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Kilkrazy wrote:
I can understand people get annoyed by the bitching that sometimes goes on. Reading YMDC threads isn't compulsory, however, and it isn't the only source of answers to rules questions.

I'll politefully disagree here Kil, there has been several threads like this in the main discussion area as a result of the increased hostility and flaming/collision of persona in the YMDC area. The conflict in threads now seems to overshadow any actual discussion or attempt to resolve. To say well it's not compulsory and you don't have to use it doesn't change the fact we are seeing discussion taking place in other areas of the forum due to the belief held by many here that the YMDC section is not working as intended. The 'if you don't like it don't go there' answer is not satisfactory. If I go to the park to feed the ducks and then find one day it's full of hoodie chav bastards littering and setting fire to the ducks, I am entitled to rail about it.

I know it's not a satisfactory answer, however I'm not convinced there is a gang of hoodie chavs in the YMDC park, as such.

Maybe the alerts are happening when I am off shift.

I will consult in the top secret Moderator Forum.

Kilkrazy wrote:I know it's not a satisfactory answer, however I'm not convinced there is a gang of hoodie chavs in the YMDC park, as such.

Maybe the alerts are happening when I am off shift.

I will consult in the top secret Moderator Forum.

SHhh its supersecretty!

Solkan:

Okay, imagine a conversation. Usually there's some back and forth. Now, imagine that instead of that conversation being between two people, that conversation is between several people.

MeanGreenStompa:

Except that such a popularity contest doesn't happen because the popularity of one poster over another is irrelevant: what's relevant is that the topic is being addressed well. Indeed, one would hope for such a scenario as you describe if the criticism of your post is valid. If the criticism of your post is invalid, someone will notice and point that out.

It's not unusual, or it used not to be unusual, for mutually antagonistic posters in YMDC to hold off on their mutual antagonism to register agreement. It is/was even customary to announce the fact of that antagonism (e.g., "Nurglitch and I don't see eye to eye, but...") as somehow relevant for that position, that posters with radically different approaches to understanding the rules could agree on that position so it must be a good position to hold. Personally I tried to avoid pointing out I was agreeing with anyone antagonistic because I want my posts to be judged on the information they presented, rather than on my relationships with other posters, but it rarely worked out that way.

Still, I doubt there's anyone actually posting on YMDC in order to talk up their buddies and talk down their enemies. Given that it's not actually a dick-waving contest, and that it just gets out of hand when posters get distracted and mistake the critical for the personal, all we have to do is incentivize critical engagement with the topics and dis-incentivize the inclination to make things personal and political.

Part of incentivizing critical engagement is incentivizing the amount of forethought posters put into their posts. Another part is making sure that everyone has the same opportunity to be heard.

Part of disincentivizing irrelevancies like flaming and trolling is making it considerably easier for moderation to police a thread. Another part is emphasizing the conversation and de-emphasizing the participants in a conversation.

In theory there's all sorts of stylistic things that posters could do without resort to such draconian measures. One could, for example, describe a particular position instead of naming it according to the first and/or loudest proponent of it: Not "Nurglitch's argument" but "The argument that [insert topic here]". One could, likewise, adopt an actual essay format (introduction, body, conclusion, bibliography, etc) instead of the stream of consciousness that is in vogue.

But let's face it, if it was just a matter of people voluntarily adopting a neutral scholarly style then we wouldn't be having this discussion. Posters need to adapt to the forum, as well as having the forum adapted to them, and so if the forum is to be adapted to them, it must be adapted so that they themselves change their behaviour.

That's all noble and full of good ideas Nurglitch, but if things were as fair, balanced and civil as that from the posters, we would not be addressing it to the point we have reached. And people do post simply to reinforce a friend or noted forum personality, or to take a swipe at someone they don't get on with. I'm afraid your granting entirely too much credit to the posters, who are for the large part made up of good people but unfortunately do also contain some quite epic arsehats.

Possible solution:

Maybeeee the posting could be anonymous as viewed by the general population, the poster only visible to the mods and admin for the sake of any reports for inappropriate behaviours or attacks.

So we remove the names, post counts, everything about the poster. We provide a format for questions to be posted and titled and then just have every response as anonymous. Take all personality out of it and thereby concentrate on the question and the answer, formating to include the interpretation as written and the use in everyday and or tournament play.

