You could make the case that it's bullying in the situation where talking about someone behind their back starts convincing everyone to be mean to that person, but the Gutter doesn't really do that so it's a moot point.
Exactly. The days of coordinated attacks are long past, and for the most part gutter members don't leave the gutter.
I'm quoting this because it's one of the most important points of the thread.
Would anyone here consider it not bullying if children at a certain lunch table at school spent their time insulting and making fun of another student as long as that other student didn't find out about it? The gutter is a place for bullying even if not everyone can see it. Why would the administration foster this or reach any sort of compromise on such a matter?
Uhhhhhhh, that post is just somebody failing to define bullying the same way that the majority of people do.
Bullying is a confrontational thing. Bullying is very close to trolling, really. Generally it's more forward.
The gutter is not being closed because it is to blame for all the site's woes. If you think there are problems with other subforums, bring them forward and argue that case with regard to that subforum. Doing so would probably be most effective in a separate thread. If you think that the Gutter as a problem should not be addressed until every single problem is addressed simultaneously, I'm afraid that's not really reasonable.
Please explain how it makes sense to make the gutter a priority while there are bigger problems with the site that are readily visible to any user while nobody would ever have heard of the gutter were it not for threads like this?
I would definitely consider worse that some mods were doing the same thing, commend Kijin and NS for apparently not being a part of it in there, and between this and the Kijin incident have actually come to agree with the calls for Ria to step down, but that in no way excuses such behavior on the Gutter's part, especially if the Gutterites want to think themselves superior to the average user, which is a very common thread among the posts in there and even the posts in here. http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showpost.php?p=8595981&postcount=1429 PhantomS' reply here is a perfect example.
Compare any of my posts that I randomly make in a "let's talk about..." thread to even the best posts in the rumor mill and it's obvious who is more informed between myself and the average poster. Are you honestly defending the quality of posts in the rumor mill? There's nothing elitist about positing that bad things are bad.
I can honestly say that I don't know a person who has ever earned pro points that comes to MTGS. MTGS just doesn't have the stats they want and frankly it isn't a haven for top level theorycrafters and players. Then again, I don't know any pros who post on the official or SCG forums either. I will say that I have noticed that if a person is even semi-professional that they will try to write for Channel Fireball, SCG, Wizards, or even Pojo before coming here. I think the association with the old days of spoilers has tainted the well in that regard.
MTGS is MTG News with different mods and a new owner. We brought all the extra non-Magic baggage with us when we moved and we just have to live with it. I think MTGS could become a major player in the online Magic arena but more time, effort, and possibly money is needed.
I have a few pro points, but I'm mostly just here for the gutter. The problem is that there is no way to have a meaningful discussion with a community this large, especially about something as complex as Magic. It's human nature to want to believe that we're good at everything, but the fact of the matter is that even a lot of players with a reasonable amount of success with the game just aren't that good. It's really hard for most to accept that they struggle with a children's card game.
Now I understand the "well report that surf" argument. But if a gutter member f'd off in the gutter the gutter deals with it. If he does so out side the gutter then; he needs to be reported and dealt with by the staff.
If the staff is shutting down the gutter for the behavior of the members outside the gutter then they to need address every problem on every forum the same way.
How are you going to accomplish this?
neither the staff or the bandwagon gutter haters have addressed this why is the gutter to blame for all the sites woes When IT'S ****ING OBVIOUS the site's non-gutter users are pretty good at making this place a **** hole.
This is a really good point. Very few people have any idea what the gutter is, yet the rest of Salvation has done a very good job of making itself look very bad without the gutter.
The only high profile players that I have heard of posting on Salvation are Patrick Chapin and Sene. No offense to Sene, but he's not exactly super well known. It is unlikely that I would remember how to pronounce his name (and I already sure as heck can't spell it from memory) if it weren't for the fact that he was in a tight race against a friend of mine for ROY nor the fact that I played against him in Nagoya.
