Do you talk about BooTrib to your friends on other sites? I do–recommend it to all the cool kids. Many distinctive features (see poll below), informed political analysis and debate, plus a friendly, relaxed atmosphere add up to an awesome place to be. And awww-the Booman Tribune was actually named after a shaggy black dog!.
As the site grows, lots of interesting dialogues have popped up about who we are, what we want, where we’re going, and how we can get there together. So, time for a good meta-discussion?
Check out more across the jump.
This is my first BT diary, second in all. So please forgive me if I screw up. We all know what road gets paved by good intentions! I hope that this will be a friendly conversation about comment preferences, company and “just us” manners, how we handle disagreements, and how we see the BooTrib community.
Booman said, “Remember that we are the pioneers here, and we can’t be unrealistic about keeping it so friendly when we grow larger. It’s a goal, but the culture will inevitably change, in some ways we won’t like, and in others that we will love.
The guiding principle is still spelled out in the FAQ under: “If I don’t consider myself a Democrat, am I welcome at the site?” ”
Checking out the FAQ? What an excellent community standard to start with! ::runs off quickly to do it::
constantly worry that they’re going to accidentally troll rate a comment? The wheel on my mouse seems possessed sometimes. If I ever do it to you, promise to confront me immediately, okay? I worry about this waaayyy too much.
I think you can change your ratings. At least, I have over at dKos when I accidentally give a 2 or 3 instead of a 4. đ
I’ve only been at Booman for a few days so I haven’t talked it up much yet. I have linked to it from my blog.
I think its a great way to build the community. After all, I wouldn’t have come over here had it not been for a certain Kossack named eleanora. đ
Hi! I was so grateful to see your reply in this thread, then I forgot to respond!</doofus> I’m so glad you decided to come over here, shetquaker. BooTrib has had a terrific round of activism diaries, all looking for some way we can help others. Your action diaries are a great addition–don’t know how on earth you find the time to track all the stuff on your blog! I’m in awe. đ
Nope, not me.
On making others feel good about themselves.
My first rating was for the sole purpose of getting a smile out of Eleanora, and to see if she was still around and paying attention.
I’m logging off to cook dinner, and didn’t want this to get out of control in my absence. In my presence, bombs away! I’d just hate to log back in, only to discover a petition signed by thousands to ban me from the site (but now I’m just flattering myself).
White flag raised as I head to the kitchen with tongs in hand. đ
on this one, Anomalous. You keel my mojo. Do you have six fingers on one hand?
(Sorry I didn’t respond right away, my boss keeps thinking I should do work or something. Sheesh.)
Thanks for the đ
But must I promise you power too? Inigo, your mojo was merely on life support, and I brought you back!!
Now please go keel Sirocco, because my mojo – eet be gone. And, I donna suppose you could espeed theengs up? đ
Hey, you rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles. Okay, I’ll stop mocking your pain and get on the job.
This thread in no way turned out like I thought it would. Much more fun. đ
was a very good one, and I 1) apologize for my many unnecessary off-topic comments, and 2) appreciate that you immediately wrote the diary as soon as others expressed interest. (It’s evident that you care about the future of this site, and I respect that.)
Tommorrow I’ll contribute some meaningful thoughts, because it’s a worthy subject for anyone who’s genuinely interested in the success of BT (which I am).
Good night, and thanks for being such a good sport. From now on, I’ll make every attempt to be a bit more mature in my posts – it’s just that the nature of the proposal I’m working on is so darn ludicrous for someone of my limited statistical analysis skills, that everything seems surreal for me at the moment and I’ve been stopping over here for comic relief. (And given your proven skills in that line of work, right about now I wish we were buds so I could invite you over to take a look at what I’m trying to accomplish)
Even now I find myself wanting to be bad, so I better log off immediately and get back to work!
is my favorite thing! Thanks for providing the fun. I’m sorry you’re having such a crunch at work. Been there myself lately–we’re working simultaneously on a 5 year department program review and an assessment workshop at my university. Almost over. I’m not a statistics person by any means, just a teacher and grantwriter. But I’d be glad to help any way I could if you’re using Excel and doing charts or something. Or if you just need a sympathetic ear. If you get time, you can e-mail me at megaparsec 7 AT gmail DOT com (remove the spaces.) Get some sleep!
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your kindness. That was really sweet of you. Really.
It’s just me, in my one person consulting practice trying my darndest to win this bid against the big guys. (I wouldn’t have been interested in the work – aside from the income potential – but my competitive nature got the best of me when I discovered that one of my competitors is someone who went out of his way to cause me a great deal of trouble in the past.)
