The trouble is, anyone balanced enough to be a good moderator will have much better things to do with their time and anyone who volunteers should be immediately disqualified from being one (ref: Douglas Adams).
^^^^ Aye.
R
Ignorance breeds Fear. Fear breeds Hatred. Hatred breeds Ignorance. Break the chain.
I'm definately in the "leave the forum as it is camp". Clearly some things work better than others but any changes will just introduce new issues and other members will be upset / angered by them. You are NOT going to please everyone here as we're all individuals.
Call me paranoid but I've concerns over the data that will be being collected from here from now on, espsically with the (possible) introduction of "Like" buttons and such. SIB replies to or "likes" a post about Cheaney shoes for example.......how long until an advert for Cheaney shoes appears on SIBs Facebook page or they appear as the first Google hit regardless what I'm searching for??
It works as it is. leave it be.
So if the new owners are from Canada, does that mean the name changes from TZ-UK to TZ-CA?? :-D
Split SC into watch and non-watch.
Get rid of Bear Pit
Moderators to take a strict line on the insults and aggression, with a little more latitude in the G & D area.
Time to clean this place up, get rid of the keyboard warriors, the bully-boys, and the sniggering/sniping in the Bear Pit.
Paul
I would suggest you stay off Facebook or any Google related product if you have such concerns. ;) The like buttons for vBulletin do little more than ad a tick box to your posts and give people a warm fuzzy feeling of validation and acknowledgement when you see something you posted appreciated by others.
-Philip
That's a great idea in principal, everyone keeps mentioning these "moderators" without actually specifying where they'll come from? This place is like an old town in the wild west, Eddie was the long standing, respected law man and has just retired. The politicians in the town (Visionscope) will make the laws, but I can't see them being the law men\women who enforce them! The rival gangs of outlaws roam the streets looking for trouble and hoping they'll become the new Sheriff in town. Any law abiding citizen who becomes sheriff will become a target for these outlaws and face the full force of their wrath! God help the citizens if power should fall to an outlaw!
OK, I may have lost the plot there and used a bit of drmatisation (read BS) , but you get the point. There is now a power vacuum on the forum as I see it. I'd love the forum to stay as it is but it has changed, nothing we can do about that. Only way it won't change is if Eddie remains as the single and only mod on the forum and wields ultimate power, which I can't see is going to happen as he has stated his reasons for handing over in the first place, which we all respect him for.
Ok, time to get back to the madness in my own head.
Haha fair point :-). I know any time I look at stuff on Amazon those items suddenly appear as adverts on my Facebook page. I don't know the mechanics behond it but I know it has to do with cookies / tracking and the likes. Genuinely it doesn't bother me that much, it's a minor annoyance rather than blood boiling rage and if they weren't advertising stuff I'd looked at they'd be throwing up some other random advert. Facebook has to get it's money from somewhere.
Genuine question and appologies if you've already answered it another of the 40 odd posts about your companies aquirement of the forum but what's your interest in it? I expect adverts appropriate to watches and other things discussed will start to appear? If so do you scan for stuff people are talking about then have appropriate adverts placed on the pages. Again going back to my Cheaney shoes example, as there are several threads about shoes and a few people say "You should check those new Wolverine 1000 miles out, they're awesome" can we expect to see Wolverine adverts on the page. Or do you just sell space based on the general "type" of forums you aquire. Genuine curiosity, despite my post I don't live in a lead lined shelter with a tinfoil hat on worrying about alieans or "Big Brother is watching"
I use noscript and adblock in firefox and don't see as much advertisements unless I'm on my phone. Must see what android has to offer in this respect as I haven't bothered.
I wonder if there will be a 'remove banner ads click here' button soon where you can make a payment to remove them.
A couple of mod's would do no harm, but getting the right person for the job is another matter.
Mini Hitler's a plenty on here.
Aside from the SC split, I mostly agree.
The Bear Pit came about, I think, as a sort of safety valve to avoid having unpleasant views and the resulting arguments on the main forum. In the end I think it began to encourage the expression of such views. A politics / current affairs sub-forum, keeping the G&D for other matters, is essential of course, but I think that some people considered the BP to offer some kind of protection from normal scrutiny.
The biggest worry for me is that our new overlords will choose the wrong mod(s) from the wide range of wrong mods available.
It seems doubtful that the BP has done anything to decrease forum rancour — I'd wager it's had the opposite effect. I actually like watches quite a bit, and having the petty conflicts initiated there from intractable differences of opinion doesn't seem to contribute much to their discussion.
