> >
> > 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.

> Fortunately, I did come back, and even went so far as to apologize to Sam for whatever it was I had said that made him kick me. And he didn't even remember doing it! It was, I suppose, a "casual kick" as you've described them, and I eventually got used to that sort of thing. But my experience shows that a "newbie" may not and probably won't interpret a "casual kick" the way it was meant.
>
> Grishny

Well, I have had several times that I was absolutely convinced that everyone hated me, and that I was either misunderstood, or a total jerk.
Twice I "left" RinkWorks and shook off the dust on my feet beacuse of some things. Once I got banned because I was joking about the Oscars (I never liked awards shows, anyway =P , sorry Sam, but I don't =P)

As Sam has said before, ASCII is a terrible way to communicate... despite the /me function and smilies, topic commands, RED text, italics, and all these nifty stuff, we still haven't any visual way of conveying a sarcasic or silly mood.
The closest is the winking or tounge sticking out msiley thingys, but they have many meanings, and people rarely intrupet them right. (I hope people inturpret my "=P" thing as sarcasm/sillyness)

And about the "Ops must uphold what Sam wants" thing... frankly... Sam cannot, and will not, be able to be there all the time for us.

We need a form of "ethical calculus" (to borrow an Alpha Centurai term... I've been playing that game too much) that pretty much the whole chat population agrees upon.

This ruleset, or whatever it would be, would lay out the basic guidlines for Ops and Admins to obey when dealing with various stuff.

It would list the various offenses and the respective punishments (frankly, I don't think "casual kicks" are funny) ...repeat offenses would be punished more severly.

Now, I'm not saying that an op should read off this thing every time something bad happens, but at least attempt to abide by it. If they misjudge, so what, we're all human... except for me, but that's another story. (humor)

Lately, I have found, that the quality of chat has degenerated quite a bit over the last year.

I know that when I first came in, I was teetering on the edge of lamerdom, and maybe threw myself off the edge many times, and caused a bad impression of myself. But I was new to the internet, and the concept of "chatting" and all that stuff. But, eventully, I ended up somewhat half-decent enough to have a semi-serious conversation.

Now, the last two times I was on the chat, the conversation quality was _very_ low.
Some of the stuff I rarely saw on netraptor.org (which is not as moderated as Rinkworks, and NR recently delted her chat, because she had no admistrative power, other than that)

I'm not suggesting we ban all newbies, and make Rinkworks into the snootiest "community" on the internet. Newbies, for the most part, are half-decent creatures... I have actully ran into *good* newbies who spell right and act nice.

Now, I find that (some) ops are a bit, unhelpful, with newbies who ask alota questions... I mean, they're totaly new to this chatroom, and prolly are used to javachats and have no clue on proper RinkEttique (sp?) and such.

When a newbie asks "how do i type blue words?", don't just rush 'em off to the help thing, rather, just tell the newbie that you could type /me, and *then* inform them of the /help command which can anwser all their questions!

If a newbie asks "a/s/l", say something like...
"This isn't AIM, but you can find out what a person wants you to know about them by using the /profile username function".

Newbies don't know better most of the time, most of them come from a very degenerate internet, or have no internet experience prior to RC. After all, we were *all* newbies at one time...

Joe "This really shoudn't offend you" Hedgehog