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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sacrificial Lamb" data-source="post: 3923836" data-attributes="member: 7482">I'm not. I say, "let people flame out". And no, I'm not kidding. When message boards are too strictly moderated, it encourages passive-aggressive behavior. ENWorld was the exception to this rule, but I think that's about to change forever. This type of behavior has been happening at RPG.net for a while now. For years there....people would flame, people would fight, and yet it was cathartic. Posters would get the bile out of their systems, and then they'd be done with it. Sometime later, the moderation there became more suffocating, and it got a little boring. The place just didn't have the "magic" that it used to have. Even worse, the change in moderation encouraged people to flame each other without overtly breaking the "rules". I put "rules" in quotes, because the "rules" were and are different for each poster. You had people getting a free pass on trollish behavior based on how much they sucked up to the mods, and how well they got along with the right "clique".   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" />  Anyway, this atmosphere created a climate of passive-aggressiveness that was simply POISON for the forums. The snark actually INCREASED, even though people were less overtly insulting. Conversation became less constructive from the more restrictive moderation, so out of frustration, posters resorted to passive-aggressiveness. When they couldn't flame an annoying poster directly, they'd never get the bile out of their system, so the flames would go on and on. RPG.net isn't quite as bad now, but quite frankly, it's one-fourth as fun as it was just a few years ago, and that's a shame, as it used to be the first place I'd visit on the Internet.I'm saying this as a person who never got warned or banned, so I'm not just some random banned poster out to settle a score. I still visit there, because the site is still good, but it is no longer great.  :\ If you want to visit a nearly unmoderated forum on rpgs, go to <a href="http://www.therpgsite.com" target="_blank">www.therpgsite.com</a> . People were slagging it because of its owner, but honestly, the flames there are much less than here, and the moderation is almost nil. There are three rules there:1.) No racial epithets.2.) No sock puppet accounts without permission.3.) No spam.I don't know if there's a rule against pornography, but people generally don't post porn there. I think I saw one thread in the past year that had nudity in it, and that's it. So there we go. There's an actual forum where posters talk about rpgs, have fun and constructive conversation, and they do it with almost zero moderation. Now....do people flame each other in those forums? Yep! It happens from time to time. But eventually they get over it for two reasons:1.) Other posters can deride a troll when he's being obnoxious.  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":]" title="Devious    :]" data-shortname=":]" /> 2.) Because moderation is almost non-existent, people don't go into passive-aggressive mode nearly so much. They flame out, get the bile out of their systems, and move on. Flame-bait threads are long threads, but THEY'RE CONFINED TO THE INDIVIDUAL THREAD. Because of this "hands-off" style of moderation, the flames don't spread everywhere, because people are getting their "thirst for blood" in the flame thread.What we see now on ENWorld, is a situation where people cannot overtly flame each other, thus, they're unable or unwilling to get the frustration of their systems. So now we have this fighting spilling out all over the place, with many posters fighting in a passive-aggressive way, and it goes on and on...An "enforced politeness code" makes this continue, so this will continue, guaranteed. I know this isn't what you'd like to hear, but this is my belief. If 4e hadn't arrived so soon, or in this way, it might have been avoided, and ENWorld could have returned to its old, sweet self, but now I have my doubts.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /></blockquote>

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