I don't have links to the posts at this time, but from what I recall of Chapin's posts on Sally they mostly involve him asserting something intelligent and then being rude to the masses of bad players trying to argue against his well-argued points with arrogant/ignorant nonsense.
Outside of that, I can think of no other high profile player that has anything to do with this site. Further, every good player that I know will ask why I insist on punishing myself by frequenting Salvation any time I mention a thread that interested me (for whatever reason, usually mind-boggling stupidity to be entirely honest- examples include horribly misinformed and wrong opinions that pop up in threads about decks that I like, such as the current Tempo Thresh thread... which is just... awful) to them.
Salvation isn't known for being a golden community that harbors intelligent discussion. As I said earlier in this thread, for the most part Salvation is best known for consolidating spoilers better than other sites. Heck, with the way sets are spoiled these days StarCity isn't even very far behind Sally with preorders, so even this might be something that soon becomes a thing of the past (though it is true that currently spoiler season still drives a quite a bit of traffic, even if this traffic is people coming in to spam the rumor mill, traffic is still a good thing I guess).
Anyway, the overarching point is that Salvation already doesn't have a very good reputation for things that happen out in the open.
This. The people that actually know about the Gutter and its existence are in the 1%. The Gutter themselves is like the 0.002%.
OWS lingo aside, the vast majority of people that visit this site either don't know about the Gutter or don't care about it because they don't discuss or come to the CI subforum. Every time a Gutter dramabomb goes off, it's always the same 15-20 people out of 100,000+ members posting here.
There is nothing more important than quantity. That's why absolutely everybody loves posting in the rumor mill.
1) The gutter has not put forward a comprehensive argument rebutting the assertion that the gutter spills over into the main forums. And why we should treat spillage as isolated incidents when it keeps happening and the mere existence of the gutter lends itself to such outbursts.
The most recent "spilling" of the gutter into the main forums, IIRC, have been this thread and the previous attempt at closing the gutter. BOTH were provoked by the staff, which is just a fact.
Now, this is not to say that members of the gutter have not been guilty of "spilling" into the main forums in the past. For example, the incident at woopaleen's help desk comes to mind. The thing about that though, was that woop was just plain moderating poorly. IIRC, the entire incident stemmed from an infraction that I received for something that I had never received a warning for because woop determined that I, being a member of the gutter, deserved no such warning. The infraction was ultimately reversed because, as I said, it was a bad infraction, and all complaints against woop were legitimate.
I did not read much of kijin's resignation thread, but this was apparently another "gutter" issue... though it really had nothing to do with the gutter either. Kijin had legitimately strong feelings on the matter to call any of that trolling would be patently false.
For the most part, the public gutter displays have been instances from the distant past that many current gutter members weren't even around for. For the most part we just want to be left alone these days.
2) Gutter oversight being doomed to fail and also lend itself towards negative impact in the community.
Could you explain how gutter oversight is doomed to fail? Is the argument that mods can be gutterbanned? Because nobody is gutterbanned if they don't make awful posts. If they can just lurk or actually contribute well to the gutter then there is no problem with this. It really shouldn't be too hard for moderators to understand that they only get gutterbanned because they make posts that make our eyes bleed in the gutter.
The best example I can think of was nai's stay in the gutter. From his first post it was very obvious that he wanted to post whatever garbage he wanted that nobody in the gutter wanted to talk to him about. Rather than stopping posting he continued to troll the gutter with his nonsense. It shouldn't be that hard to realize when you don't fit in.
Now, I'm going to ask this and I only want an answer from people that actually have any power to make decisions- Where do we stand on working towards a compromise here? Good suggestions that I have seen involved not allowing any new members into the gutter and promoting a new gutter staff that don't have a negative history with the current administration. I'm sure I missed plenty of good ideas because, frankly, this thread is filled with a lot of useless posts, so if ideas for a compromise could be reiterated and people posting nonsense could stop that would be great.