I’ll definitely make note of your e-mail address so I can take this offline, should I reach the point of no return in my struggles.
Thanks again, Eleanora. Your emotional support alone gave me the kick I needed to stay in the game. You’re a real gem. And on that note. . .back to work.
Thanks for starting off the discussion, Eleanor.
What I’d like to see is open, unfettered discussion on a variety of topics, with people not worried about getting a troll rating unless they are an actual troll. I suppose that needs defining as well, unless it has been already.
I’m not especially a Democrat, and not especially interested in politics (horse races and elections and stuff), although I am interested in deep seated change at the local level, in the terms of debate. And also figuring out ways to more effectively use blogs and other online things to work well both on and offline, building community and such. Which will, of course, benefit progressive/democratic candidates in the long run.
I think that once the general tone of the site is set, that it will be easier for it to grow in ways we like, rather than don’t like. Of course, some things are beyond control, but still…
ITA Nanette about no endless rating wars and discussions. Let’s make that a BooTrib tradition! (Oh wait, I forgot about Anomalous.) Never mind.
Anyway, what kind of site activism could we do here? Something we could all work on together–a site petition, link up with someone’s anti-red-corporation campaign, save the whales, fund a candidate, investigate Sean Hannity? Would be fun to find a common goal, set a target, and work on it for awhile. Be nice if it would help Booman with advertising and site hits. We need something that sets us apart from other blogs.
Maybe a targeted campaign to get Quizno’s to stop with the CGI’d baby’s mouth in those commercials? That kid kind of gives me the creeps.
What is that?
I think BooMan has plans for political type stuff, when that season begins (does it ever end?). Supporting candidates and so on. I think I read that somewhere, am not sure where.
I’d be more interested in strategy planning –building the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy ;), but if someone has a cause of some sort, I’d be willing to help out with that as well.
I also think we (blogs collectively… is that commie?) need a sort of cross blog megaphone. We could name it the BooTips by HotTips O’Booliman… đ
(sorry, I just had to get that name in there again. Needed a laugh ;).
I saw you got the go ahead last night and was hoping I would see this diary today.
In response to some of the comments above, yes you can change ratings, anytime you want.
I think it was Nanette who brought up defining a troll, and perhaps that is the first thing we need to do. I’ll start out with my idea:
A troll is a person whose sole purpose of posting comments is to disrupt the conversation. A troll is also someone who attacks the person posting and maybe just attacks rather than discusses.
I have only given out one troll rating ever, so I don’t think too much of using the rating period, but I suppose there are times when the ability is required.
I prefer rating 4’s for comments I especially like, or are informative and I want others to notice.
there are two definitions of trolls in the FAQ. One is a history of the word, the other is Pastor Dan’s definition for dKos.
I don’t know that we need to improve on Dan’s work. But we might reflect that we have slightly more tolerence for non-Democrats here than dKos does.
Still, a troll is a troll.
I’m so sorry I missed this comment. This thread has been hard for me to follow. Of course, Monday and Tuesday have both been crazy busy at work! So my blog time has been really limited. Sign from God–stop and think before you do something new! You’d think I’d have learned that by now, sigh.
ITA with your point about ratings; a strong, simple definition of what merits a trollish post would be very useful in setting a clear community standard. I like PastorDan’s diary and the rating FAQs, but they’re pretty long. A condensed version would be good. Your definition is great!
Ratings are uncomfortable for me. I feel kind of silly judging someone else’s work. Why should anyone particularly care what I think about their post, barring what I say to them in a comment? But I know when I get good ratings, I smile–the grateful recipient of a friendly gesture. So I try to give them that way. And ratings are good for site modding-the Scoop sites are best for keeping out trolls and keeping on target. Thanks for your participation, and I’ll try to do a better job next time!
Well Eleanor, having just gone through a troll rating attack on Dk last night as you can see downthread, for a comment ‘about troll rating’ I have a different view today than yesterday.
First of all after receiving the troll rating I made several comments to the troll rater about etiquette on troll rating as defined by kos. I lost my TU status for that first comment, and then today I find that the troll rating is gone as well as the 1’s replaced by 11 4’s. Didn’t get back TU tho, so that’s kinda bad.
So now I am against troll rating altogether. One person has the power to remove my TU status and that is not right and that for saying ‘why are you troll rating someone’s else comment, for what reason? ‘
So I hope that people will consider that troll rating an opinion that one disagrees with is destructive and when it is applied to someone who is advocating free speech, is is pretty ironic.
