Expand dumbworld

I think in the new subforum the concentration of stuff that could violate tos would be slightly higher than what can happen now, it's like in bathrooms with signs "pls dont piss on the floor" vs bathrooms without these signs.

From what I've seen so far on the forums, hot discussions happen in threads hardly related to doom, almost never or never happen in the db project threads. I feel that it's quite easy to predict if a thread contains stuff that might be offensive or it doesn't. Just avoid what you might not like, that should be enough

You know, I was expecting something like this to happen, can't say I'm surprised.
Oh well!

This is some great stuff, in my younger years would have loved to go to a rave of this. A bit dark with a dreamy/spacey atmosphere to it, having said it like that, it might seem it wouldnt work but actually creates a quite an unique mood to it, perfect for zoneing out it to, getting away from your problems, but with a slight undertone of still being aware of the problems, but in a way you still deal with the problems through the music. And after doing some research I also why I like it so much, Salem's early stuff was a precursor to cloudrap and early soundcloud rap (bones/seshollowaterboyz not the mumble rap bs). And it also reminded me a bit of a darker version of nuages - closer. It sounded familiar to me, now I know why.


I also forgot to respond to this. Fucking shit the promotion was just garbage and just left you with more bullshit, hopefully the new job you will be looking at will be something positive.

For me its not about not seeing the reaction. More there should be real consequences otherwise why change ones behaviour if there are no consequences. Ofc I dont want somebody to be immediatly banned after they went too far, thats why the time-out were mentioned. You could do like a 3-strike system and every time out to be longer than the previous one. But after a certain point you just need to cut out the cancer. Maybe the time-out could be on dumbworld, so they can still dm people, but then again what good would it be for 1 person to be timed out, being by himself on dumbworld and just create threads only he can respond to because he is the only one on dumbworld. And preemptively putting people in dumbworld just wouldnt work because of the things said by stodgy.

Let's look at a little

1) Ancient History

and see if anyone can learn anything from it.

I've been around this community for a long time. You could take any four members from this forum and add their years of service together: I'd bet money that I've been around for longer.

During this time I've been an active participant in at least six doom forums: the old green legacy boards (circa 1998?), newdoom, doomcenter, doomworld, the Vets, and DB.

I've seen a lot of shit. And I've seen the sort of shit moderating decisions that killed these boards.

Legacy died when they switched hosts to newdoom. We were assured that the boards would continue to operate away from the newdoom umbrella, but that, of course, turned out to be bullshit. Wmull (retard) was attempting to create a competing empire, something akin to Planet(insert game here), with a stable of forums for various Raven and FPS titles. Of course, being a retard, he struggled to actually populate his forum with living bodies, so he sniped other boards with offers to host their projects, then closed down their respective forums to force people to use his butt-ugly monkey-coded website.

Some people went along with it. I was young, but I still railed (with little elocution) against Hurdler's decision to close down the legacy boards. It was, I claimed, a mistake. Ultimately I was proved correct, because – as will become a fucking chorus over the course of this dissertation – darknation is always right.

I moved over to newdoom, because most of my friends went there – a few filtered over to doomworld, which was basically a Something Awful satellite site at that point. And problems immediately became apparent, because SA was in the midst of one of its periodic troll wars, and people were getting banned for Reasons of Utmost Faggotry. These people would then filter over to doomworld, only to be instantly banned (Ling was SA – I don't know if he was a mod, but he certainly wrote a few articles for them), and then they moved to newdoom.

This meant that SA's least successful trolls washed up with the old legacy crew, who didn't much like the look of what they saw, and we immediately decided to kill each other. And – because doomworld banned them – there was a lot of antagonism and shit-flinging between ND and DW.

The participants in these wars are, I suppose, unimportant. I suspect at least half of them were King ReOL puppeteering various accounts in an attempt to make himself look like he had friends. He was, at last, banned by wmull – by this point I had set myself up as his retarded attack dog, and I pretty much baited ReOL into suiciding his account. I photocopied my own asshole, with derogatory remarks written in marker pen about ReOL's mother on both butt-cheeks, and mailed it to him. it caused him to finally shit himself so hard (psychologically speaking) that wmull had no choice other than to ban him.

For the good of the forum, of course.

At this point things were getting fucky for wmull, financially speaking. His only useful website was newdoom, because he had a habit of backing the wrong horses; the other games he decided to focus on died on release or simply had no active userbase. I forget the reasons, but there was talk of pay-gating the website, or some such asinine motherfuckery, and the userbase rebelled. I, especially, rebelled, mostly because without ReOL I had nothing to do other than bite the hand that fed me.

So I called wmull a faggot and lolled out of there.

