Let me go ahead and post my 2 cents as I've been gone for the past 2 months.
It has been stated 1001 times by Shane and the other members of the Twink Info Staff to l e a v e the moderator discussion out of the forums. Problem? Message the Admins or other Moderators. End of discussion. You don't create @mod threads and complain about him/her. That's just purely immature. I know you all love to hate me, that's fine. Sure I'm strict with the CoC, I wrote it.
If you don’t want the community to discuss the moderation team let me give you a hint on what to do: Put it in the CoC. Doing so gives you an actual reason to lock the threads, other than the pathetic @thread excuse.
Contacting the staff is not a reliable option to express dissatisfaction as both admins and half of the moderations are inactive at best and have a history of ignoring private messages. I actually messaged a mod about this very issue only two or three days ago and it got ignored, as usually. Often forum threads are the only way to draw attention to certain matters.
On my first day back an EU member started raging on the forums about me being asked to moderate the forums and enforce the CoC. After Shane had warned him to leave the Moderator discussion off the forums, he found himself with a 2 week ban at Shane's hand which he circumvented earning him an indefinite break from the site. Meanwhile another US user was doing the exact same thing as this EU member, but stopped once he was was warned
I do remember that incident. I remember as well that the thread was located in the Tavern section and got locked because it was not twinking related. In the section that says “Talk about anything here”. No part of the CoC prohibits discussion about the staff, can you really blame people for creating such threads?
Let me go ahead and say any moderation I did in September was backed by the CoC. Simply put, don't swear at other members, don't post IRL pictures of other members, don't spam the forums to attempt to aggravate the TI staff.
Of course your moderation was backed by the CoC, that is because it backs the deletion of
every single post or thread if a moderator wishes to interpret it that way due to the part that says “Infraction Worthy Offenses: Unnecessary Threads”. Does that mean you should delete every thread you consider unnecessary? No, in that situation you should take a second to consider if the thread may be of interest for another part of the community that you are no part of.
The issue is when there is no respect for absolutely anyone on these forums. I have a job to do: Enforce the CoC. I haven't done it in two months. Before banning any member they must first accumulate 3 active infractions for a typical ban. Infractions happen when someone has a hard time posting on these forums while respecting others.
You do not need 3 infractions to get banned, several people have been banned in the past without ever receiving a single infraction, or even a warning.
I warmly welcome all discussion 100% of the time. No discussion has been ended on this site because of the argument, it was ended at the result of there being breaches of the CoC most commonly being related to disrespecting other people.
In situations like that do your job and edit the disrespectful posts, having one or two disrespectful sentences in the whole post is no reason to delete it entirely, or even lock the thread. Doing so is just laziness and lack of effort from the mods’ side.
There were on[y a handful 19 members who tried to keep the community going after things really died down. These are the people who actually played in the last few games 19s had, played and organized wargames and world pvp events. Most of the people posting in this threads were not any of these members who tried to help the bracket endure a patch that is very, very game changing. These people typically never once stood by the idea that causing drama on TI was a necessity to the existence of the bracket.
And this handful of 19 members you mentioned seemed to be a minority as they could not generate pops without the “elitists”.
I have a thread of 52 users along with evidence for each and everyone of them which supports how they earned themselves a ban.
I don’t see how this is relevant as you won’t share it anyways.
This is the blanket concept for the CoC. If you can post whilst following this you will never have a warning, infraction or a ban:
Discuss whatever you would like to on these forums as long as you are not talking about problems with the TI staff (PM the Admins or Moderators themselves), disrespecting others or being extremely off topic (@threads are spam as they can be dealt with via PM). There simply is no reason nor excuse for a disrespectful post.
The CoC is highly subjective. If a mod decides to hand out a ban or an infraction it allows them to do so. Note that I am not saying that this is how the majority of the bans happened.
About the PMs, please refer to my second paragraph.
If there isn't any information to be shared, discussion to be had or organization of any event is there really a necessity to post a thread in this section? I honestly don't feel as though the fact that members want more drama is not reason enough to do so... If you want drama: skype group calls can handle many people. Go at it there.
Thank you
There were discussions to be had in the majority of the threads that got locked, they were just either about topics the moderation team, or certain moderators, did not approve of, or got locked because a moderator did not put in the effort to moderate it (which is kind of ironic, isn't it?). Let the people have their drama as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. That’s the great part about forums: If you don’t want to be part of the drama, simply avoid the thread.
Also note that when I say “you” I usually mean the entire staff, not you as a person.