I say only have 4’s and go to booman or someone designated (like a site moderator), for any problems with a poster.
I’m sure this will never happen, but that’s how I feel. It really is kind of silly to give this power to people who can then silence us.
What a stressful experience! I’m so sorry that happened to you. I’ve read lots of your posts and never seen you post anything but kind and informative comments, even when provoked. Not easy to do.
Went over there to give you some mojo. Don’t worry about TU status–I think Kos mentioned that he was adjusting the formula to prevent just this kind of problem. You’ll be uprated again in no time. And you got in a positive plug for Booman Tribune on the Open Thread. What a Frogger!
Hey, I just found out you rated me up on DK so thanks a lot for that, and how nice of you and Booman also, to do that.
Gee I guess I should get troll rated over there more often, got me a lot of fours, who would have thought.
Anyways what a wacky world we live in here on the blogs.
My kids cannot understand my passion over this, even though my son blogs on car build-up sites. I Take a lot of teasing over it.
This is probably more a thing for the FAQ, but I think we should have clear definitions of terms… such troll, as discussed above, and diary and all that.
For the longest time (I read for a couple of years at kos before I registered) I thought people put out a “tip jar” for people to send money to the diary writers, via paypal or something. If you are not signed in, you can’t see the ratings systems ;).
Nanette that I didn’t understand tip jar for a long time either on DK. Still don’t get the point too much, I guess it tells you if someone likes your diary.
Also didn’t understand what they were talking about troll rating.
Did you see Kos on Cspan last night, he was very good and explained very well about blogs and what DK and others were doing.
He seems so sweet and young.
Glad I wasn’t the only one, on the tip jars.
No, I didn’t see kos, although I understand there is a webstream of it. It’s good that bloggers are getting more air time, and explanation time. I am not sure what some people think bloggers actually are (although the term does sound a little off putting).
A friend of mine… older woman, democrat and all that, only visits the “mainstream” blogs… talkingpointsmemo, washington monthly, places like that, and who wouldn’t go to kos no matter what I said to her… saw the show last night and was all of a sudden talking about “our” kos, and telling everyone about his educational background, and jobs and such.
I guess some people need to hear that sort of thing to feel comfortable with someone, or some site.
re Kos: He seems so sweet and young
Actually he gets kicked out of movies that have a rating above PG-13……..
Diane, if it makes you feel any better, I actually got a bit sensitive one day because of a discussion on kos concerning trolls. At the time I had been lurking for over two years, I didn’t understand the term “troll”, and I had never seen the term “lurk”. Since trolls are creatures who skulk under bridges, it seemed to fit the concept of lurking. So there I sat, thinking I was a troll.
It concerned me so much, I almost started posting on kos, because I didn’t want to be a troll. (But instead, I spent the next hour looking up Internet terminology, and was relieved to discover I was only a lurker. đ
too crazy about the ratings thing either. I put 4s because it is the thing to do, and I would feel impolite not doing it, but maybe it is just a personal pet peeve, but I don’t think people read enough as it is, and putting little “oh read THIS one” signs on some comments seems too much like encouraging people not to read the other comments.
Comments are interactive, and not every comment is going to be or should necessarily be a thoughful insightful witty and informative treatise.
In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with just posting “well said” or “good point,” or even “bullshit.”
That is just as polite as a 4 and it is more personal, and if you want a community, well…
And yes there is the constraining feature. A troll is not going to be constrained. A troll is going to go IRC and join the #switzerland channel and yell “CHEESE SUCKS” until he gets kicked. He doesn’t care about getting ratings or recommendations.
Regular people, on the other hand, DO feel constrained about saying what they mean and saying it plainly, because someone might give them a 3 or a 1 or something, and there is too much porcine lipstick application going on anyway. I don’t mean here, or message boards in general, it is a society wide phenomenon. A thug paid by the US kicks in a door and murders a family and it’s called a “military operation.” The art of the contrived euphemism has not enjoyed such a heyday since Victorian times, which you are probably too young to remember but may have studied in school, people would say a piano had “limbs” because it would be vulgar to say it had legs, and people ate bosom of chicken because breast was considered too graphic.
People need to be able to say what they think without having to bother about what number someone might assign to their opinion. Let the person disagree with them, let them argue all night, words speak louder than numbers.
This concludes this rant. Thank you all for participating. Samosas and lassi are available in the lobby.
I find the ratings thing distracting too. I sometimes forget to rate, and go back and do it. And rate everyone (or no one) most times, because I don’t want to leave anyone out, and so on ;).
