Establishing Culture---Part I

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Edit: This post looks angry and it’s for a reason. I don’t want to edit it because it wouldn’t be honest. I was when I wrote it. However, I would like to invite you to share your feedback in the comments, even if negative, as long as it’s constructive towards the forum agenda.

Hello all,

I realized this week that I haven’t been thorough or explicit enough in my introduction post with the culture of discussion that I expect to have on this forum.

On Content

  • I’m not looking necessarily for a large influx of posts. Quality and thoughtfulness should come before chatting and immediacy. Your discussions shouldn’t be self-serving, but also act as an archive to others that are interested in the same topic.

  • I’m not necessarily looking for showcasing your play, but to invite self-reflection spurred by the other users’ questions and challenges. If inviting self-reflection is taken as an attack, it’s your problem and this place is probably not for you.

  • Self-identified game designers are only players in this space, equal to others. If you use your introduction post mainly to promote things you have made, I will consider that a first strike and watch your behaviour.

  • If you only plan to comment in the discussions that you open, you probably won’t fit in here.

  • I probably thought that it went without saying with the reference to Ron Edwards’ jazz band metaphor, but discussion of any roleplaying with social giver–receiver dynamics, paying people to play, railroading (even consensual), or funneling towards a repeatable experience, is off topic. You’re not being judged as “bad wrong fun” for engaging in play with these objectives, but simply it’s not the topic of the forum. It’s incompatible with emergence and this forum is a space where I want to develop our understanding of techniques for achieving it. I also don’t want to go through the stress again of mediating between users with conflicting play goals.

    • A good rule of thumb which is a bit permissive to figure out if you’re interested in “emergent outcomes” is—if I played this again, would I like it to go completely differently?

    • In case of doubt, I’ll take the stance of allowing the discussion.

    • As a caveat, this is not open season for remote-diagnosing others’ play as non-emergent. As long as a user declares they’re trying to, all is good. We’ll take the good faith of users as a given.

If you want to check out the type of discussion that I’m interested in having, you can check out this excellent thread from La Locanda—automatic translation is your friend. We’re discussing how late in play one can change hidden elements of the situation without undermining previous decisions taken by others. Everyone is sharing personal experiences related to the topic, and a consensus is being reached—with some users remaining in disagreement.

On Behaviour

I also realized that my usual methods of soft handling of problems do not work in an environment where a large contingent of the users (natively-English-speaking users) has an innate cultural hegemony by the mere choice of lingua franca that I’ve chosen for this place, and an entitlement to dictate how others should speak.

Regarding users’ behaviour:

  • As said in the guidelines, natively English-speaking users should not immediately assume that because the main language of this forum is English that their cultural assumptions about what tone is acceptable are automatically true. Talking in an international environment requires a lot of charitable reading.

  • I’m instituting a zero-tolerance policy towards public callouts or public shaming. If I cannot find a charitable explanation for it that is not inciting a cyber-mob, one instance of this will get you banned permanently and without recourse. It doesn’t matter if you were “right”.

  • If you are upset by another user’s post, you are never to escalate. Always flag the post, and I’ll intervene. If the user has made a mistake, I will make them amend their post and apologise if necessary.

  • People that have status acquired elsewhere, such as famous designers, have the responsibility to be doubly careful about how they interact—to frame themselves as players, and when issuing suggestions and disagreement to make sure it’s evident that they’re not using their influence to demand things from me. If this is unclear, I will assume the worst and take action.

  • I’m taking the explicit stance of protecting non-natively-English-speaking users’ ability to make mistakes in tone and meaning over the hurt feelings of natively-English-speaking users. The main reason a lot of people that I know don’t participate in English-speaking places is the perception that they have to be perfect with their language or they may be misunderstood. Leave your cultural hegemony at the door.

  • The handshake reaction button is not to be used to vicariously participate in other users’ inappropriate messages without any stake to oneself. It’s a thank you button—if you’re thanking someone that’s escalating, you’re doing it wrong. Therefore, I’m creating the stakes—if you click it under a post that I find to break these policies, I’m going to consider you partially responsible for it as an enabler and take proportional action.

Transparency: Action against users

All of that said, the following action has been taken against users:

  • B.R. has been permanently banned and his account wiped. He’s not welcome here. Here’s what happened.