The closing of the gutter specifically isn't the issue here. It's a symptom of a much bigger problem. If three people can decide what part of this site stays and goes, it stops being a community.
Thank you for this. I find it comical that one of the arguments against the gutter is that it's such a small community when the reason it's being closed is that, like, three people decided to close it.
To everyone saying that gutter members want to be treated differently than other forums: How can you possibly reach this conclusion? The gutter is open for anybody 18+ to join, and we're only exclusive in so much as that only people that can fit in the environment end up staying... So what's wrong with booting people that don't fit in? That's more or less the same standard that the rest of the forum has- if you don't follow rules you get banned.
Sure, the rules in the gutter are different- but why should this matter? It's essentially just a humor subsection. Imagine having a humor section with censorship. It wouldn't be very funny. In fact, it would be awful. The rules are different in the gutter because it's essential for the gutter to have the positive and fun atmosphere of the gutter. Same as the rules are different in rules q&a as the rules are different in market street cafe.
If you counted person for person, no. If you counted the loudest most dramatic, yes.
Okay, so what we can glean from your post is that loud and dramatic people are loud and dramatic.
There are a lot of differing viewpoints expressed in this thread beyond those of the loud and dramatic. It is extremely unfair that to say that everybody defending the gutter is witch hunting the staff and/or is doing so to stir up trouble. I love the gutter. I don't know anything about rianalnn. So little, that I'm almost positive I'm spelling his username incorrectly. I just want the gutter. I'm not alone either.
How was most of that thread not things being pulled up from the gutter to discredit or personally attack others? From what I remember, the whole thread was basically that.
You'll have to pull up specific examples, but I have no intention on reading that monster of a thread, and to my knowledge I never contributed to it. My knowledge of what exploded there was kijin's legitimate dissatisfaction with something that happened externally to the gutter. I'd like to think that I'm currently one of the more prominent gutter members and that incident certainly had nothing to do with anything happening with posts I read in the gutter. The incident was referenced in the gutter to be sure, but it was strictly commentary that was referential in the opposite direction that you seem to be suggesting.
But really, you guys seem to hate this forum, and the staff. Why not just move your little club that "isn't really a big part of the forums" (that is a paraphrase but you get what i mean) to somewhere else? It's not like, in 2012, it's hard to be a member of two different forums.
I don't think I know nearly enough about the staff to hate them. Any staff members that I've had much interaction with have since been de-staffed.
I certainly don't hate this forum. Of course, to be fair the gutter represents a lot of what this forum means to me. The freedom allowed by the gutter is something that is very enjoyable for me. While the rest of the forum isn't nearly as important to me as the gutter it's not as if I never post there and it's not as if I venture out to troll people because I'm a gutterite and I'm the devil. I'd like to believe that I make valuable contributions.
How is this thread still alive? Little progress has been made and the Gutter is still being closed. Is there a point to discussing the matter further in CI? I could see this continuing on a help desk or via PM's but this thread has gotten all the attention its likely to get from the forum at large. More people are looking at M13 threads in the Rumor Mill than in this thread and that says a great deal about its overall relevance.
This post is neither constructive nor well thought out. For starters, the rumor mill tends to get an insane amount of traffic. Often times I've had a page or multiple pages of comments fill into a thread while trying to make a post in the rumor mill, so I have no idea what you're driving at with that comparison.
This thread has been doing anything but dying down. If you've actually been watching the thread it has indeed been evolving and a lot of different perspectives are emerging. Is it falling on deaf ears? Perhaps, but many would like to think/hope not.
People yelled about mods not being here to answer their questions but naturally they were busy...you know...moderating their assigned forums. I have to say thank you to any mods or admins who have taken time out of their duties to come here and try to get their point across. If I were in leadership I wouldn't have put up with the level of rudeness, sarcasm, and self-servingness displayed here today.
And has already been said, it is completely unfair to treat this thread as an isolated incident. It is the sum of many things. Yes, some things were posted that should not have been and punishments have been issued. This has nothing to do with the merits of this thread. There are still plenty of people having level-headed discussion.
