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"Thy Flesh Consumed" and "Doom General" should be behind a registered users wall.
90% of the forums unsavoury public image solved.

PART III – Blogs, Politics, & Religion

The layout of Something Awful essentially mirrored that of Dante's Inferno. It started bad, and the smell got worse the further down you got. It was only natural that DW should follow in suite.

The much beloved and sadly missed Post Hell? Yeah, it's just the SA Comedy Gas Chamber. Don't tell anyone.

Not that there weren't innovations: it would seem novel (perhaps unimaginable) for the modern pilgrim to discover that Doomworld used to have a Politics and Religion forum, before the twin policies of verboten and omerta came to dominate the lower echelons over there. The expectation was that you could be trusted with dangerous knowledge, such as Both Parties Suck. You could read about such intoxicating religious apocrypha as “What is Heresy by Nine Inch Nails really all about?”

In the good ol' days, you could start a religious flamewar from the comfort of your own living room, and without the need to look at ads on Twitter.

This is what they took from you. This is the world that could have been, before they took the wild, free internet and paved over it to make a shopping mall. Sometimes I forget that this sterile grey hellscape is all you kids have ever known. You have the dull eyes and aspirations of battery-farmed hens.

Of course, there are drawbacks to setting a bunch of teenagers loose with all the world's knowledge at their fingertips, and an empty fucking forum to fill with bright new thoughts. The principle drawback being that, having discovered fire, it is mankind's first instinct to set his neighbour's hair alight.

So Politics & Religion was a mistake, although Ling accidentally discovered the concept of a Containment Board at the same time. You ought to appreciate the conceit, because you're currently posting in one. The smartest trick the Devil of Post Hell ever played: Move the containment board off-site.

Yea and verily, we'll even make the fuckers moderate it themselves.

As innovative at is was to have children playing Battle Royale in Politics & Religion (soon to be renamed Everything Else, mostly because there was no dedicated place on DW to discuss the much more interesting Sex & Drugs), there were further innovations afoot (and this time not ripped wholesale from SA). Being a bunch of self-absorbed little shits with wide-spectrum mental illnesses, there was a developing tendency to overshare online: the concept of a Blog suddenly gained huge popularity, in much the same manner as a Tamagotchi or other faddish mayfly.

It was also a way to move everyone's embarrassing social incontinence off the front page. Which, in rifling through this fucking sock drawer of memory, has given me an idea.

In a nutshell, Blogs was a side-board, not viewable from the main page. Users would post what they had for breakfast that day (in nXn's case, that would be mostly crack). A .css script would then take the forum post and convert it to a nice little homepage for the user, complete with modifiable title, png backgrounds, text colour, blah de fucking blah.

And voila. Everyone on doomworld now had their own little hosted site.

Of course, it took about two days for users to... well, turn it into an assploded demilitarized zone. A doom site that hosts smaller doom sites is a normal occurance: what doomworld had now accidentally turned itself into was a host for BBG's Gun and Squirrel Cooking Guide, or nXn's Crack Den. I spent a year drawing retarded little comics:



for my homepage, in between occasional forays into the developing doomworld / zdoom wars and the the rapidly escalating Nickbakery (more on that later).

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

Lessons to be learned

1) The best laid plans of mice and men aft gang agley.

Blogs was a mistake. It was never intended to be what it became, which was an even more hilarious version of Everything Else. If you can think of a legendary DW thread, there is even money on it originating from Blogs.

God bless you Liam for your moderation of that forum. And to think I had my doubts.


2) You cannot force evolution (at least, not in the direction you intend).

This one feels important. You cannot provide your userbase with tools and expect them not to abuse them. Shit, that's how innovation works, you push whatever you've got until breaking point, re-evaluate, and then push it some more. And the Blogs forum provided some of the greatest content DW ever produced.

It's worth noting that the DW redesign took that element of Blogs and completely trashed it. It is now, I imagine, Working as Intended, which at least keeps the battery-hens from squawking overloud (although the meat still tastes foul).

But...

I have found, in this fucking nostalgia soup, a solution to this fucking drama. We reinstate Blogs.

Hear me out: we do it in the same way it was done on DW, no fucking link from the front page, nada. This fulfils 40's need to separate the shit from the post. Our off-topic board is renamed to something asinine like Q&A and buried in a toxic waste dump somewhere, we'll integrate it with the Blogs board or something later. This also fulfils the DBP developer's desire for greater visibility: with off-topic gone, you're gonna need to make DBP visible to the general public again, unless you want the poster child for the fucking forum to be the fucking anime board.

This makes two parties out of three happy.

The shitposters, I believe, will also be pleased by this solution: to be part of the Resurrection of the Greatest Fucking Board in Doom History is a sweetener. In addition, we have community history precedent: this is not an exile, this is a reinstatement of ancient shitposting right. I don't know about the outside hosting for the .css scrape: I think it was manc who did that originally for DW, and there's no harm in me asking about the technical feasibility of such a thing at some point further down the road, we're still on good terms.

Thoughts, gentlemen? I have... various concerns about this, shall we say, but I want to hear from everyone else first.