That, I think, was the *actual* day newdoom died. A few people stayed: Doomdude and a few others, but the exodus ruined what little traffic and engagement the site had. The forum would, of course, finally meet it's demise when deathz0r & the #doom crew figured out wmull's admin password (PASSWORD1 or some fucking thing like that – he really was a retard) and used his admin privileges to burn his stupid website to the fucking ground.

That one was *not* my fault. I wasn't anywhere near #doom at the time, and I have fucking witnesses.

What *might* have been my fault was the death of doomcenter. I moved there after wmull's unrepentant dumbfuckery became too much for my delicate sensibilities to bear. Again, a lot of the diaspora from the newdoom apocalypse joined me – a few went to doomworld, although the ND – DW antagonism still remained, and I was reluctant to nail my colours to that ship of faggotry (yet). And I actually got along well with Bigdog, and soon fell into my old routine.

SA had, by this point, instituted a paygate (which is probably where wmull got the idea from): banned members could simply pay Lowtax boxwine money and have their account reinstated, meaning that ReOL was busy buying our dearly derparted leader a fucking winery and getting progressively more psychotic with every fucking cheque that cleared. Eventually, he was banned permanently for reasons I can't really remember (lol) and so he moved back to his one true love, which was making shit doom maps, and rejoined doomworld. Who promptly banned him again.

And so he came to doomcenter. And this I would not stand.

What followed was an SA invasion fleet the likes of which was seldom seen; if you ever find an old SA goon, ask them about ReOL. He was a lolcow before we had even imagined there could be such a thing. And, so determined were we to milk his silly little udders and drive him into a cataclysmic carpet-biting rage, that doomcenter accidently burned to the ground. The shitposting from a thousand goons actually ruined the forum, you couldn't see anything doom-related, the forum was ankle-deep in fucking goatse. The place got fucked up, the servers pretty much melted, everyone and everything was banned and BigD just said “fuck it” and shut the fucking place down because recovery was impossible.

King ReOL's brain broke. He now rides elevators for 11 viewers on youtube, a broken husk of a man.

I said that this might have been my fault, but really, my association with the SA crowd was minimal at best (pretty sure this was during the chanology raids, but I could be misremembering. Opsec / multiple accounts were SOP – it kept Lowfag in boxwine). If I was a paranoid motherfucker, I'd wonder if one of Ling's smurfs had been involved in the Burning of Doomcenter.

It's a possibility. I have overestimated my powers in the past.

Regardless, I was now in with the SA crowd, so I packed my bags and moved to doomworld. It worked out really, really well.


2) Lessons from Ancient History


What killed these three forums?

1 – Legacy: Moving the forum. Shifting sites, hosts, whatever creates diaspora. And it creates utter, utter resentment: this forum is our motherfucking home. It's bad enough being moved from your comfy home into some fucking ad-mill: worse when someone who actively hates you decides you are persona non grata and moves you from your rightful lands onto some fucking reservation. This has happened to me too many fucking times now and I will not be moving again.


2 – Newdoom: Weak administration. If wmull had been less of a fucking retard then shit would never have gotten so out of hand. Forums are not a democracy: they can have the trappings of them here and there, but ultimately the admin is a dictator and the forum is a dictatorship. And weak dictators get assassinated and replaced.

For the record, because it has been mentioned above, I have ZERO FUCKING INTEREST IN BEING A FUCKING ADMIN. I have zero fucking interest in ventilating caesar either. My interest is preserving my fucking home. And 40, you have been weak: if I wanted to, I could have ripped this place out from under your nose, and there would have been nothing you can do about it.

As I said, zero fucking interest. But you'd better be really fucking careful installing these Bright Young Things into any position of moderating power, because they love power. You install a fucking essel or any one of these giggling uWu fucks and that's you gone.


3 – Doomcenter: yeah, probably not too much to be learned from that one, other than don't let dn mod for you. If you were desperate for a lesson, I'd put it down to competing forums and competing power structures: discord, in this day and age, is an especially bad idea for reasons I've said before but bear repeating: Discord creates competing power and moderating structures that will split forums into civil fucking war, because the Discord Diaperfags are just a fucking (content removed) aristocracy waiting to happen.


This is already way too fucking long, so I'm going to split the post and get back to it later. There is a point to all this.

With the former you are not housing them next to those they may grow to resent, including yourself. Ultimately does your responsibility lay with them or the rest of the site? Or even with yourself?

I think allowing for a more graceful exit doesn't need to be off the table either. Granting some time where they can still pm others to not lose contact. Considerations to not sever someones social links I think is a positive thing. Some would abuse that I'm sure but no real harm there. 

