Improve the drama section by making it anonymous

[Rednakin]

Complaints about the drama section have been made before, but most of them suggest that the solution should be to completely remove it.
The intended purpose of the drama section is to talk about problem users and socially pressure them to change their behavior to be more tolerable and inform other users of the problem user's behavior.
I have a solution which could make it more effective at fulfilling its purpose:

Make it so that all users appear anonymous to each other. Moderators should of course still be able to see who's who to ban flamers and other rule breakers. This change would eliminate the following problems which the section currently suffers from:

• Users threatening to "Drama" each other
• Drama derailing because of the controversial identity of the accuser or other partakers
• Problem users making petty dramas as a way to give the appearance that they're nice people instead of changing.
  Setro tried this by accusing 2 people in an otherwise empty server of being liars because their haunted house server didn't have a
  haunted house in it according to his perception
• Drama couldn't focus on subjects that are irrelevant to Blockland.
• Apology threads.
• The current form of drama feeds negative attention seekers
• Drama is not helpful and only causes more chaos.

The change also offers some extra solutions:

• Drama would focus on sharing negative experiences with/thoughts about the person who is accused of being X.
  The anonymity of the users coming forward about someone's problematic behavior makes the social pressure towards the accused much stronger
  and increases the chances that they will change. When the users making accusations can be identified, their ideas have a lesser effect on the accused.
• There's no reason to join drama to "BTFO" users
  The ebin forum rep for "OWN3D'ing" a faceless person also goes to a faceless person.
• The accused can only take part in the discussion anonymously.
  Which means they cannot fuel the drama more. Fire wont spread beyond the initial issue due to the continuation of conflict.

This system would require 2 additional rules to the drama board for it to work:

1. Do NOT reveal your or anyone else's identity - Describe events in third person, crop pictures so that only the relevant messages/activity is visible

2. Do NOT talk about the identity behind anonymous users.

The goal here is to make drama as boring as possible by minimizing conflict to make it a place of calm discussion.

This would completely change how drama threads are created: instead of

Example User: Problem user B deleted my build, forget him
Problem user: Haha you deserved it
*chaos*

Threads would look like this:

Anonymous: Problem user B was in the server Bumpy123's freebuild and deleted Example User's house after he worked hard at it and laughed about it
Anonymous: Problem user B has been acting off lately, he was at Ballsbridge Knife fight saying all kinds of hateful things about people
*Drama never escalates*

What do you guys think?

[Ad Bot]

[Conan]

if anything more anonymity will allow for more hate and mob rule, since nobody is accountable for their opinions or posts. you bring up some valid points though about counter drama, but i dont see drama conversations not escalating simply because posters are anonymous

[Rednakin]

if anything more anonymity will allow for more hate and mob rule, since nobody is accountable for their opinions or posts. you bring up some valid points though about counter drama, but i dont see drama conversations not escalating simply because posters are anonymous

Moderators should of course still be able to see who's who to ban flamers and other rule breakers.

The anonymous posts would be linked to your forum account, but normal users wouldn't see the identity behind drama posts. All rules would still apply, and you would get banned just as much from flaming anonymously as from flaming with an identity.

I don't really see how it could increase "hate and mob rule". Could you give a hypothetical scenario?

[Siren]

I dont think the website this forum uses to run will even allow than, it might have to be moved to another website entirely

[Rednakin]

I dont think the website this forum uses to run will even allow than, it might have to be moved to another website entirely

I thought about that myself, but i don't know what the capabilities of SMF are.

EDIT: http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?action=search;basic_search=anonymous

It should be possible to modify this so that users can only post anonymously.

[Kyuande]

Look at blockland's smf version.. it's incompatible. No, badspot will not update it because of how heavily modified this version is and it would be a pain converting it over.

This is just a terrible idea and will only make the drama section worse.

[Checko2100]

wait wth

if nobody can mention the identity of the problem user which you said would be anonymous as well
how will we loving know who to ban

I can think how a problem user can easily get away with what he has done by not being mentioned
btw if we get drama'd how will we know?

[gr8dayseth]

yeah tbh this would cause more problems than it would solve

[#Jeetlor]

I dont like this idea.

[Rednakin]

wait wth

if nobody can mention the identity of the problem user which you said would be anonymous as well
how will we loving know who to ban

I can think how a problem user can easily get away with what he has done by not being mentioned
btw if we get drama'd how will we know?

As always, seems like I'm not very good at explaining things.

The users who will post in the drama thread in this anonymous version of the drama section will have their identities hidden from each other. They're not allowed to reveal their identity or question the identity of other anonymous users who are posting in the same thread. The OP of the thread will accuse some identified user of bad behavior like crashing servers with some evidence that doesn't reveal who OP is. If you're making a drama thread of someone and the evidence you put forward would reveal who you are because it's from a private chat or skype call etc. most likely this drama is not really related to Blockland or its forum and dragging the community into it is a waste of time.

The anonymous users in this thread will now discuss the identified problem user, reporting their personal experiences with that user. The problem with drama right now, is that often the discussion derails from the OP and drama starts to develop between the users who are posting in the thread, which equals more drama.
When users in drama are anonymous, the drama between anonymous users over poor logic etc. stays in drama. You don't know who called you stupid, and they don't know who they called stupid. Users discuss ideas and the best ideas get most attention. The user's reputation doesn't come into count because they're anonymous.
Because the user who is being accused in the OP cannot reveal their identity if they post in the thread themselves, they can't really defend themselves unless they can outright disprove a claim that has been made against them (e.g. "No, this user did not crash the server, the IP addresses don't match, it must be someone else"). The anonymity means that the accused cannot launch ad hominems or other BS at other users, because the users do not have identities to attack. It's also against the rules to discuss the identities of other anonymous users.

[the_stitch]

While I personally don't think this would be good idea, I feel like nobody else has thought of any merits of the idea.
That Sp0nge8ob guy started out with broken mods, but is beginning to show improvement. Then the dual printer's topic revealed this gem;

now make a PRINTER PLAYERTYPE
nvm
i'll do it

Pls dont..

The whole mob mentality against Sp0nge could be negated by being able to speak of him anonymously, and being able to say that he has done some things at least semi-decently might dissipate some of the aggression here.
Or make it worse, I dunno. Just bringing this to the discussion.

[SWAT One]

This could cause more problems, but I think that there should be a way to reference a post, such as a number indicating the number of posts in the drama board.  For instance, if there are 556,391 posts in the drama board, that post would be numbered Anonymous_000556391 or something.

You're thinking real critically about it, and I applaud it, but it has potential to create problems in place of the ones that it aims to fix.

[Rednakin]

It'd be lovely if people could elaborate more on their disagreement besides just saying "It would cause more problems". I don't see what you mean.

[The Resonte!]

drama becomes more 4chan than 4k!ds

It'd be lovely if people could elaborate more on their disagreement besides just saying "It would cause more problems". I don't see what you mean.

i agree

[Conan]

since normal users have no clue who posted what, a single user could potentially post numerous times to pose as support and nobody would know to report said poster since its not obvious they are the same user

conversely, the number of reported posts would probably skyrocket and badspot wouldnt be annoyed to hell and back. hes mostly washed his hands of this community and probably doesnt want to get deeply involved again.

in addition with anon posts people wouldnt be as accountable for their opinions and will likely post more inflammatory opinions or comments since the only ones that would know who they are would be badspot and the moderators, all of whom dont give a stuff what people do here unless it's against the rules. its one reason why not all drama threads just spiral out of control - people dont generally want to have anathema attached to their name.

i can think of more issues, but these downsides already outweigh the upsides to the conversion