    • An Italian with not as good proficiency with English as me poorly phrased a reply to B.R.'s post.
    • Every Italian reading this post was aware of what the user meant, because of how words of Latin origin have a wider meaning in Italian and a narrower, haughty, meaning in English.
    • B.R. immediately went from “nice” to “nasty” and set off with a post where he publicly shamed the Italian user for their language. This is the most vitriolic and unnecessary over-reaction I have seen in my history as a moderator of a forum of unruly and hot-tempered Italians.
    • I temporarily closed the thread and set up a private chat between the users to mediate, where the Italian user apologised and offered to amend the post.
    • B.R. proceeded to ignore the chat and go complain about the user and the forum on an external platform.
    • Although he did this very quickly, we only learned about it at the end of the day, and the uncertainty of B.R.'s lack of private acknowledgement of the Italian user’s apology caused enormous stress for multiple people involved, including me and several of the friends from the Italian contingent of the forum.
    • I want to make it very clear that I openly denounce this type of behaviour and I want nothing to do with it.

  • @Deliverator has been suspended for a week for pressing the handshake button on B.R.'s inflammatory post.

  • @Paul_T has done the same as Matt, but he’s been spared as I believe he has done so in good faith and has understood the effect of his action.

  • J.M. has been permenently banned and his account wiped.

    • He introduced himself mainly talking about his games, as well as openly undermining the agenda of this site.
    • He has been mostly posting and commenting under his own thread rather than engaging with the rest of the threads.
    • His politeness level has been inconsistent depending on whether the user he’s talking to agrees with him or not.
    • He opened a thread with a provocative title “Slow Mode: Threat or Menace?” complaining about the slow mode of the site in a way that I am interpreting as a demand. The only way I can interpret the original title—which I changed—is an attempt to make users “rise up” against the slow mode, rather than suggest something.
    • In conclusion, I have come to the conclusion J.M. has brought an external personal agenda (self-promotion) to the site, he’s been acting in bad faith and with a pushy entitled behaviour and he is not welcome.

Final notes

Your feedback underneath is always welcome and I do read it and take it into account.

Please note though that this is not a democracy and the forum agenda is set by me. We’ve been having great success on La Locanda in mutually helping each other by following a similar agenda and I would like to achieve a similar thing in an international context.

As said in the guidelines:

  • The agenda expresses the main goals of this space. Generally, what furthers them is welcome and encouraged, adjacent activities that don’t hinder them are allowed, and whatever hinders them or puts them second to the personal goals of the users is frowned upon.

You’re free to chat and interact as long as that doesn’t undermine the forum agenda.

If you find yourself not aligned with it in irreconcilable ways, you can contact me and I will disable your account amicably, and you’ll be able to return later on if you change your mind and find it interests you.

If you feel the need to announce your departure, or act in any way that undermines the agenda of this project, you’ll be banned without recourse and never welcomed back.

Thanks everyone for listening and I hope this project interests you, and you decide to stay on Wynwerod. Also, if you have friends that are interested, let me know and I will give you an invite link to give them. Let’s get back to talking about play.

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P.S. I’ve cleaned up the offending content, which you can find in the #off-topic section. The site is back to being public, but it’ll stay invite-only for the time being.

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I’ve been asked to clarify by @Paul_T : This is not banning discussion of any specific game, including very popular ones, as long as there is an interest in achieving emergence—which doesn’t even have to be successful.

No-one will be ganged up on for choosing a specific instrument for their endeavors. Someone might disagree that it’s a good one, but it’ll have to be done respectfully.

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@Paul_T gave some private feedback, and I removed the part referring to behaviour in other places. It was excessive and gave the feeling of me running a Gestapo secret police, which is not at all what I intended.

I also rephrased “Anglo-Americans” as “natively-English-speaking users” to avoid making the cultural problem one of nationality.

Other feedback is welcome, here or privately.

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Thanks, Claudio.

As I expressed to you in private, I was concerned by an underlying sense of anger here. Our emotional reactions might be justified at times, but a post like this will and should remain long after the initial circumstances which led to it have passed. It’s not a great thing if the introductory or orienting information for a forum shows ‘the emotions of the moment’, and could prime further conflict for new people arriving. Thanks for addressing this, I appreciate that.

