I don't currently have access to my map of Stardock's close to 350 unique forums that due to duplication are accessible as over 750 forums spread over Stardock's 12 seperate forum sites. Actually I'm sure these numbers have increased since at the time I made my map the Elemental site (the 12th) did not yet exist. The reason I have never published this data is that it's enough data to choke a horse and there's no clean way to make logical sense of it all.
Off the top of my head the forum that is accessible from the most sites (other than the Impulse forum that seems to draw a disproportionate share of moderation) is the Personal Computing forum, but even that isn't universal. In all reality it's very difficult to know how the source of your audience varies from one forum to the next.
I know you've been a proponent of OFT for sometime now and to be honest I have relaxed my previous stance and have even come to appreciate it somewhat, it's just that I have difficulty understanding why some folks feel that anyone that holds a contrary opinion is an idiot and therefore a legitimate target of abuse. Although I do think that some beliefs are so heinous (a la Nazi apologists) that they indeed *are* legitimate targets of abuse.
Ah ... double post due to page boundry crossing.
Thanks for the correction, Mumble. I only root around GC2 and Elemental and was mis-remembering from your earlier sprawl analysis.
Joe User pretty much scared me away the few times I've scanned it--I like amiable disagreements, not ferocious ones. Guess that might make my "Free the OT" position just some unconscious form of cowardice or something.
On the other hand if your opinions are generally to the right of Ann Coulter and you enjoy swearing at and otherwise abusing the occasional liberal that’s stupid enough to wander in and stay for any noticeable period of time then this is the place for you. You certainly have no need to be concerned about your language or trollish behavior, heck those things will just make you fit in better. However you still must be concerned that you not say the wrong thing to the wrong person or as my God-Mother used to tell me your ass will be out of there “so fast your head will spin” (not quite sure what this means, I never was brave enough to press the issue and find out).
So the point of a forum is to always be friendly? How boring.While I usually consider rudenes to be when attacking the arguer instead of staying with the argument.It is not a good tactic anyways.
I tend to be centrist. What I resent to no end in other moderated forums is when the moderator staff treats members differently based on whether their viewpoints are the prevailing opinion or not. For example, they may have a "no flaming" rule that applies not just to other members, but to famous people. Yet if you cuss out Saddam Hussein or Amahdinejad until your fingers get tired, nothing happens at all. You flame Bush, though, you get censored. Or even better is if you get a private mail from a mod with your own special rule they made, just for you.
Um, yeah. I'm not on those forums anymore. Although I haven't particularly tried Joe User, either.
I'd guess that I would never care to associate with 50% of the people I meet in real life, I can't imagine why the internet would be any different. Life's too short to waste on arguments with people whose viewpoint is diametrically opposed to yours, particularly when they won't even listen to your arguments in the first place.
But there are those that enjoy confrontation. I tend to suspect that such folks are most likely cowards in real life that compensate for it in the anonymity of the internet but whatever, to each his own. It’s no skin off my neck.
Ann Coulter...thats the guy on Full House, right?
Why was this post resurrected?
It's a sticky. In any case guys, if you want to discuss the OTF policy here, that's fine, but keep it on-topic (yeah, off topic forum... it's the rules thread, live with it).
Um I was bored?
Is there a link somewhere to a general Terms of Service or Forum Rules for the site as a whole? I couldn't find one.
http://forums.demigodthegame.com/https://forums.elementalgame.com/https://forums.galciv2.com/https://forums.joeuser.com/https://forums.politicalmachine.com/https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/https://forums.stardock.com/https://forums.wincustomize.com/As far as answering your question https://www.joeuser.com/terms is the only thing that I could find.
As to the original intent of this sticky thread, which was the attempt to keep contentious threads off of Stardock's game related sites and keep them limited to a site with a more adult community, that point is now moot.
This Off Topic forum i.e. https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/412 is now accessible from the Joe User site. I'm not sure when it happened because as of a few months ago this forum was only accessible from the Demigod, Galciv2, Impulsedriven, Sins and Stardock sites.