I guess I agree with Killkrazy, in that while I may have kicked off the navel gazing about YMDC with my post on the personalities there-in, I actually don't see any problems with it as is. It is what it is, but I think it works relatively well.

Any new proposal has to meet a cost/benefit analysis, and a one post rule would have IMO relatively minor benefits. Will we arrive at rules answers quicker, better, or clearer? Probably not. If you slog through a YMDC thread, it's not hard find the main issues and the reasons each might be correct. The main benefit might be for lurkers and readers who come back later to look for rules answers.

What I do like, is rather than implement the one post rule for every thread, start a new sub-forum or a special kind of thread for after a contentious issue. Essentially, after a big nasty thread, open a "Final Thoughts" thread where everybody can post once. The arguments and evidence will have been developed, and so it's not hard for every person to state their case.

This could be useful for those grey areas where a "normal" thread doesn't end serious discussion,. So, if a new player wants to know, for example, how valkyries work for disembarking, they can read a series of mini-essays on the topic, rather than a 200+ post thread.

Polonius:

I like your idea for a repository of "Disputed Knowledge".

It would be something to have Legoburner look into how it's flagged in the search system, because I can't be the only person whose noticed that lots of posts on dead-horse subjects start with "I tried searching for this, but I couldn't find it..."

I think the article system is already in place to handle such things though, although I don't think it turns up in forum searches.

Nurglitch: well, I like your idea for a more scholarly approach to writing about rules, the problem is that the research needs to get done first. If you think of a nasty YMDC thread as field research, and then you write up your analysis in a second thread, I think we can have the best of both worlds.

To give an example, when I played in an RTT yesterday, I took my Valkyries that I'd finally painted. I explained to the TO that the scout move was treated just like it happens in the movement phase, but skimmers are only obscured if they moved flat out in the previous movement phase. I explained that strict RAW seems to favor them not getting a cover save from a scout move, but that there is some support due to the "just like in movement" language. He saw it as pretty close, and had my d6 it before the tournament, but the point was that I was able to bring him up to speed so he could make a decision aware of the facts. In that case, I'd rather have the decision be made arbitrarily because of a full appreciation of the facts, than have a TO arbitrarily decide what facts to seize upon.

Nurglitch wrote:Solkan:

Okay, imagine a conversation. Usually there's some back and forth. Now, imagine that instead of that conversation being between two people, that conversation is between several people.

I can quite easily imagine such a thing. One instance of such a thing is a discussion in a classroom. What's your point?

Solkan:

You had said:

Solkan wrote:By my understanding, there was no provision in your proposal for conversation unless one attempted to subvert the proposed mechanics in some way (editing posts to address later comments, the use of alternate accounts, etc.) How is one supposed to have a meaningful conversation when limited to either an original post or an original post and a followup?

My point is that you do understand how one can have a meaningful conversation under said limits.

Nurglitch wrote:Solkan:

You had said:

Solkan wrote:By my understanding, there was no provision in your proposal for conversation unless one attempted to subvert the proposed mechanics in some way (editing posts to address later comments, the use of alternate accounts, etc.) How is one supposed to have a meaningful conversation when limited to either an original post or an original post and a followup?

My point is that you do understand how one can have a meaningful conversation under said limits.

In a classroom discussion, people are not normally limited to a very small, finite number of utterances. There may be the occasional, "Please give someone else a chance to talk" statement, but that's hardly the same as only giving people one say.

What you are proposing is at best an essay or speach contest for the purposes of determining which answer the crowd favors most. That is hardly the same model as a classroom discussion. What I do not see is how a meaningful conversation can be conducted in that environment.

Actually the best seminar environments by I have been in have been exactly that format: the professor* lectures for about an hour, and then everyone writes down a question (in order to make sure that people have a succinctly expressed question or comment).

Then the professor selects every student in turn and answers their question. This goes by pretty quickly, because there's usually a fair number of duplicates, and people can pass on questions that have already been answered, or ask for extrapolation or clarification on a previous question.

*dude won awards for teaching excellence, voted best professor in Halifax several years running, etc.

Having said that, what I am not doing is proposing an essay contest to see which one some 'crowd' favours the most. What I am doing is proposing that people come and reason together, and collect the various opinions and arguments pertaining to the topic. As Polonius suggests, this is basically field research, finding out what's said on a topic, and people's opinions on what's been said on a topic.