Infractions and warning would have been handed out and I would have selected the more reasonable parties to participate in a private discussion of this very topic. But luckily I'm not in leadership so the fun continues.
Frankly there are too many people involved for that to be a reasonable outcome.
If you don't care for this thread then why post in it?
So that whole Kijin thing had absolutely nothing to do with **** from the gutter being dragged onto the main boards? That's what I got from it.
I don't see what that had to do with the gutter. My understanding was something happened in RLA that kijin took issue with and that was kijin's deal. Didn't really have anything to do with the gutter.
I don't even care about this whole thing but you do understand the Gutter isn't self-contained? You can't make the argument that "if you don't like it don't join" when Gutter members do nothing but air their grievances and whine on the main boards now.
This is just so, very, very wrong. Most members have only ever heard of the gutter because of CI threads that pop up because the gutter is being unfairly closed down. This is hardly the gutter failing to contain itself. Personally I don't care about what happens on the rest of salvation so long as the gutter is here. For the most part I check the gutter and spoilers, with occasional posts in other places, but it's not as if I'm flaming people on the main boards.
Sure, there are some members who do, but they would do this with or without the gutter. Madding in particular has been suspended multiple times and that's exactly what happens when gutter members treat the rest of salvation like the gutter- THEY GET SUSPENDED OR BANNED!
I would bet dollars to donuts that most flaming warnings on sally come from non-gutter members. Sure, it's true that there are fewer of us than of others, but the thing is we know the score. This year the gutter has been incredibly tame because we know we're on thin ice and I see no reason why this behavior wouldn't have continued indefinitely but then the staff came and kicked down our door and things got unpleasant.
We know the boundaries and if we cross a line we get punished, and we had this happy little balance until we were up and told to **** off.
As someone who was a member then quickly banned, during my lurk I saw nothing that justifies it's shutting down. Anyone who has lurked there or posted there would see this as out of left field.
Now, this is really interesting to me, because Philonous experience in the gutter is an example of the type of behavior that this motion is supposed to stop. He came, he posted, was told to stop posting, kept posting and was banned.
However, you'll note that he has no problem with the existence of the gutter.
Why?
Because it's not a big deal. Most people who have ever been in the gutter have an understanding of the satirical nature of what goes on there and/or don't care that they didn't fit in.
Exactly. The days of coordinated attacks are long past, and for the most part gutter members don't leave the gutter.
Uhhhhhhh, that post is just somebody failing to define bullying the same way that the majority of people do.
Bullying is a confrontational thing. Bullying is very close to trolling, really. Generally it's more forward.
Gossiping is not bullying.
Please explain how it makes sense to make the gutter a priority while there are bigger problems with the site that are readily visible to any user while nobody would ever have heard of the gutter were it not for threads like this?
Compare any of my posts that I randomly make in a "let's talk about..." thread to even the best posts in the rumor mill and it's obvious who is more informed between myself and the average poster. Are you honestly defending the quality of posts in the rumor mill? There's nothing elitist about positing that bad things are bad.
/hypocrisy
I have a few pro points, but I'm mostly just here for the gutter. The problem is that there is no way to have a meaningful discussion with a community this large, especially about something as complex as Magic. It's human nature to want to believe that we're good at everything, but the fact of the matter is that even a lot of players with a reasonable amount of success with the game just aren't that good. It's really hard for most to accept that they struggle with a children's card game.
This is a really good point. Very few people have any idea what the gutter is, yet the rest of Salvation has done a very good job of making itself look very bad without the gutter.
The only high profile players that I have heard of posting on Salvation are Patrick Chapin and Sene. No offense to Sene, but he's not exactly super well known. It is unlikely that I would remember how to pronounce his name (and I already sure as heck can't spell it from memory) if it weren't for the fact that he was in a tight race against a friend of mine for ROY nor the fact that I played against him in Nagoya.