Although sometimes people do read diaries and rate instead of comment, as well. As you say, though, a comment is more personal.
here is my advice on the ratings.
They have two MAIN purposes.
a)people who are frequent visitors, who post comments that are enjoyed, get trusted user status.
which allows
b)people to 0-rate trolls and trollish comments.
That is the main issue, and function of the ratings system.
Beyond that, they can be a distraction, and I recommend not taking them too seriously.
Oh, I don’t take the ratings too seriously… although I was devastated for a time when I got my first 3. I was merely good instead of excellent ;).
I’ll still hand them out and no doubt get them, I’ll just make more of an effort to also comment, is all.
seem to freak people out. Someone said in a Kos thread that “troll” describes a person, whereas the other ratings describe a post. Seems logical and explains why people take it so personally. One good idea someone had was to cut out ratings 1 and 3 as extraneous and just use the others:
Bet it would be a bear to change, though.
4- I trust this user
3- I enjoyed this post
2- Warning! you’re a jerk-off
1- I’d give you a zero, but I’m not a trusted user
0- I am a trusted user, and you should be tossed off the site.
Certainly spice things up, I guess. Everything except rating #3 basically describes/rates the person, rather than the comment, though. 2’s would be especially zesty and full of fun!
Wait, were you kidding? My first thought was Yikes! Danger, Will Robinson!
I’m such a dork when I’m trying to be all grown up at work and still play on the computer. But I could see those ratings being veerrryy tempting to a ouchie-d site mod. Still think the 2 would bring lots of joy! Think of the diaries we’d have, the threads we’d take over. Do it, Booman, do it!
If you weren’t kidding, this comment was written by Anomalous.
Okay – I just learned that I’m unable to change a “1” to a “none” – after trying four times. (So have yourself a free “4”)
Sorry – I’m being overly silly right now. I’ve spent the last week knee deep in statistical analysis in an effort to win a project bid at a Fortune 100 company. (Which is quite laughable because I’m competing against two of the Big 5 accounting firms. It’s also quite likely that you could have whipped up the report in a couple of hours, so I’m kinda jealous of your analytical skills)
Obviously you picked this software because you like the ratings thing (see how I am trying to be polite by not referring to them as “game points” like I usually do!)
And there must be other people who like it too, or you would hear anguished howls with annoying frequency.
But it would be interesting to know how many people like it versus dislike it.
I came for the conspiracy diaries, but I stayed for the pie.
how about trolling diaries? I love the recipes, but any response just exacerbates the situation. After all, if you respond to trolling at all, they’ve caught you! And everyone sees the sudden big traffic in snarky comments and recipes and jokes and chat, so more people wander in to take a look and stay to play. Counterproductive, like the whole family throwing a party whenever a two-year-old has a tantrum.
One book discussion board had a good policy. The first poster in a trolling or hostile thread just posted the comment “No” and went away. Everyone else who came in could either agree by not commenting and leaving too or could stay and argue till a mod shut it down. Left the poor trollish wannabe mourning alone in an empty thread. Would something along those lines work here?
No.
be that way. ::sob::
Hee-hee.
đ
Abstinence does work, but only if people abstain from sex, which is a rather strong human urge, which unconfirmed reports indicate may pre-date even the Reagan administration.
So it is with trolls. If no one co-operates with them, they will go somewhere where they are more welcome and receive more satisfactory responses.
But it is human nature, I think. Even though people know this, they simply will not, or cannot, stick to a policy of non-cooperation and not respond. At all. Even a little bit.
It is ironic, if you look, not just here, too new for many trolls, but on boards in general, all the thoughtful, intelligent posts that are ignored, no replies at all, but let some 14 year old whose parents made bad choices in the area of unsupervised teen computer time roll in and bleat some rubbish, and people are all over it like Ariel Sharon on a buffet table!
Let’s not put those together again. But I agree with the irony of rewarding trolls and ignoring intelligence. Kind of describes our government lately.
The No technique did work on that board, but we were told in no uncertain terms that anyone who posted anything else in a clearly trollish thread would be warned and/or banned. FAQs need to be short and sweet, in words of one syllable so everyone gets the point.
What do you suggest about hostile diaries? I’m hoping that this diary sticks around for awhile to get more ideas, or maybe we can keep the conversation going in an open thread.
one that basically says “this site is so lame, it really sucks, you are all doo-doo heads etc etc etc.” in which case I would just ignore it.
Clearly that is a troll. If someone really thinks the site sucks, etc., it is reasonable to assume that their mouse skills include the “back” and “close” buttons.