I have some other comments and thoughts for later, but for now I want to highlight this:

I think this is a good and wise guideline. I want to promote it as perhaps the most important or useful bit of guidance here. Honouring this will prevent many issues in the future, so I hope we all remember to heed it. Even if you don’t read anything else, heed this part!

I have seen that Claudio is legitimately very open to criticism - a rare thing - and makes himself available for open discussion on any topics, no matter how contentious. So, yeah, let’s keep communication open and I recommend that any readers with issues reach to Claudio right away: talking, frankly and openly, is good, and will help this community.

Most people are not very good at taking honest, direct feedback. Claudio is! I learned that today. Take advantage of that - he’s serious and he means it, so take the above and consider it ‘rule number one’. He showed me that he will listen and sincerely address any concerns - not just to make a show of it, but for real.

(This is important to me as I don’t like the idea that a forum like this could lean in a very dictatorial or totalitarian direction. I see that Claudio makes very strongly-worded statements on how things should be, as he did here and in the Introductions, which can seem very heavy-handed, but what balances it out is that he is open to discussion and criticism - perhaps less obvious from these posts, but very important and very true. So now it’s up to us to respond in kind.)

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Thanks for being my translator, @Paul_T, and I appreciate the feedback.

In this context, I felt that the newness of the forum and the amount of people that signed up quickly was being taken advantage by some (including influential people) to establish a culture that I didn’t want. This is why the statement is so strongly worded.

I really never did have to ban people or issue statements of this kind on La Locanda.

It’s not a great thing if the introductory or orienting information for a forum shows ‘the emotions of the moment’

You’re right. I’ll integrate this stuff into introductory materials, and we’ll at some point retire this thread. But it stays on the record—otherwise, I wouldn’t be honest with my process.

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I really like the openness spirit your fostering here (not that I’d come to expect differently from you), and in that spirit I’d like to give three suggestions about this general theme.

First of all, I’d move the “moderation log” (the list of moderation actions you’ve compiled here) into its own space. A closed thread or something where the moderation actions are logged independently of the specific incident or other considerations (which could still be hosted on a specific thread without polluting the log).

Second, I’d advise against completely wiping a user as a default “ban” option. Blocking them from posting again is cool, but the complete wipe you’ve employed made navigating the welcome thread pretty difficult, since lots of people there are referencing somebody who is now only known as “anonymous_random_numbers”. Imagine what would happen if you banned someone after they’d been active here for months on end. Maybe you can still do it if the user wants their contributions to the forum erased, but I wouldn’t keep it as the default option because it impacts the future readability of threads.

Third, and this is a real mess:

On the one hand, I totally agree with this. On the other, I remember the good old days of forum wars (not that modern social media drama is much better) and I wouldn’t exactly want to interact here with somebody who actively tries to sabotage this space somewhere else. I think that striking a good balance here (or at least one which can hold as an hard and fast rule - I’m pretty sure you’d know how to act on a case-by-case basis) is gonna be a mess and I wouldn’t fault you if you decided to just not do it, but I also think it’s important to voice this concern as a user.

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Lorenzo, thanks. I’m taking it slow right now as long as the forum is hidden from the public, but I’ll implement both suggestions.

I’ll also be more careful about wiping/anonymising accounts (although they can easily be fixed). I’ve added initials to both wiped accounts to lessen the problem you mentioned.

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I agree, that seems wise. It’s hard for me to see any upside to drastic measures like wiping accounts. It’s confusing for new readers, and doesn’t seem to actually help anyone (as well as being unnecessary extra work for the moderator).

I think we had some good discussions there that I’d like to return to at some point - the relationship map thread was fantastic, for instance.

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I’ll ponder returning the relationship map thread to the main section. I’d like to consider it for a few days and not flip-flop on the decision right now.

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I have some experience as an admin of RPG communities in Portugal and I really sympathize with the effort to foster a specific culture of discussion, especially since this always requires a lot of work from moderators, and that work often gets misinterpreted by some users. Good communication isn’t easy but indeed it’s very important.