AGREE 100% .....this really is becoming a nasty and openly racist place. And for the ones that deny the racism, we know what you are. If the new owners are to make it more commercial then as long as the focus is on watches (which is what most here originally came for) then I think that a positive
Tend to agree Paul.
Or if the BP must stay, lock/delete the draft/moan threads, ban swearing (not that I'm a prude but I don't think it helps debate) and clamp down on the personal insults/feuds.
I think the rationale behind the BP was top keep the heavy stuff away from the main forum. Perhaps that worked once upon a time but these days I think it has a negative impact: the feuds and grudges spill over into the rest of the forum unfortunately.
First, you can limit Ad Tracking on the mobile phone you use, as well as turn off various default settings if you’re signed into Google.
You can use various Ad blocking extensions to prevent this stuff from ever being collected or presented.
Of course, you could just not “Like” someone’s post about Dick’s shoes, in the first place – often times the simplest solution is to take the easiest option of doing nothing.
With Virtucon taking over isn't it about time we came up with a suitable Mission statement.
Belligero:
*It seems doubtful that the BP has done anything to decrease forum rancour — I’d wager it's had the opposite effect
I think this is quite probably true.
I’m not extremely anti-BP; after all I have posted on it myself and I accepted its existence. However, I do wonder sometimes if, overall, it has encouraged members to feel free to speak to each other outside the BP in a way that wouldn’t occur otherwise.
*The reply with quote function is up the left.
This is my favourite forum due to the lack of moderation and the very British sense of humour in evidence. Having said that there is occasionally nastiness and bullying which is allowed to go too far, and there do seem to be some members who are here to cause trouble rather than to contribute to discussions about watches. I do think some light moderation to stop reasonable SC posts being trashed or watch-related threads being taken over by personal disputes would do no major harm.
Can we also ban the word 'tactical'?
What puzzles me is how people think they can play some sort of Jekyl and Hyde game, with a 'normal' persona for the rest of the forum and a thoroughly obnoxious 'alter ego' for the Bear Pit.
Maybe this place should become a democracy and we'll put things to the vote!
Here's a thought: Close the Bear Pit for a month and see whether forum behaviour/manners improves.
Paul
It’s such a difficult thing to get right. I assume Edie went through all this years ago: do you adopt Eddie’s approach and trust that generally, by and large, the group will self police? Let’s face, that worked more or less all the time for 12 years. Or do you risk losing valuable posts, thoughts and discussions by attempting to filter off the very extreme or the borderline illegal? To do it well takes time and thought.
Got to say I also concur with the views on keyboard warriors. We're here cos we like watches and have loads of other stuff in common too, yet too many just want to cause a ruckus from the safety of home. We need some moderation but who's best to do it?
I am genuinely puzzled why folks are proclaiming the place has/is going to the dogs - the only thing that has changed is Eddie no longer owns the forum. I see little if any evidence that there is rafts of bad behaviour outside the BP - it's what the place is for surely?.
Eddie has booted a few off over the years and I am sure there will be more in the future but no need to really change anything significantly.
Putting anything to to a forum vote is a bad idea - nearly as daft as asking for an opinion on something!
When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks long into you.........
Do all the members calling for moderation actually use other watch forums that have moderation? How do you find that?
I'd be happy to see the end of the double avatar tbh.
A slightly bigger avatar of the users own choosing would be much better imo.
I don't see the need for any change, but if any, they should at least be put to vote. A bunch of people whinging about something on a thread do not necessarily represent the view of the majority in the community.
There will be changes I am sure, it's inevitable - but the more there are then the less it will be like the TZ we know and (mostly) love. Be careful what you wish for is all I'll say.
Root and AdAway and you're all set
To be on topic, am I the only one that finds it a tad weird the most recent posts being first? Although I've been here a couple of months now, I still click on the last page most of the time, because that's where I expect the latest replies of the thread to be (probably because this is the first forum I'm in that works this way). I'm fairly sure that there could be an option in the settings to change the sorting of the posts.
Other than this, there's nothing else that I would change
LE : Scratch that. I've just found it in settings. I knew I should have looked for it better
Last edited by asteclaru; 12th November 2015 at 20:57.
Once you open the gates on moderation there is no going back. I personally don't like the idea of an arbiter that has the power to ban people just because they feel it's the right thing to do. To me it's very simple if you don't like what someone says then ignore it and move on. How anyone can get offended by what someone says on a forum is beyond me.
We need more unicorns. I don't recall a single one in the last year. Soundood would bring more unicorns fo shizzle.