Anyway since this forum is now accessible on Joe User there is no point in moving any contentious subjects to Joe User since you're already there. That means the assumption that your language should be suitable for a 13 year old game site participant no longer applies. Feel free to swear like a longshoreman, many prominent JU members do. Just do be careful that you not say the wrong thing to the wrong person.
This is like NTFS hard links. I hate them too. I'd like to think that because the banner I'm posting under says Elemental, I'm posting on that forum. What was the giant win for implementing this nexus of confusion?
Personally I can understand and partially agree with this argument but I do think there are a few flies in the ointment. First off most of the sites have a specific purpose. People that go to a specific site go there for that purpose and significant amount of "Off Topic" discussion dilutes the benefit of the site. Also as has been noted these types of topics tend to generate some amount of grief and can tend to scare off new users.
However, you could also argue that someone that plays Sins might be interested in Elemental, Demigod and GalCiv2 and so some amount of "cross posting" is both beneficial as well as good advertising.
All in all the mixing of the forums have significantly changed the dynamics of the site that I visit most (galciv2) and in my opinion the changes have not been for the better.
From Stardock's point of view perhaps the commonality makes supporting them easier, I'm not sure. In any case this has been discussed and it's doubtful that this will change and the likelihood is that there will be more sharing in the future rather than less.
Given all this I think most folks accept the situation, it's not like there's anything we can do about it. The one thing that I think would be very helpful is if the poster's site was known for each reply. At least then you would have some idea as to the context of someone's reply.
I'm also pretty sure that it's not really necessary to have close to 400 unique forums duplicated across sites at different levels of the hierarchy on each site. A pruning of the forums along with a published map of them would go a long way to helping folks make sense of the system. Otherwise you really don't have a clue.
It'd also help some guidance/warnings could be given when directing people over to the JU site - for example I assumed that since it was a site for political, religious and inflammatory threads, that it would be acceptable to engage in debate with people who posted there (including Brad [Draginol/Frogboy] and other stardock employees), providing of course that I used common sense and didn't attack or insult such people, especially since even when checking the hard to find terms of service I couldn't find anything saying that this wasn't acceptable. Instead I've found out that I've been placing my galactic civilizations account at risk of a ban from engaging in such political debate, while other people who have kept to the gal civ forums to post political/religious/inflammatory threads don't appear to have. So just to warn anyone else who makes the same mistake as I did: Don't go to JU, and if you do, as Mumblefratz said, be careful that you not say the wrong thing to (or even around) the wrong person.
Awww man and I was just gonna go and say some crap about MACS on the MAc thread cause Macs suck.
....................Welcome.................... to THe Beginning.......................................
This policy is out of date because this *is* Joe User.
How can you tell people to "take it to Joe User" when they're already there?
I suppose that you could say, take political discussion to the specifically defined political categories on Joe User that at the moment don't happen to be shared with most of the game sites (political machine excluded of course).
You could also say, take religious discussion to the specifically defined religion category on Joe User that at the moment doesn't happen to be shared with any of the game sites.
However there really is no specific place for inflammatory threads so why would this Off-topic forum that exists on Joe User be out of bounds?
Of course I'm primarily playing devil's advocate here, but it does seem disingenuous to say "take it to Joe User" when you're already there.
Ha ha... well they have been messing with forum code recently...
but... the link in the first post still works... so... meh.
JU has a *lot* of categories. Chances are whatever topic someone has come up with that's going to draw the sort of behavior we don't want on the games forums, it has a place on JU.
Failing that, I'll just have to resort to telling people to get off my lawn
[post-lock comment removed] (Newest feature)
Yep, that's what happens when we reply for nothing -- has everything been somehow transfered to "JoeUser" ?
Cuz, i went in only 16 minutes after the Lock, in the Games forum. And even more members could post after this!
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