(Cereal):

I just threadsucked the part of Better Board where the last discussion about MARCIE took place. I'll read it tonight, compile a complete spec of this feature and its functionality and post it to see if people agree with it.

I'm for the Marcie (except for the paranoid part of me which thinks everyone will Marcie me), but shouldn't we wait until the other issues that have come up recently (meaning within the last week) with the board are resolved?

And lately, I think everyone's been more concerned with making sure the board was still running/has a future than making additions. Understandably. (xpost w/Perkins)

I think a warning would be good. It's not like we'd be banishing her. Not sure it would DO anything, but that's a whole other issue.

Thanks for stepping up, Paul. I got as far as the threadsuck part myself, and then realized that there's no way I'm even going to get to look over it for days. Put up a yell (in BBaBB) if you need help/input.

I was away from the computer for the past 4 or 5 hours, so I'm getting to this discussion a bit late. Sorry.

*I* was the first person to ask Zoe why she puts quotes around names, and I worded it quite neutrally. Over on WX, I did respond to her random posts in UnAmerican, because they were dropped into the middle of a thoughtful, serious discussion about the war.

I thought about this for a while, and I would have made those 2 posts -- and worded them the same way -- to anyone here. I am not singling her out.

Having said that, I am on the side of the line with the people who think she is being deliberately disruptive. Even if she has mental problems, that doesn't excuse rudeness, and it doesn't excuse a complete unwillingness to apologize.

Nutty said this:

Clearly, I'm at least somewhat of the same mind as Kat on this: I want to create a precedent that cumulative tiny offenses, when not mitigated by some kind of social grooming behavior despite the offense being pointed out by peers, should be tolerated no more than one big offense. The whole idea of warning was to give a head-check to the warnee, to say "Look, dude, you've gone too far. Please stop it."

It's just that, many posters having tried to say the above as individuals, aren't getting a response; maybe it's time that the collective say it.

And I agree entirely.

(waves at Zoe)

I have to agree with Micole .

I think she's deliberately stirring up trouble, and an official stompy warning is long overdue

See, I don't know whether she is doing it on purpose. She might be, but I don't feel that I can say with certainty that she is. I think it's possible that she doesn't quite understand how her posting style differs from Jo(e) Buffista's posting style, and that in the past she FELT she was being attacked when she originally wasn't (eg when someone politely disagreed with something she'd said, or asked for clarification - behaviour that is normal between posters here and doesn't have to have an overtone of personal attack, but which could be read as agressive nit-picking by someone not used to this environment) and that, feeling attacked, she responded by lashing out verbally. Which she felt was responding in kind, whereas the other party then felt that they had been attacked out of the blue.

We're now at a point (and have been for some time) where she only has to make one half-assed remark and many people find their patience has vanished. (I had a flatmate once who had this effect on me. Nice girl, but she drove me completely insane. She only had to walk into a room and I wanted to hit her with a frying pan on general principles.) I think there's a degree of poking-her-with-a-stick that goes on now. I sympathise with it (and am guilty of it myself, actually, because the InnerBitch is strong in this one, young Padawan) but I know it isn't fair. (e.g. the UnAmericans thread cited above, with the rudeness - I love Jim, and I totally agreed with him, and indeed laughed my socks off, but he did pretty much provoke the cited rudeness when he responded to her earlier post (which was not very bright, but also not, I think, intentionally rude) with the gloriously pithy "In a pig's arse." I mean, man, he totally spoke for me. But it was rude, and nobody called him on it. Whereas Zoe's subsequent rudeness [since presumably she will have been surprised/hurt to find herself verbally slapped] was pounced on at once. If I were Zoe, I'd be pretty cheesed off by this.)

I mean, yes, it's perfectly possible that we're being played and the person typing isn't who they present themselves to be, but that kind of game hurts my head, and it gets all existential and you get all suspicious and so forth - so generally speaking I prefer to take people on face value. (Subtext is fabulous for fiction, but in online dialogue I just have to deal with the text and give people the benefit of the doubt. It seems fairer.) So, assuming that Zoe is quite genuine, I think the reason she winds people up is because her posts are often incoherent. Sometimes because the sentence structure is baffling, sometimes because she seems unable to gauge the tone of the conversation she's joining, and sometimes because she doesn't seem to be thinking very clearly. But she doesn't realise this is the case, and she doesn't see a big difference between her posts and those of other people. She's feeling picked on. Other people are feeling frustrated to the point of violence.

There's a consistent failure to connect, both intellectually and emotionally.

FWIW, at least half the time I can't make out what she's saying. This, teamed with a tendancy to make unsupported statements with which I disagree, (and to dismiss other people's attempts to engage with her argument out of hand, in a very schoolchild-ish manner which makes me suppose that she's actually pretty young) brings out the worst in me. But I feel bad for her. I would be hurt if I read this about me, and on the whole I don't think she's being malicious.

But I think we can adapt to different people's styles; some posters do have more abrasive styles of posting. Miracleman, bless his cotton socks of doom, can be quite aggressive, but because he feels like family you just take it in the right spirit. Rio's FUCKOS could be very jarring for a newbie, but cracks up most longterm members of the community. Some people are maybe able to adapt equally to Zoe's style. If that's the case, then I don't feel like it's a case for stompage. Or at least - if any kind of warning were required, that it should just be in the spirit of trying to work things out, since there's clearly a lot of tension, rather than in a telling-off kind of way.

For my part, I do now see the need for MARCIE, because it would be a non-agressive way of dealing with a situation where one is (perhaps unfairly) annoyed beyond the ability to be polite. As and when we get it I'll be delighted.

I'm very frustrated that the work on MARCIE keeps getting shelved, or seeming like it's getting shelved.

Guh. The only coding that's been moved ahead in line is the effort to pare down the posts table. Unfortunately, we can't ask hostrocket's MySQL implementation to Doblerize.

I don't want to seem defensive, but it's been a technologically challenged week, and what we have is a bunch of time-short coders, an unformed testing scenario, and an incompletely specced feature.

Sure, stuff will get done, but it will get done on a schedule that meets the resources.

For the moment, if this is a board-breaking issue, I'd love someone with either a) CVS expertise b) the time to become a CVS expert or c) a CVS alternative to come forward.

We can't responsibly go forward without controls -- having MARCIE be in the works would otherwise forestall or complicate other development or fixes.

I don't want to seem defensive, but it's been a technologically challenged week, and what we have is a bunch of time-short coders, an unformed testing scenario, and an incompletely specced feature.

ita, I don't think anyone would blame you or feeling defensive. I think we're all very acutely aware of how much we owe you and the tech folk. Marcie is a good idea, and as and when it's feasible, that'll be nice. But y'all are busy people.

I'm not sure what the solution to the Zoe issue is, but I can say that, if the *proposed* solution is that 25% of the posters (or more) should just dump her into MARCIE, we have a problematic poster on our hands.

I think the whole board might be better served if warnings were not seen as THE END OF THE WORLD so that they could be meted out when deemed appropriate without a 2000 post debate on the fate of the Buffistas.

Are you saying that now's a bad time with all the up and down stuff here? Sorry, I'm a litttle tech illiterate. I don't think anyone will be upset if you have to say it just can't be done right now. A MARCIE filter with a broken board is a little like a tivo without a tv.