For example, in this kind of international forum, people may begin to imagine that Italian users have some special access to its moderation because of a common native language. But in my experience, there’s nothing special going on behind whatever curtains users see, just people who may also have a few disagreements between them trying to find time to make some initiative work. So I agree that it’s useful to reach out with an open mind before escalating to what can be a regrettable conclusion.

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I won’t deny that one of the people involved in the altercation is not only a countryman but a personal friend—however he immediately apologised and offered to fix his mistake, which didn’t warrant any further action on my part. That cannot be said for B.R. (the banned user).

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I’d like to remind everyone - supporting what Claudio has already said, above - to take it slow and carefully regarding immediate reactions to particular words or wording. If something looks challenging or hurtful or unclear, I’d advise everyone to take your time, ask a poster what they mean by a certain word or why they chose it, and then carefully digest the response.

Lots of people here are coming from different cultures or backgrounds and speak different languages, so I think we should be as patient as possible with any possible miscommunications.

So far we’ve had two very, I think, rather overboard reactions to simple word choice - once to the word “unjustified”, which may feel very different in two different languages, and once to the phrase “threat or menace?”, which was likely intended as a humorous nod to Spiderman (e.g. Tile 2 x 2 with Groove with Newspaper 'DAILY BUGLE' and 'SPIDER-MAN THREAT OR MENACE' Pattern : Part 3068bpb1722 | BrickLink ). I think both situations could have been avoided by asking what was meant rather than reacting in the moment.

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I want to address this specifically. As we’ve talked about in private, I agree that the banning of J.M. was an overreaction on my part, due to my misinterpretation of the phrase you quoted.

However—I do truly believe, and all that we clarified in private seems to indicate, that he was not sufficiently aligned with the agenda I set for this forum. And what should have happened was a private conversation with him that would have likely resulted in him leaving. The vibe that I got from him was “how can I use this space for what I want” instead of “how can I contribute to the forum mission” and I do stand by this assessment.

I also think due to his status he has a responsibility with how he interacts in spaces owned by others, especially to make sure people don’t misinterpret his actions as trying to influence the space to his liking—which can be damaging even if he doesn’t mean it. This burden was in my opinion not met.

That’s what I was talking about here in the original post:

In the end, I don’t feel comfortable having a person of his clout potentially influencing Wynwerod during a critical growth phase if he’s not well aligned with the agenda.

You’ve passed my email address on and I’m happy to reverse my decision on J.M. in a less critical time if I establish that no self-promotion agenda for participating exists.

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I just want to say that I appreciate both the transparency of the decision-making process and the communication of the desired direction and vibe of the forum. I also applaud all the openness and willingness to receive feedback that I’ve seen displayed here. Being able to see and understand the process of what is happening eases a lot of anxiety for me, personally. [Edit: I just realized all this comment is doing is trying to footnote my :handshake: reaction. :laughing: ]

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Thanks Rob—I realise that this is uncommon. But there’s no private “moderator” chat here—I’ve had a private chat with a few users, but all of the main arguments are being laid out in this thread. I run La Locanda similarly. I make the executive decisions, but users are expected to give feedback.

In our private conversation @Paul_T mentioned how surprising this approach to dialogue is. He said many people say “feel free to give your feedback” but few mean it. I do mean it.

I’m generally the kind of person that is put at ease by assertive and clear communication and tackling problems directly (even when disagreeing with me), and is angered by evasiveness and conflict-aversion. You can point at neuro-divergence as the cause, but for me it’s personally just the way it is. I find the social dance of circling around problems exhausting. I do realise this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people.

However, I’ve been convinced over several years of running a forum that my type of communication is very conductive to productive intellectual discussions on roleplaying.

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Thanks Claudio. I’m actually surprised by those assumptions “You can point at neuro-divergence as the cause […] I do realize this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people”.

Clear and assertive communication, direct address of potential conflicts and avoiding conflict-aversion are recognized as fundamental group practices in interdisciplinary context in public health and in conflict-resolution literature, among other variables (such as fixing clear goals in collective discussions or actions, etc.).

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I guess I arrived at that conclusion my own way.

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I’m drafting a new announcement that should clarify my positions, ease some of the fears that have been expressed to me in private, and make some guarantees against summary permabans. You can expect it in a few days.