>>32 You are one of the extreme few in which politely telling you actually meant something. You apparently took it to heart, learned a bit, and didn't keep making mistakes repeatedly.
While I understand and am aware that there are people like you - Just as you are aware there are people who tend to need to be cursed out to get them to listen - in the past we've had a majority of the latter and an extreme minority of the former. The result being that we, and I refer to everyone who does this, tailored our default responses from being nice and polite at first to skipping what we found repeatedly did not work and going straight to what did.
Most members who initially started this policy tend to always accompany logical reasoning backing up their tear-down. In some cases, they even just point it out plainly without cursing at all (Insertnamehere would give you an entire wall of text regarding his right to curse and what not), but those instances tend to get overlooked.
What you misunderstand is that "Once again, being polite may not work for a small number of people" has been tested and proven wrong over a year or so of the site's life. The opposite is true - Where people who take politeness and act on it, rather than just ignore and brush it off are indeed the
rarity.
That's just our precedent.
That being said, just as the "respond with shock value" became a growing trend that newer members jumped onto in order to 'help', so too did the "why are you so mean to us?" sentiment become a bandwagon for newer members to join up on whenever they get told off or corrected.
With the exception of Thiamor - Who will bite your head off over shit when trying to help, which is his own little quirk - I haven't seen many aspects of the Moon Warriors actually being cruel to newbies. Incidents like some guy flipping out and going overboard earlier this month weren't just ignored; People stepped in, the same people who get accused generally of being such jerks, and said in no uncertain terms that uncalled for or unjustifed anger simply isn't how this BBS works.
It is entirely possible that perhaps the overhaul of unstoppable idiots who require people to react overtly immediately has stopped - They were in steady supply for over half of a year. Those guys who were what finally drove what used to be a self-moderating community into actually asking Reltair "please give us some mods to deal with this shit".
However, it's a two fold issue. One, the people who joined/were a part of the site when it happened have ingrained habits regarding it - Because it works.
Two, people have seen it as a standard and jumped on it because they assumed it was normal behavior. They don't really get the reasoning behind it, or that it was initially done because it was warranted, or lots of little details like actually including advice or help as to what the person can/should do to not make the mistake again, or where to find the information they're searching for.
Now, it's silly to think that change can't happen. Most of the Moon Warriors who usually get jumped on are, in fact, extremely logical and understanding of things. We've had several threads in the past asking for us to be nicer using the same words provided - And generally, the first 4-5 times, we agreed.
Everyone made an effort to be nicer. To be more polite. To amiably redirect people. Every time we did, spam filled up Main, duplicate threads cropped up everywhere, introductions were in every board... I don't mean "a couple every now and then", I mean that they could literally blot out any relevant or original content on the boards with their mass.
So after repeated acquiescence to be kinder failed, people understandably grew very skeptical.
At which point we started emphasizing the general rule of thumb: Be the change you champion. People started being meaner because they wanted organization - Organization was obtained, people became mean.
If you want people to be nicer, then step up and be nicer and help others yourself. The only requirement to help around the site is to know the basic internet etiquette - And that's not even something that requires experience, most of it is common sense you can pick up on any forum or website. Duplicate threads are bad, put things where they belong, it's just like being offline.
But since people wanted niceness, they were encouraged to step up themselves and be nice while helping. I'll leave out their success rate - Because it's obvious how that turned out - and say that the condition for being nicer was simple.
If you could be nicer perpetually and keep the site organized at the same time, then that was fair indication that being nice would achieve the same results that used to take being mean. Once that was achieved, people would be nicer. It's all about results.
These conditions haven't changed, twentyfloorsabove. Some people will listen to politeness - We all accept this - But most people simply don't. Until this is proven otherwise with the actions of people who care enough about what they want changed to try to change it themselves, then there's most likely going to be very little compromise.
As for the Moon Warriors thing - It's insistent terminology, not an excuse. You make the mistake of believing that most of them happen to be older members... What scale do you judge old on? Many of them became that practically days after joining. Everyone was new at some point. There's really no point in saying "They're just a bunch of meaner old members" when the
majority of these people are in fact fairly new and/or joined in on the first few days of being here.