I think Little Green Footballs and BlessedCause and StopIslam and Stormfront et al are all really lame sites that suck and are populated by doo doo heads.
So what I do, is I visit other sites. And I’m not alone. Spending one’s online time on sites that one enjoys is pretty basic common sense.
Where the question of a hostile diary gets trickier is if is a diary that expresses an unpopular opinion.
As someone who has a whole boatload of unpopular opinions, I would caution against automatically considering those to be trolls.
I guess if there is any doubt, my advice would be to just ignore it. Don’t argue, don’t flame, just do nothing. If it is a troll, that’s the best thing you can do.
If it is not a troll, but someone sincerely expressing an unpopular opinion, that will just confirm that the opinion is unpopular, but most importantly, your time will not be wasted either trying to change somebody’s mind or encouraging trolls, whatever the situation is đ
I hit ‘post a comment’ when I mean to hit ‘respond to this’.
ITA upopular opinions should be debated passionately but politely, or walked away from.
As for troll diaries, be great if ignoring happened. But even in this nice place, you can see this with 54 comments which resulted in this with 41 comments, some of them mine </regret>. An earlier problem required this. Has to be time-consuming for the mods and stressful for everyone, when we could be talking about how GWB sucks.
DK handles this stuff by posting recipes, which sometimes turns into a party. We could do that too or look for an simple alternative all our own. Or not, of course, Booman’s call.
doesn’t argue with a troll, he troll-rates them out of existence.
This compensates for the unwise user who would rather flame.
As long as a troll is visible he is effective.
However, clever trolls can straddle the line.
We have had at least one here who was a near expert at straddling the line so that he could cry free speech if banned or troll-rated.
Has done everything in his power to exhibit patience, tolerance and flexibility in the face of some unpleasant situations. I’ve respected your moderating of this site, and trust whatever guidelines you choose to put in place. Thus far, you’ve been generous in asking for feedback from visitors. Having said that. . .
I think there will come a time, with the growth of the community, when you’ll need to make a unilateral decision or two, independent of input from others. And when that time comes, I hope you have the support of your visitors, without the need for in-depth explanations on your part.
Make a new box on the side that says “Most Revolting Troll Diaries” and let the people who enjoy feeding them as if they were pet goats at a zoo have at it, and the disinclined can give that section a wide berth!
I never click hidden comments, but I just checked and there are hardly any. Being able to read hidden comments is one of the two benefits listed by Booman of the ratings thing, so in fairness, I suppose there should be more trolls, and troll ratings, and resultant hidden comments, or being able to read them will hardly qualify as a desired feature đ
I posted this comment in the middle of an argument on DK and this is the rating I got, no name of rater, just
‘Zero rating 1, have you ever seen a rating like this one”
http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2005/4/11/21652/1277/100?mode=alone;showrate=1#100
“”Just happened to wander by this page and found this discussion.
I don’t get what you are doing and why? What is the deal here, many agree with RFTR who are liberals, so now this person is to be silenced for espousing his personal view. Just because it does not fall into group think, does it make it irrevelant.
So if I dont agree with your view then should I zero you out and follow you around and zero out everything you say.
Come on!!
And fascist, what’s the deal with that. I have been to this site of RFTR and I found nothing fascist. I personally think you are guilty of ratings abuse as recently defined by Kos.
http://peopleforchange.blogspot.com/
by diane101 on Mon Apr 11th, 2005 at 20:19:43 PDT
[ Parent | Reply to This ]
Others have rated this comment as follows:
Zero Rating: 1
and now I can no longer see hidden comments
The culprit is Greg in TN
did you lose your ability to see hidden comments
I still have mad mojo at dKos. Why?
I lost TU over one comment, is that normal
that you didn’t lose it over that comment.
He adjusted the mojo scale about a week ago and many people lost TU status.
You’ll get it back if you make some comments that get rated.
Here, you need to have at least 10 rated comments for an average of 3.5 or better in the last 30-60 days. I forget whether I have it set at 30 or 60.
I don’t know his settings, but they are similar, and he just made it tougher to be a TU.
Well I haven’t posted there much in awhile and very little after I came to this site, but I am a little miffed over this with Greg. So you can’t even say something reasonable to him without getting a troll. Wow. Crazy goings on over there.
I want to troll rate a comment. I do not believe in troll rating comments.
I am conflicted now. It is BooMan’s fault. He has craftily held out the forbidden grapes of hidden comments.
I am lusting in my heart to do what I spent several minutes last night explaining why no one should do it.
Help me be strong.
Why hold back?
to lean into the strike zone and take one for the home team! Oh, happy day.