A sort of side note but for the sake of transparency I will be completely honest that the reputation this site has that keeps the "woke" away has been refreshing for me since it's almost impossible to avoid online. The cultural zeitgeist is shifting though so hopefully all that crap cools down soonish anyway. I expect the odds are pretty good that I'll eventually be back to complaining about the cultural stranglehold conservative Christians have sometime while I'm still above ground.

You going to start a Doom history class dn? If so I'm in. 

It's the only way I can think of to present this fucking hard-earned wisdom in a manner that won't drive me bullshit. I could say "Splitting the forum is fucking retarded and will kill it", but what will that achieve? Instead, here's an example. I could say "These hypocrite DW fucks are not your friends and want you dead yet you still imagine you can replace your existing userbase with them?"

Instead, here's an example.


PART II – Doomworld B.C.

<dn> whats the point in saving quotes?
<Quasar> dn: it's like taking photos of people IRL.
<dn> I wouldnt want photos of retards


I wasn't going to go into #doom / #zdoom, but – again, it has relevance with the competing power structures – I've decided there are lessons to be learned there too.

Apparently, I joined DW in 2000, but I wasn't a regular poster on the forums by any means, I just went round for the bi-monthy ND – DW shit-flinging contest. I suppose I started frequenting the IRC channels around that time. The culture around IRC was an entirely different beast from that of the forums, it was wilder, zero filter locker-room mentality. The internet back then has been compared to the wild west, and that's about as fitting an analogy as anything.

The people in charge of the rooms at that point were mostly the same as the staff on DW – it was probably a testing ground for potential moderators, because no one cared if you fucked up the IRC channel. The IRC channel was already fucked, it was a feature. Two bans a night per-person, no exceptions. You'd ban people for comedy purposes. You'd get yourself banned for comedy purposes. You'd mod people for a laugh just to watch them go fucking hog-wild with the ban button.

Ban ban chocolate I mean ban.

And other, darker, shit was going on. And we can illustrate that, let's tell a story.

See, when people are hidden behind a mask of anonymity, there are two things that can happen in the real-time environment of IRC (as opposed to the more curated presentation of a person in a forum): the first is that people go fully mask-off, and reveal the real person underneath. Combined this with no (or very little) moderation, and the results are people speaking their mind. I like to think that I am one of those people: it's probable that it's the opposite, that I adopted the internet persona of Ancient Lovecraftian Horror, and somehow grew into that person IRL.

Regardless, the spoken minds of the autistic are fucked-up swamps. Here be fucking monsters.

The second thing that can happen is that people – miserable, fucked up people – decide to become someone else. They lie and cover-up their real identity, pretend to be someone they are not. Big Bad Gangsta was a seven-foot tall black man on the internet, when in reality he turned out to be mostly ginger. Ralphis was an athletic jock, when – as any fule kno – Ralphis is fat. Ling is smart and handsome and intellegent.

And Auxios decided he was a woman called Katarhyne.

I am lucky, because I fucking despise “women” on the internet. Any doom-related post that begins “speaking as a woman” is automatically posted into the trash. It's attention seeking whoredom, and it will not service you with me. I do not need to know your gender: either your opinion interests me, or it does not. Appending “I am a woman look at meeeee” in an attempt to make your vapid fuckwitted take palatable to a wider audience simply annoys me. And leveraging your sex in a male-dominated space in an attempt to garner unearned power?

You've engaged in transactional behaviour. You're a whore.

And this is when we are dealing with real women (of which there are precisely two in the community). Auxios (or however the fucking name was spelled) was not a real woman, although he was an attention seeking whore. And, by god, did he get attention.

Definitely from Ling and certain moderators, amongst others. Not all of them: Quasar was too busy sperging out wondering why his fucking cat hated him and shaving / burning off his leg hair, and Bloodshedder was too reptilian to remember to blink sometimes. But there were definitely others engaged in this larp. Fraggle is a probable mark.

It had been ongoing for quite some time when I was getting established in the DW swamp; I imagine it started with basic “tee hee I'm a woman and I have sex,” but it had escalated to utter degeneracy, as these things are wont to do. This week Katarhyne was incesting her brother – next week she'd fucked her dog for Ling's mental fap folder.

Someone out there has the #doom IRC logs. I suspect BS definitely does, because his peculiar brand of cold-blooded autism and data-hoarding go hand-in-hand. I wish to god I had thought to take a copy of it all back in the days of the Vets, because releasing that shit would be like dropping a nuclear fucking BOMB on the fucking cuck-cabal.

It's still out there, on someone's forgotten hard-drive. Gathering dust, tick-tocking away.

Of course, “Katarhyne” got outed as a fat neckbeard eventually. Reactions varied from Niggerlicious to Excellent Ruse Bro to fucking Tragically Pathetic: one long term forum member (whose name escapes me) made one final, desperate plea against the universe itself because he was in love with Katarhyne you see, and say it isn't so, she's a real women who fucks dogs and her father but he can fix her and, by the living Christ, I think he might have died of cringe.