If a thread is going to be compiled into an article, there wouldn't be some crowd that decides whose opinion goes in and whose is left out because the who of it is irrrelevant, and what is relevant is making sure that people are familiar with the terrain of the subject, the points of dispute, the critical rankings, and so on.

What we have now is what you're suggesting that I'm proposing, a situation where the opinion favoured by a majority of the crowd is passed off as gospel-truth. My proposal, such as it is, is specifically concerned with preventing such appeals to popularity.

What I think may be giving you trouble in this regard is the distinction between style and content. In an essay contest you're mainly judged on style, in deploying just the right kind of rhetorical tricks and flourishes that will appeal to the vanity of the judges, and so on. In a constructive discussion, the content of your comments is what is judged, although clarity and style help to communicate that content.

Part of the problem with the mob mentality identified by the original poster is that it's too easy in YMDC to attack someone on their style, use rhetorical tricks, and to appeal to popularity, authority, convention, and so on. That's because in a normal back-and-forth conversation between people the context is about the relationship between those people.

If everyone has only one post, then it's impersonal, and we can let the content of our ideas speak for themselves.

Nurglitch wrote:Actually the best seminar environments by I have been in have been exactly that format: the professor* lectures for about an hour, and then everyone writes down a question (in order to make sure that people have a succinctly expressed question or comment).

Then the professor selects every student in turn and answers their question. This goes by pretty quickly, because there's usually a fair number of duplicates, and people can pass on questions that have already been answered, or ask for extrapolation or clarification on a previous question.

*dude won awards for teaching excellence, voted best professor in Halifax several years running, etc.

Sounds pretty horrid actually. Flies in the face of the socratic method and good old continuous interaction. Sounds like designed for professors who can't handle people not treating them as gods.

Yep, so, as I suggested, make it anonymous. No points to be scored, no interwebs fame or glory to gain, no buddies to impress, only the discussion in a purer form.

Well, it's best used to topics where a lot of information comes at the students, and the instructor only wants to take questions that show some basic effort put into understanding the material.

That's in no way similar to YMDC. There is no professor. Under your system, the professor could give his lecture, and then only other students could answer any questions.

Like I said, I like the idea of having single post threads created after the initial thread has died it's natural death, but given the fact that nobody can understand Nurglitch's idea for how to do rules debates, switching to his system probably won't work.

I think nurglitch wants to be the professor

I understand his idea, I just don't think it will actually help people understand the rules better, which should be the goal of all of us.

Frazzled:

Actually it was quite amazing. There was a reason that professor won awards, because he ran one of the best seminars at Dalhousie (also the undergraduate student advisor). I tried it myself. It's a great way of promoting classroom discussion. The interaction is continuous, you can manage large groups of people in a single conversation, and there's a considerable amount of interaction between students as new questions and comments from previously answered students get passed along to people without a question of their own. You really have to see it in action.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

willydstyle wrote:I think nurglitch wants to be the professor

I understand his idea, I just don't think it will actually help people understand the rules better, which should be the goal of all of us.

Actually no, I don't want to be "the professor". In the system I'm proposing we won't have a central figure organizing the conversation. We don't need to, thanks to the format of the forums, and any moderation will be handled easily by the existing forum moderators.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Polonius:

So far as I can tell from the thread, everyone understands quite clearly what my proposal is, they just either don't think it'll work, or don't understand how it could work.

To reiterate my proposal:

Limit posting in YMDC forums to one post per poster per thread, no edits.

As for how it works, basically it works on the principal that "Less is more". Posters are encouraged to think harder (and edit) before they post, concern themselves with the subject of the thread, and to co-operate with other posters in developing the discussion.

Since the proof is in the pudding, as they say, I'd suggest that the Moderators/Administrators set up several threads in YMDC with the right permissions and see what happens. In particular I'd suggest threads on controversial topics such as:

- The matter of Deff Rollas and Tank Shock,
- Which particular Chaos Space Marines Fabius Bile's Enhanced Marines rule applies to,
- How Chaos Dreadnought's Fire Frenzy works,
- How the interactions between rules that use another unit's Leadership (Rites of Battle, etc) and rules that reduce a unit's Leadership (Soulless, Weaken Resolve),
- Whether Librarians equipped with Terminator Armour can make Sweeping Advances,

And so on.