This exposure scares me. We might see the ideas meant for dbps appear somewhere else before these dbps are made, with more probability of that happening than it could be now.

It is a protective barrier: one has to be: 1. registered, 2. logged in.

Sometimes even needing to log in stops lurkers from entering

I don't want to say examples of what and who /that/ publicly, so consider this being my subjective sense.

It would probably be good to have the more positive elements of the site front facing.


While having the messier stuff sort of back ended if people want to dig into it. It's certainly in line with my 'provide different things for different needs' suggestion.


I do understand a bit of this concern though but there are plenty of lurkers who no doubt are only registered because it's the one thing they can't see without an account. I'm not sure it would make much difference in the end.

I'm in favour of any proposal that brings back Blogs. In true Doom spirit, it was a real secret area of old Doomworld. And if someone here likes secrets then it's ya N-slur Xeep.

Edit: on the other hand I don't quite understand why should TFC/"Everything Else" get canned. Political posts for instance have no business being in blogs. It will probably see a reduction in activity but it would still serve a purpose.

I fucking told you before, 40oz, your default forum looks like a warez website. You want to attract more users and have them stay? Fix the awful default design.

Thank you for this. This almost, telepathically addresses in part the thoughts I returned here to finish. See, my life really sucked for a little longer than I hoped it would. I do owe a lot to this forum and its participants for reading when I have stupid threads to post here. But when I'm feeling profoundly depressed and vulnerable, nothing about this forum presents this question:

"How are you doing? ... No, not 'fine,' I mean how are you really doing?"

I'm not gonna pretend not to know I'm in my own way when I say this. Message boards with pathetically low moderating thresholds should give everyone free reign to write about anything. And my shitty fucken mood is a thing. But given the context of how the majority of people on this forum respond to simple things, telling anyone at all where my head is at with all my shit exposed just really doesn't feel safe. As fucking lame as that sounds...

For someone who writes a hell of a lot of words, I just don't have it in me to articulate it sometimes. So I just have to fade away.

Pressured with my obligations to come back here, my head will shuffle paranoious questions like "why do I share this forum with so many people when over half of them can't validate my pain?" They might tell me I've dug my own grave or to eat shit or other things that never get easier to hear. Why do I subject myself to this? Moreover, why would anyone else? I assume this explains why hateful words dominate the doomer boards lexicon while anything else of interest is nowhere to be found. For years, I haven't succeeded at getting anyone talk about why they don't have anything to talk about here, so I'm left to try and answer these kinds of questions internally.

The question about how to improve this forum as far as its optics -- rapid growth through an influx of more strangers does nothing to address the above problem in my opinion. I'm not at all trying to trick people into thinking this forum is a nice place. I want it to actually be a nice place. A place with actually valuable relationships that are worth staying for. Sure, I can open up doomer boards project and mapping workshop, but will this visibility to non-registered members do anything to influence the already existing community to treat the rest of the forum with respect? Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the link.

The groups I follow in other non-doom avenues that do practice inclusivity and acceptance are much better at fostering community relationships that are much more affectionate, secure, and vulnerable. When the conversation topics of the non-dbp parts of the forum forum wave between ghostly silence and messages that indiscriminately hate certain types of people even when they're not here to hurt the speakers in any way, that doesn't inspire me to trust people here with any information about my life. Am I alone in this?

Blogs might be cool at this, maybe; if people actually use it sincerely. After Nirvana and Doom News, I'm not 100% optimistic about adding another ghost town to the boards that I'll need to populate with threads myself. but I can give it a shot.

Said nobody ever.

It's not that kinda place. We're not therapists, and I don't advocate seeking psychological advice from drunken slavs.

I dunno what to tell you man. Most depression meds / solutions are bunk. The only thing that ever worked for me was self-improvement, and actively seeking out and destroying the sources of my depression. (edit: nor am I entirely free from manic-depressive bullshit - I might know what I'm talking about here.) Seeking solutions, for most people. just involves looking for something to blame, preferably as a group, so they can wallow together in collective misery and - this is the important part - not do anything about the fucking problem.

I swear, half of reddit is stuck in this exact cycle. They have made their mental illness part of their identity - fuck, they have made communities established entirely of the mentally ill. Not only does this reinforce group-think and bunk science re: the cause of their depression, but it removes the inertia required to actually change your habits and make meaningful positive change. If the only place a miserable motherfucker feels happy is locked in a room with other miserable people, then what is the incentive to remove yourself from that miserable strata?

It's all bullshit. Personal problems demand personal solutions, not an eternal pity party populated entirely with sad clowns.




You know, I write a lot of fucking words because I enjoy it. A lot of people don't. And a lot of people, at some point, lost the ability to actually articulate themselves in concise bursts, presumably because the problem is so over-whemingly large that to encompass it in a few pithy soundbites feels impossible.

Combined with a general nose-dive in the populations' attention span (and reading comprehension) means that everyone is shouting over everyone else and no one looks like they have a fucking clue what they are trying to say. This is a problem with low moderation thresholds.