I don't have links to the posts at this time, but from what I recall of Chapin's posts on Sally they mostly involve him asserting something intelligent and then being rude to the masses of bad players trying to argue against his well-argued points with arrogant/ignorant nonsense.
Outside of that, I can think of no other high profile player that has anything to do with this site. Further, every good player that I know will ask why I insist on punishing myself by frequenting Salvation any time I mention a thread that interested me (for whatever reason, usually mind-boggling stupidity to be entirely honest- examples include horribly misinformed and wrong opinions that pop up in threads about decks that I like, such as the current Tempo Thresh thread... which is just... awful) to them.
Salvation isn't known for being a golden community that harbors intelligent discussion. As I said earlier in this thread, for the most part Salvation is best known for consolidating spoilers better than other sites. Heck, with the way sets are spoiled these days StarCity isn't even very far behind Sally with preorders, so even this might be something that soon becomes a thing of the past (though it is true that currently spoiler season still drives a quite a bit of traffic, even if this traffic is people coming in to spam the rumor mill, traffic is still a good thing I guess).
Anyway, the overarching point is that Salvation already doesn't have a very good reputation for things that happen out in the open.
There is nothing more important than quantity. That's why absolutely everybody loves posting in the rumor mill.
The most recent "spilling" of the gutter into the main forums, IIRC, have been this thread and the previous attempt at closing the gutter. BOTH were provoked by the staff, which is just a fact.
Now, this is not to say that members of the gutter have not been guilty of "spilling" into the main forums in the past. For example, the incident at woopaleen's help desk comes to mind. The thing about that though, was that woop was just plain moderating poorly. IIRC, the entire incident stemmed from an infraction that I received for something that I had never received a warning for because woop determined that I, being a member of the gutter, deserved no such warning. The infraction was ultimately reversed because, as I said, it was a bad infraction, and all complaints against woop were legitimate.
I did not read much of kijin's resignation thread, but this was apparently another "gutter" issue... though it really had nothing to do with the gutter either. Kijin had legitimately strong feelings on the matter to call any of that trolling would be patently false.
For the most part, the public gutter displays have been instances from the distant past that many current gutter members weren't even around for. For the most part we just want to be left alone these days.
Could you explain how gutter oversight is doomed to fail? Is the argument that mods can be gutterbanned? Because nobody is gutterbanned if they don't make awful posts. If they can just lurk or actually contribute well to the gutter then there is no problem with this. It really shouldn't be too hard for moderators to understand that they only get gutterbanned because they make posts that make our eyes bleed in the gutter.
The best example I can think of was nai's stay in the gutter. From his first post it was very obvious that he wanted to post whatever garbage he wanted that nobody in the gutter wanted to talk to him about. Rather than stopping posting he continued to troll the gutter with his nonsense. It shouldn't be that hard to realize when you don't fit in.
Now, I'm going to ask this and I only want an answer from people that actually have any power to make decisions- Where do we stand on working towards a compromise here? Good suggestions that I have seen involved not allowing any new members into the gutter and promoting a new gutter staff that don't have a negative history with the current administration. I'm sure I missed plenty of good ideas because, frankly, this thread is filled with a lot of useless posts, so if ideas for a compromise could be reiterated and people posting nonsense could stop that would be great.
Thank you for this. I find it comical that one of the arguments against the gutter is that it's such a small community when the reason it's being closed is that, like, three people decided to close it.
To everyone saying that gutter members want to be treated differently than other forums: How can you possibly reach this conclusion? The gutter is open for anybody 18+ to join, and we're only exclusive in so much as that only people that can fit in the environment end up staying... So what's wrong with booting people that don't fit in? That's more or less the same standard that the rest of the forum has- if you don't follow rules you get banned.
Sure, the rules in the gutter are different- but why should this matter? It's essentially just a humor subsection. Imagine having a humor section with censorship. It wouldn't be very funny. In fact, it would be awful. The rules are different in the gutter because it's essential for the gutter to have the positive and fun atmosphere of the gutter. Same as the rules are different in rules q&a as the rules are different in market street cafe.