Oh, it was Heinemann. I imagine his mummified corpse is still in front of his keyboard; I imagine the gun is still welded to his shrivelled paw.

This was the first troon-related radiation leak on DW. And it's not even the fucking worst one.


Part II - Lessons to be learned

1) See the above comments, re: There are No Women on the Internet. Your gender means precisely fuck all in this environment. You get no special privileges. Islam was right about Zoe Quinn.


2) IRC is not a very smart place. And the differences in people's behaviour when they are forced to react instantly, rather than the “curated personality” (damn, that's a fine line) they present when using forum software is... stark. (I'd imagine Twitter somehow managed to combine the worst of both worlds). You think that the boards are a lawless fucking disaster zone, and tremble at the criticism of these gooning Discord hypocrites? You fear the judgement of those who present a public face of “SOCIAL JUSTICE SOCIAL RIGHTS” whilst privately cheering on as “Katarhyne” chokes down dog dick?

There are not enough asteroids in the universe to cleanse the fucking planet of these people. It could rain meteors for ten thousand years into the discord server farms and still I would cry for more.


3) Always keep receipts.

Well dumbworld just did get expanded, to a quite significant degree, if I may say so myself. But when I say dumbworld, I mean my asshole, of course. The shit I just took was so massive it took three flushes to go away, and a fourth one to scrub the shit residue off the toilet bowl. That's probably tens of liters of drinking water, an immeasurably valuable and increasingly scarce resource used up on transporting my fecal matter. Trololololol!

Very well.

I know I don't come off this way in times like these, but I am a very patient and understanding person. My processing style around this is unorthodox and sounds very angry and authoratative for some inane reason I don't fully understand, but I've taken in all of your thoughts, ideas, suggestions, I mulled it over and slept on it and I've decided I won't move forward with my proposal.

What this does bring to light is that Doom-community related PTSD is unquestionably real. Even for me. I'm truly sorry I had to activate it for some of you in this way.

As far as any actionable steps, I'm going to put a pin in this and consider what people have said here instead.

I want to add some clarity to the fact that this thread was not at all inspired by doomworld's moderatorship in any way. It's from, what I perceive to be, a lack of compassion and understanding for one another that keeps doomer boards mappers and a safe place to express themselves divided. I have more to add to explain where I'm coming from but I don't have the time for it at this very moment and will have to comeback to complete this thought later.

Truth be told, I'm not really in any position to be doing this. The job of forum moderation fell into my hands, but I'm a map designer, tester, and project leader. I'd like someone else to take this job but I also want to remind everyone who's been hurt by doomworld that I don't have access to any essels, rd's or dew's here. All of my doom related contacts are pretty much entirely centralized here. So if someone has any answers to how encourage and cultivate a better culture here I'd like to interview you with anything you have in mind so I can better accommodate the people that participate here.

I've thought about expanding the mod team, especially when the admin was AWOL.

Frankly I don't trust anyone here not to be a fucking retard with moderation power. I've seen nothing from anyone recently that convinces me otherwise - it's a very particular skillset - and I've really fucking thought about it. This is not a personal slight on (some) of you guys, but the only fucking way I'd be giving you the keys to the nuclear option is if my gut says so.

Those members I'd consider good mod candidates would never fucking use the button. Which defeats the whole purpose.

I hoped I'd have more time to finish this trip through Really Fucking Bad Community Decisions circa 1997-2024, but I'll be honest, I suspect 40 has already decided what he is going to do (we would have hit that same exact same conundrum when we reached Doomworld, 2015 onwards), and this thread is just a performative survey. Game's rigged, even if he has convinced himself otherwise. I was hoping that maybe a solution could be found in those reminiscences, but that's probably bullshit. I do eulogies for dead doomers, and now I'm writing one for the whole fucking community.

* * *

I will say right now that I not be a part of any decision that results in forcing people off their land and onto the reservation. That's the decision that got us into this fucking place to begin with, we're already out of zion and into the fucking slums of Palestine. There is nowhere left to go but into the sea.

If you create two separate forums, split between the tards and the tard-not, then I am fucking gone. I will not moderate for a board with two separate drinking fountains. We already get that treatment from elsewhere, we're already the (content removed) of Doom. The idea that you can turn Uncle Tom, and maybe some Hypothetical Mystery Doomers will let you sleep in the kennel instead of the bushes, is deeply fucking depressing.

That's not PTSD: that's Stockholm syndrome.

I'd ban you (again) for suicide baiting (TOS: Self-Harm), but it seems redundant.

Don't come back or post until you've sorted yourself out.

If even in a different universe he'd be unbanned, do you think he'd come back?