BUT.

You will not like this next part, but it needs to be said. Part of your inability to express yourself is not coming from this forum and the alt-right evil doers here. A *large* part of your inability to express yourself - and hence your confusion and misery - is coming from those in your life who are telling you about BAD WORDS, and BAD THOUGHTS, and NOT TO THINK THAT WAY, and THAT EMOTION IS INVALID. These ideologies and the people who espouse these ideologies are actively engaged with curtailing your ability to defend yourself against misery. They are amputating the linguistic parts you need to express yourself. They are lobotomizing your language until you are incapable of doing nothing else than agreeing with them in abject misery, because the mountain is so overwhelmingly large that it would require a centaury to chip away with what limited mental tools you have left at your disposal.

Stop seeking solutions from those kinds of people. Yes, they will engage with you, but they have no interest in actually fixing you. They have an invested interest in keeping you in misery.




People talk about their frustrations. They vent those frustrations as you cannot, using short bursts of language which has developed as a shorthand for espousing twenty different frustrations in one, possibly two syllables.

Science denial, child grooming, medical mutilation, group-think, cult ideations, suicide, othering, misogamy, moral crusading, hypocrisy, double-think, mental degeneracy, moral degeneracy, familial degeneracy, fallen friends, & an implacable enemy that invades your spaces like a cancer cell. All of this can be summarized by One Bad Word.

So you excise that word from your mental library. Fine, you can replace it with the above list. But then there is another bad word that must be excised (and this one is only semi-offensive). And another (a slaved drive? BAN). And another (woman = birthing parent). And before you know it, you're writing out seventy words where ten would have done, and you're exhausted and you can't connect the dots and you've forgotten exactly what it was you were complaining about in the first place.

Stop conforming to other people's moral standards. Create your own, otherwise you'll go fucking insane.



It is a nice place. For the people who want to be here and share certain values. For those that don't, not so much.

You're correct that separating the forum Blogs style will do fuck all for our optics. You can say "Look, I move the Nazis, will you come play with us now?", and they will say "OMG IT'S WORSE THERE IS NOW A SECRET DOOMERBUNKER FULL OF NAZIS THIS IS EXACTLY THE WAY HILTER WOULD HAVE DONE IT." But you're not going to win with them anyway: you can plow me and mine into the foundations of any new utopia you can imagine and you'll still be stained with the sin of association.

Germany has been certified Nazi Free since 1945. No one has forgiven them yet.




You're missing the link. I have no idea how. You've got a fucking Porsche locked away in the garage and a burning honda civic up on bricks out the front. You wonder why people think there is an intellectual poverty problem here, that's why/



See above for my thoughts on certain groups. I don't know who they are, but I've seen a marked decline in your mental health over the past few years, and I suspect the correlation is with some of those groups.




They won't use it correctly. It's not intended to be used correctly. It's intended to be a wild and interesting magnesium binfire outside the abortion clinic: beautiful and unique and quite, quite horrific.

and everybody not tall enough to peek into the garage window thinks the porsche is a washing machine. Its a confusing metaphorical situation.

whatever, at least we've got a car.

I'm not even convinced our optics are that bad. If there was a cacoward for the forum with least amount of child abuse scandals in any given month... even scuba would have to give us that one.

You came back after hiatus with a plan to blow half of the community as it currently is out of the nearest convenient airlock. I'm not entirely sure what to say about that particular personal relationship.




We're about to enter the holy month of Pride, where every corporation out there will don the sacred rainbow vestments, Lochhead Martin and Blackrock will lead parades in the street. That's not in the margins: that's front and center.

I'm not gonna get deep into this slew of fucking shit. Tantrums over The Cass Report, which basically confirms everything I've been saying about social contagion and child grooming over the past five years, no need to apologies for calling me a nazi folks, I'm sure my hurt feelings will get over it. The Scottish Arts Council that won't chuck me £5 for a beer after a fucking poetry gig, but can still find £100'000 to pay for pornography. The Rape Crisis Center that was sacking women for gender critical beliefs, and refusing to aid victims with the same protected beliefs. This is from fucking today. Literal rape victims being refused help becuz some fucking libelous Sturgeon-appointed governmental genders studies accredited ogre had his feelings hurt / gets off on it. I could go on.

This is not marginalized. Marginalized people do not dictate what people can and cannot say, do not write their own laws, cannot hold themselves above criticism, cannot force themselves on others. That's an aristocracy. Which means I will bring the guillotines and the hotdogs if a certain standard of behavior is not observed by we peon masses.

I'm very, very tired of people with anime avatars wiping their arses with the social contract and then taunting "What are you gonna do about it?", only to scream bloody murder when the inevitable consequences of their own actions come back to fucking annihilate them. And it's time, it's finally time, the boomerang is finally returning. Yes, I'm going to fucking laugh. The final word is going to be the one word that their parents never told them, which is "NO." I only hope that the fucking explosion doesn't take the actual sane members of the LGB with them, I'll miss those little fuckers.




I'm not saying that. I don't think I have ever said that. I'm the freezepeech guy.