Okay, so what we can glean from your post is that loud and dramatic people are loud and dramatic.
There are a lot of differing viewpoints expressed in this thread beyond those of the loud and dramatic. It is extremely unfair that to say that everybody defending the gutter is witch hunting the staff and/or is doing so to stir up trouble. I love the gutter. I don't know anything about rianalnn. So little, that I'm almost positive I'm spelling his username incorrectly. I just want the gutter. I'm not alone either.
They are most certainly not the same. Similar, sure. But not the same.
You'll have to pull up specific examples, but I have no intention on reading that monster of a thread, and to my knowledge I never contributed to it. My knowledge of what exploded there was kijin's legitimate dissatisfaction with something that happened externally to the gutter. I'd like to think that I'm currently one of the more prominent gutter members and that incident certainly had nothing to do with anything happening with posts I read in the gutter. The incident was referenced in the gutter to be sure, but it was strictly commentary that was referential in the opposite direction that you seem to be suggesting.
I don't think I know nearly enough about the staff to hate them. Any staff members that I've had much interaction with have since been de-staffed.
I certainly don't hate this forum. Of course, to be fair the gutter represents a lot of what this forum means to me. The freedom allowed by the gutter is something that is very enjoyable for me. While the rest of the forum isn't nearly as important to me as the gutter it's not as if I never post there and it's not as if I venture out to troll people because I'm a gutterite and I'm the devil. I'd like to believe that I make valuable contributions.
This post is neither constructive nor well thought out. For starters, the rumor mill tends to get an insane amount of traffic. Often times I've had a page or multiple pages of comments fill into a thread while trying to make a post in the rumor mill, so I have no idea what you're driving at with that comparison.
This thread has been doing anything but dying down. If you've actually been watching the thread it has indeed been evolving and a lot of different perspectives are emerging. Is it falling on deaf ears? Perhaps, but many would like to think/hope not.
And has already been said, it is completely unfair to treat this thread as an isolated incident. It is the sum of many things. Yes, some things were posted that should not have been and punishments have been issued. This has nothing to do with the merits of this thread. There are still plenty of people having level-headed discussion.
Frankly there are too many people involved for that to be a reasonable outcome.
If you don't care for this thread then why post in it?
I don't see what that had to do with the gutter. My understanding was something happened in RLA that kijin took issue with and that was kijin's deal. Didn't really have anything to do with the gutter.
This is just so, very, very wrong. Most members have only ever heard of the gutter because of CI threads that pop up because the gutter is being unfairly closed down. This is hardly the gutter failing to contain itself. Personally I don't care about what happens on the rest of salvation so long as the gutter is here. For the most part I check the gutter and spoilers, with occasional posts in other places, but it's not as if I'm flaming people on the main boards.
Sure, there are some members who do, but they would do this with or without the gutter. Madding in particular has been suspended multiple times and that's exactly what happens when gutter members treat the rest of salvation like the gutter- THEY GET SUSPENDED OR BANNED!
I would bet dollars to donuts that most flaming warnings on sally come from non-gutter members. Sure, it's true that there are fewer of us than of others, but the thing is we know the score. This year the gutter has been incredibly tame because we know we're on thin ice and I see no reason why this behavior wouldn't have continued indefinitely but then the staff came and kicked down our door and things got unpleasant.
We know the boundaries and if we cross a line we get punished, and we had this happy little balance until we were up and told to **** off.
Now, this is really interesting to me, because Philonous experience in the gutter is an example of the type of behavior that this motion is supposed to stop. He came, he posted, was told to stop posting, kept posting and was banned.
However, you'll note that he has no problem with the existence of the gutter.
Why?
Because it's not a big deal. Most people who have ever been in the gutter have an understanding of the satirical nature of what goes on there and/or don't care that they didn't fit in.