Nurglitch wrote:Frazzled:

Actually it was quite amazing. There was a reason that professor won awards, because he ran one of the best seminars at Dalhousie (also the undergraduate student advisor). I tried it myself. It's a great way of promoting classroom discussion. The interaction is continuous, you can manage large groups of people in a single conversation, and there's a considerable amount of interaction between students as new questions and comments from previously answered students get passed along to people without a question of their own. You really have to see it in action.

You might be right. Would not have worked for most of my classes, but thats not everything.

@ Nurglitch: the thing is that those topics have already been hashed out, so a lot of the thought is out there, it just needs to be cataloged and processed.

I like your idea for a method for dealing with issues that have been hacked at, just not for fresh topics.

MeanGreenStompa wrote:I also believe that discussion must take place. Lets look at the current alleged 'circle jerk' taking place in the YMDC hot-tub, if one on those people posts their view, you post yours, then another of them posts deconstructing your view and reinforcing the first post, then what? Your left with your point of view 'done down' because there aren't enough people backing you up. Ergo popularity contest and we're still left with the problem we have there now.

I dont think anyone is crazy or stupid enough to post in YMDC just on purpose of "backing up" their friend.
As others have mentioned already , such actions cant be done without it sticking out like a sore thumb because
the post wouldnt make sense. I have yet to see anyone agreeing on an issue purely based on "because its him , or because he is my friend"
unless you seen some examples , then i would like to see what you mean .

I think animosity plays too big of a factor in YMDC .

LunaHound wrote:I dont think anyone is crazy or stupid enough to post in YMDC just on purpose of "backing up" their friend.

You might be right Luna, but there are certainly enough "+1, QFT, I agree, etc." to clutter threads.

I think that the concept of posting once in a thread is a nice one. It would (at least for me), make sure that I made a well-reasoned argument, supported by what I thought were the relevant facts, and present my case. If someone then wanted to "I agree" to it, then that's how they'd choose to spend their post.

I also like the idea of categorizing and listing the "common unanswerables" at the top of the forum. If we were able to redirect all the deff rolla, valk, lash, etc. questions to read the already hashed over thread on it before posting it yet again, it might go a long way to lower the ratio of content to noise. I actually appreciate Dakka for being able to keep manageable page counts on its threads, and I think YMDC could use a little more succinctness.

I'd also be in favor of some posting structure. I think this was mentioned earlier, but that a posting should include:

1) Question or Issue
2) OP's understanding of rule/issue
3) Relevant pages/rules/FAQs in support or attempt to answer
4) Conclusion

This cuts out the "I'm at a game and need an answer asap" type posts, and also limits the posts for people without rulebooks, etc. If you require them to quote rules and relevant items, it makes for a fuller discussion from the get-go, rather than having to wait three pages before all the relevant rules are in the thread being discussed.

Like many others, I used to frequent YMDC, but only really look there every so often on a lark. Ofttimes its a trainwreck.

LunaHound wrote:
I dont think anyone is crazy or stupid enough to post in YMDC just on purpose of "backing up" their friend.
As others have mentioned already , such actions cant be done without it sticking out like a sore thumb because
the post wouldnt make sense. I have yet to see anyone agreeing on an issue purely based on "because its him , or because he is my friend"
unless you seen some examples , then i would like to see what you mean .

I think animosity plays too big of a factor in YMDC .

No Luna, no one would be crazy or stupid enough to post in YMDC stating 'because it's him' or 'because he's my friend'. You have entirely missed my point.

The point raised is that people will gravitate to a side of a discussion based on the attitude taken by a group of individuals, people using words like 'cheat' or 'wrong', setting themselves up as the de facto law in that area of the forum. As Cruentus just pointed out, we do see plenty of 'bandwagon' jumpers, who post just to add a single word or abbreviation that holds little merit to the discussion.

Further your post contradicts it's self, you spend a paragraph stating that personal 'issues' aren't the issue, than you finish with a closing statement that entirely clashes with what you just wrote, blaming personal 'issues' for the issue... That sort of ambiguity would not be permitted in YMDC you know.

oh, nearly forgot, here's some huggles backatcha!

/hugglesssssssssss

I am going to close this thread. If others wish it open please PM Yakface. We already have two threads in YMTC and one here on similar topics and this is going to get flamy.