On June 07, 2001 at 23:23:45, Brunnen-G wrote:
> > I never, ever thought I'd be in a position to complain about having *too many friends*, and I'm not really complaining, but the other thing is that it stretches your emotions thin. People who are well able to cope with supporting one or two friends through various life crises can falter when faced with twenty worried people, each with their own problems and needs. I'm thinking of Sam more than myself in this context. Each time one of us has needed his care and empathy, he's been there for us, and that kind of emotional investment in such a large group of people takes a toll.
> >

A toll wherein you get to the point of not caring anymore. Yes; exactly. This degree of burnout explains why few people have more than one or two very close friends in real life. Not even professional counsellors can stomach the emotional tidal wave produced by trying to empathize with that many people every day.


> > An aspect of Rinkchat's current decline (which I know I'm guilty of) is a reluctance on the part of ops to take action against idiots. Everybody's happy to kick when some jerk comes into chat and is blatantly offensive, but most of us have been doing nothing to prevent the takeover of sheer stupidity and witless babble. I feel that any chatter who is incapable of contributing to the conversation (or failing that, merely watching it without getting in the way) should not be there. Unless Sam tells me otherwise, I'll be kicking and then banning anybody who talks like Radebur and isn't doing it for humorous purposes. I also have a personal opinion that any op who isn't interested in ACTIVELY maintaining a certain standard in Rinkchat should ask Sam to take them off the op list.
> >

This last point I agree with strenuously, and my concept of "actively maintaining a certain standard on RinkWorks" is something I'll address below. However, I also believe that kicking and banning should not be used in the haphazard fashion that they are now. There are other, more subtle ways to maintain control which, in the long run, are probably more effective at encouraging meaningful dialogue.


> > I'm not capable of holding all the fraying threads together while trying to hold myself together in the middle of it all. I don't have any solutions to this but it needed to be said.
> >
> > Brunnen-"I would also like to say that 'getting back to the good old days of Rinkchat' DOES NOT MEAN endlessly repeating gags which are now a year and half old"G

On June 07, 2001 at 23:49:44, Dave wrote:
> Then tonight, I realized that chat isn't a friggin democracy. It's a dictatorship, and Sam is the Pharoah. So if there are 500 lamers in chat and only six non-lamers, and Sam decrees that the lamers must go, they MUST GO. End of friggin story.
>
> And, as BG says, as ops and admins, we have the responsibility to uphold what SAM wants, not what we want or what we might think is right. So if what Elly was doing was something she felt Sam would have done, she's absolutely in the right, by definition. End of story.
>
> -- Dave

Dave, did you ever hear about the ethical obligation to *higher* responsibility from the Nuremburg Trials? Examine your logic again when you say "we have the responsibility to uphold what SAM wants, not what we want or what we might think is right." What is this -- a hands-off & hold-your-nose policy to partisan politics? Not to put too fine a point on it, but what you are suggesting is unethical. I know that by now you may well be totally fed up, and think that Chat is a fairly trivial thing to devote your time to, or to devote any great effort of personal ideology. But any time you have ANY degree of human interaction and communication, it has to follow certain rules of acceptability -- of finding COMMON GROUND for determining right and wrong -- or the communication will inevitably descend into meaninglessness. This includes one's time spent in Chat. Sam cannot decide what is right and wrong for you all the time, because Sam is not always there at the time. The persons who are op'ing or admin'ing at the time have the obligation to be arbiters of what is appropriate behaviour. These persons must always exercise tact and caution in exercising power. Otherwise, it will just make a bad situation worse and everything will glom into a perpetually simmering resentment between certain Users and Operators, and your time spent in Chat will not be a pleasant experience.

Because circumstances seem to be forcing us to do so, I think the only way we will have peace is if we try to come to some sort of (rough) agreement as to what moderators (ops, etc.) ought to do about troublemakers in Chat. You could regard these guidelines for moderators to be a kind of Rules of Engagement. The guidelines have to be applied consistently, and at core -- I know this may be a stickler -- in the end they have be FAIR. Elsewise there is no earthly reason for any User to respect an op's authority. There are some other aspects I cannot discuss here, but one thing I do want to mention is that in my experience, high-handed Kicking and Banning simply does not work except in the very short term. If an op NEEDS to use these tools, warn repeatedly before doing so. Even if you KNOW a problematic User is not going to listen to you until you do Kick him, you still have to give people the opportunity and choice to be civil.

There is every sign to indicate that what *we* might perceive as a "casual kick" is NOT perceived that way by a large number of people. The degree to which it produces prolonged animosity suggests we ought to rethink the Kicking policy.

The other thing I suggest is that holding entire prolonged conversations in "Dialectese" (like aHcker, etc.) be severely curtailed or banned outright. As Brunnen-G suggests, this kind of joke in Chat has gotten really old really fast. From the beginning it was funny for all of 30 seconds. Operators already have too much to do in following normal conversations and PM communication, and random attacks of Dialectization do not improve matters. It deliberately obscures meaning rather than enhances it. Posting Dialectized text to the Forum, or to a private website, is different because people then have the choice not of NOT reading it if it does make their heads hurt. ;-)

Again, I repeat Travholt's concern that many of our Rinkian inside jokes and gags are indeed part of what makes this place so unique. But because they are so internal, they are also exclusivist. As time goes on and RinkChat evolves, the continual repetitions of some of these jokes are becoming obvious liabilities.

In all things I suggest the old standby of this particular Rule of Engagement: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." So what you'd never like done to yourself, don't do to someone else unless there is an understanding beforehand. When even this is not possible, those who are charged with the responsibility of maintaining conduct should use only the necessary force which causes the least amount of damage. You might find that following these precepts can go a long way to preserving emotional equilibrium, and will help prevent the exhaustion of burnout, exasperation, and of not caring. Clarity of one's purpose in interacting with people tends to reveal the character of the heart.

Wolfspirit