politics, religion, and beating children
 

The other thread was very interesting but it moved from strategic joking to personal warfare. Complaints occured. In order to save the original thread all 16 pages of it has been trimmed back without selectivity.

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

Good job Gandalf. I'm sure most of those around appreciate it.

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Thanks. I hope I dont have to do it again. There are only 2 options. Delete thread, or delete post. Or in this case delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, delete post, (for a good part of he morning) http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

*Argitoth quietly giggles as he hides at the side in the dark*


BWAAAAHAHAHA http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I don't appreciate it, but I also don't care that much. Still it seemed to me that there was more discussion and less bashing going on in that thread than most others like it (not on these Boards...)

Anyway, its more interesting to me to have those discussions with people I know from this board than going to some random newsgroup or other forum. Oh well, the moderator is always right, except in this case http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

As a person new to the forum and the community, I very much appreciate what you did, Gandalf. Those are hard calls to make, but that thread was out of control.

Thank you.

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

Hard decision. But understandable. Two thumbs up.
So far I feel right at home here...

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Well you are of course entitled to that opinion, but this is not a normal forum. For things that go rabidly off topic I personally feel it's best to not keep them at the top for the most vocal to post madly to express their opinion.

The Last thing I'd like anyone new to Dominions 2 is some 60 page thread about personal politics and religion in a rabid fashion.

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

This forum is aptly named: "Dominions 2: The Ascension Wars". It's a forum about gaming. There are plenty of other forums, newsGroups, Yahoo Groups, etc... where people can go to debate their own personal religious beliefs, political ideals, parenting methods, and just about anything else they can think of. Let's try to keep it that way. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

As I said, I was having fun with the thread myself (and added a few barbs). But the Last few Posts in that one kindof embarrassed me for new people to see it in a games forum.

If it had been in something like newsGroups I would definetly have jumped in swinging. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
Thats one of the things I have newsGroups for

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

There's no question that religion is everybody's favourite flamewar. A while back, in the newsgroup comp.sys.ibmpc.games.strategic, some guy called Alvin started a thread entitled "Christianity and Gaming", in which he passed some comment about which games are suitable for good Christians.

It soon became by far the most popular thread in the group, and quickly lost any relevance to gaming. People just love to talk about it, anywhere and with anyone.

Personally, I would have preferred to have seen the discussion in this forum retitled to "OT: Religion, politics and beating children" (if that were possible) so that it could stay for the folks that wanted it, but the "OT" would warn off the folks that are only here for Dominions.

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Hmmmmm but I was trying to free up the original thread so it could continue. Maybe if I had copied the entire thread to a different forum, then stripped it down, renamed it, copied it back. Im not sure if that would be possible. And I probably would still have had to delete some of the Last few Messages. Nahh that would have gotten into unfair judging.

I love such debates but I get them in the newsGroups rather than a game forum. It tends to work better since newsGroups dont belong to anyone.

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

Maybe a good solution would be for Shrapnel to have a separate Off Topic forum, where people could discuss those issues at their leisure (and perhaps with greater liberty of speech?), without cluttering up the game-specific forums for the people like me, who are interested in Dominions II information and not so interested in others' views on non-game-related material.

Several other forums on the net have separate Off Topic forums and it seems to work pretty well.

Edit: I wanted to add that I agree with what Targa said 110%.

[ February 14, 2004, 05:52: Message edited by: fahdiz ]

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

Pity, I was looking forward to show my post in that thread to my religion teacher... I see why it was done, though.

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">That'd be a good solution in theory, but in practice, most of these these kinds of debates start ON topic, and occur when a thread gets horribly derailed.

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I have a lamentable weakness for trolls. I find it hard to resist replying when people say what I consider to be silly things. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Your internet providor that you connect with usually gives you access to a email, browsing (by providing a DNS service), sometimes a personal web-page space, and newsGroups.
Ask them about newsGroups. Every job, hobby, pet, team, music group, or any other debate subject seems to have its own newsgroup where people gather to yell at each other. NewsGroups are part of Internet just like www is part of Internet (except newsGroups are much older than www). There are arguments there (ummm I mean debates) that have been going on for decades.

As long as the newsGroups still exist, Moderators dont have to feel too bad about saying "that doesnt fit here" and deleting it.

I tend to live in comp.ai.games (where I learned of GalCiv in '95), comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic (where I learned about Dominions1 in '01), and in alt.hacker (I was the 2nd most frequent poster there for 2003)

[ February 14, 2004, 13:33: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">...which is why the Moderators have the power to move a thread from one forum to another. If a thread gets so derailed that there's no going back, it just gets moved over to the Off Topic forum. It works both in theory and in practice.

I am the head moderator over at a gaming forum with over 1550 registered Users (many of whom are younger than the average Dom II player), and it works for us.

[ February 14, 2004, 16:57: Message edited by: fahdiz ]

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I have followed, and a few times posted in, CSIGS and rec.games.roguelike.adom for a few years. It was a link through Illwinter's page that got me into them (google Groups). Now that my father decided to try Linux I have access to IRC, newsGroups etc. programs, I might be able to change into a real newsreader. Are those really worth bothering if I can already read 'Groups through google? I have got IRC to work, but haven't found #dominions to be very active... BTW, thanks for those who told me some servers.

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

I prefer reading my email on linux but I use windows programs for news. Forte is cool. I wouldnt prefer to do either of those thru a web interface because its too limiting.

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

You might want to try #Dom2 on IRCnet. In the US use irc.stealth.net 6667. Zen has a continuously updated thread here:

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...;f=74;t=001276

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

Remember, I still only have Dom2 as a demo. Still, as I think about it, propably they are playing with the two at #dominions too, so I might aswell give #dom2 a try. Thanks for the hint!

[ February 14, 2004, 19:09: Message edited by: Endoperez ]

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

Yes yes, I understand why Gandalf did what he did, and I probably didn't see the Last handful of Posts, so I can't say that they weren't getting more out of hand...

Anyway, OT Boards are useless to me, I never go there, becasue 90% of the junk there is a total waste of time. I don't see what the big deal is with *one* thread getting alittle (ok alot) off topic. If all the threads were like that, problem for those new to the board, if its just one... well its just a place for people to have some fun or discuss non-Dom stuff with other Dom players. That's really what I enjoy, I don't want to wander around in some NG where every crackpot shows up and runs threads into the ground over and over (been there, done that...) I like it when its the subset of crackpots who at least share a common interest...

Oh well, enough of my thoughts on this, if another thread goes off like that I'll probably be in there going off, otherwise I'll just try to go off in an ontopic manner http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: politics, religion, and beating children
 

If the problem had been getting off topic then it would have died when it got to 3 pages, not 16. The problem was when it turned into religous insults. There are not alot of privately owned forums where something like that survives.

Since it was a long slow increase from friendly jabs to harsh responses, once it started being trimmed it was hard to decide what post was "ok" and didnt cause the problem. Fairest thing was to remove it all but I wanted to leave the original poll asking about age.