee off Proboards (or whatever that was), the community moved to a new location. This is the same thing: Ganymede torched our old neighborhood and gave the keys to Derp, so we just moved on.

It’s really hard to explain how much of this is because… honestly… Derp is such a mansplainy little turd, that it is hard to swallow that he “wins.” He and Ganymede essentially have the keys to our shared history. And it hurts to think of losing that (for the 4th time?) because of this narrow-minded little man who doesn’t have the common decency to yield to the will of the community he was supposed to be entrusted to oversee.

Derp should have done the right thing and stepped aside when it became obvious how upset so many of us were.

Ganymede should have done the right thing and asked him to step aside when it became obvious how upset so many of us were.

The misplaced trust in Ganymede over the years compiled by the smug crowing imagined in the background by that tiresome manchild…

It still stings.

So that’s why I’m still reading, even though I know I shouldn’t. I’ll grow out of it soon.

They won’t.

@Warma-Sheen said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

@Pavel said in Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo:

I understand the ‘must have proof’ mindset, though. Sometimes (rarely, but still) bitches do lie. After all, this board was founded after people were falsely accused of something and punished without any sort of transparent investigation.

Yep.

Sometimes people lie.

Please show me the receipts where people have lied about being harassed. If this is such a prevalent problem, you should have no trouble producing them.

We lost our CKCS recently. So now we have 1 & 1/4 Boston Terriers.

@Cobalt lordy, just when it feels like it can’t go any lower

Just from my own past experience? Don’t give away your DB. Don’t let someone take it over. We did that with GH, and I regret that decision big-time. Stuff only got worse, and - even though I publicly walked away - there’s still a sense of responsibility. And people who still think I was responsible for shit that I had no control over.

If they love it so much, let them make an homage.

LOLOL and Gany banned us all to protect this nasty weirdo

this hobby, man

@Cobalt just jumping on the bandwagon.

Derp’s knee-jerk assumption was that YOU are the bad actor in this scenario, and everyone agreed - right up until you walked into the room, when suddenly they realized they weren’t just talking about someone who couldn’t defend themselves. Then Ghost and Macha did their frantic back-pedaling, and Derp of course ignored the fire he just started.

They’re not there for discussion. They have BANNED everyone who actually wants to discuss things.

This thread is here in all fun, because getting banned from MSB is still ridiculous to so many of us.

But it has ultimately turned out to be a positive. Clearly, we’re lurking there to see how this all shakes out - and hi to those lurking here in return. It’s sad to lose a piece of our collective history, but it’s not the first time, and it probably won’t be the last.

We aired many grievances in Discord over the past two-ish weeks, but we also started putting our heads together constructively. Several new games are in development, people took (happy and sometimes snarky) walks down memory lane, and this forum came together very quickly as a testament to the willingness of the community to band together.

It’s unfortunate that it took a common enemy to shake us from our complacency, but I just wanted to say that I’m glad that our response was to pick up the pieces and start again.

That’s the community I have enjoyed and am glad to continue enjoying.

Now I am going to block all you people and all the Arx threads and get back to business.

@Raistlin Just curious if you’ve actually seen Dark City (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118929/)?

It’s always been in the back of my mind as “would make a cool MUSH.”

@Tez Asking for specific examples really hits me in the warm-fuzzies.

On GH, the metaplot was “small town supernatural sandbox causes psychic trauma to residents.”

We attempted to reinforce it it by running weirdo stories and scenes, usually with the goal of being simultaneously hilarious and horrifying, and by establishing as part of the core concept a way that people could play with the supernatural elements without needing staff intervention (Dreams).

Specific examples included a long-term story about the proper disposal of the bones of a serial killer, our primary plot-dispensing NPCs being a blob fish (occasionally in costume a la a bridal veil or monocle) and Juno from Beetlejuice, and one-off scenes like a Christmas party that gets trapped inside a snow globe.

On ODW, the metaplot is “playing in a version of Anne McCaffrey’s world of Pern where the book canons left things in a sad state and the PCs are rebuilding a better future (and also we ignore the stupid parts of Pern canon).”

I’m implementing it by recreating the iconic Pern moments as on-camera moments while flat-out ignoring parts of canon that are stupid, and by highlighting story moments that lean toward positive momentum.

Specific examples include on-camera Threadfall scenes where PCs get to flame Thread and take injuries, running a Hatching where nobody has to fill out an application first (with future plans to hold a colorless Hatching; IYKYK), and telling stories that mix typical Pern themes like a Lord’s son standing for Impression with stuff that just sounds fun like the possibility that his family has been cursed for centuries.

@Juniper said in Staff and playable pcs:

I think ideally they shouldn’t play because they will benefit from insider knowledge…

Of a MUSH plot. Just to keep the stakes in mind.

Not a bug. Just to say thanks for updating things.

You’re appreciated.

@Kestrel I read everyone’s desc. I like reading them. Writing them can be a challenge sometimes, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

If we don’t keep challenging ourselves as writers and creators, we’re going to wind up RPing nothing but Movie Nights and Karaoke, linking to images of our outfits instead of actually (wait for it) describing anything.

Rabble rabble kids these days.

As someone who uses ignore functions a lot, I’m with @Roz on this.

If people are seemingly all “that sucks” or “wow crazy story” on a channel out of the blue, I can piece together that it’s in response to someone I have blocked.

It happens on the forums all the time.
If you don’t know what I mean, I have to imagine you won’t use this function much anyway.

I don’t have a lot of thoughts on how overall blocking someone should function. I just avoid people I don’t like and usually the games where they play, so I can’t actually think of a time that I page-locked someone.

But a command that just squelches a person on a channel would be a welcome addition. channel/ignore <someone> to clip the oversharers out of the conversation.

I don’t think there needs to be any notification or any way for someone to see if they’re being ignored. People don’t need to be aware how often I want to mute them.

I’m so used to being the one that asks people to RP with me that nowadays I look sideways at anyone who reaches out.

Like how dare someone else actively enjoy roleplaying, they must be some kind of weirdo.

@Tez Allow me to quote @Snackness:

“Leave.”

Really old drama.

I almost put this in the “Good Things” thread just as an example of things I’m so glad we decided as a group to stop doing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040204025308/http://southern.silvertree.org/southerngoldapp.cgi

14 general questions, then 33 questions on the gold application and 26 for bronze.

Question 24 on the gold application is amazing.

24. During your first hatching that you’re running as a Junior, you hear on the grapevine that your Weyrleader is flirting with prospective candidates and promising them search and/or impression on acceptance of TS. Your Weyrwoman is his RL wife, and has no idea any of this is going on, and in fact, you know, told him on a number of occasions not to TS. What do you do?