There needs to be more communication - General

This is in regards to Hezzy's stream. Why are you doing a stream? Not only can you not quickly search for questions and answers, you're also ignoring the responses on the forums. Why not just make a thread? You know, like the whole intent and purpose this entire change is supposed to be? Why are you discussing forum matters off the forums? Instead of just locking threads and giving attitude, maybe post what exactly you mean and explain details, because as it is right now there are conflicting reports from multiple people on the mod team. And speaking of mods, it seems like there's also a lack of communication among the mod team as well, with mods contradicting one another as well as Garry. Why implement sweeping changes like this when not everybody is on the same level of understanding?

this entire day has been nothing short of embarassing in so many ways.

This is from a post in Forum Discussion seven months ago directly from Hezzy: https://i.imgur.com/lp2HW45.png Forums Discussion v3 What happened to this? Why are we giving as few users as possible a chance to communicate with the CM by switching all discussion off the forums? For someone championing transparency and accountability, there sure seems to be a clear lack of that as of late.

I mean back during the last ban wave with the tudd nonsense, he closed the thread when people kept asking what is he going to do, and to ask for any kind of detailed respones to what happened. Then he just closed the thread saying people are derailing it or some dumb excuse. I mean shit, pascal has always been more vocal and open to discussion.

I really don't know what they want from us. They don't want us to have megathreads, it seems like if your thread is to specific you get banned. Threads seem to always be one post away from being locked due to it being considered a "megathread" making sure no conversations can last. I really don't understand how this is all suppose to attract new users and make current users stay and enjoy the site.

From what I've gathered from Pascall (who is trying her best to keep the rest of us informed), it seems like the mods didn't really get a heads-up of the situation either.

That’s a great way to implement sweeping changes.

no no don't you see we need a million different forums with one thread each it's so much more organized :downs:

Honestly it's a surprise this forum isn't in a worse state when it's developed by people that don't use it and who seemingly don't know how to communicate even amongst themselves.

thread closed by hezzy: it's a megathread headass

Does this count as a megathread ?

I wouldn't say it is but who knows anymore

Hasn't this whole issue of banning mega threads been floated before? What exactly is different this time (other than being on a specially developed platform rather than vBulletin)

I thought we were still okay on Megathreads, it's just that people had the option to post their question/thing as a separate entity now. Did that suddenly change?

Garry wants to bring back more sub forums in favour of fewer massive megathreads as its less intimidating for new users. In doing this there was some mis-communication where people thought megathreads were flat out banned, which they are not.

not sure what you're referring to?

Garry has said megathreads are fine, Hezzy has said no, Mods have no fucking clue, Users have no fucking clue.

It would have been far wiser to give everyone a heads up about changes, or at the very least, the mod team, so people dont get permabanned for posting how they thought was intended. That way the kinks could have been ironed out without frustrating everyone because their forum is now arbitrarially harder to use without warning.

Yeah but the permabanning was garry going on one of his little sprees, most of the bans were technically legit, others not but i dont think they should have been perma. Especially since its currently impossible to even unban people

I mean yea you can make that argument for josh and mort (tho josh spamming like 50 threads for 90 minutes was fucking stupid regardless lmao. you should be posting threads when you actually have something to say, not just for the hell of it..), but it really needs to be pointed out that the rest that garry perma'd were people just spamming like mad. They weren't interested in trying to see if this could work, they were trying to spam like crazy as some sorta goofy protest. We need to actually give garry's ideas a fair try ->under normal not-spamming conditions<- first before declaring they're impossible. garry fixed that on the last update actually

Even without spam threads look at how many threads in GD and GGD are tagged, and how many actual GD and GGD threads are being pushed back to several pages deep. That's the entire fucking point of people getting mad over this change and it seems the mod team and Garry are just completely ignoring it and going "You guys are just mad because change"

How did the no unban button come about anyway? Intentional or accidental?

I get that, but it's still something garry worked on and something we should give a fair try on before throwing in the towel. That, and from what i've seen from garry, it sounds like he's still got some more features that'll be tacked on to it. And ofc it's not like this is set in stone. Getting tweaks as we go along is totally possible and probable.

Fair enough then

We have given feedback, but it ends with the threads being locked and Garry staying silent. He hasn't responded to my previous thread that had a list of feedback and concerns at all. And that's the point of this current thread.

I don't mind giving garry's ideas a try but I'd prefer he didn't ram them down our throats first without any kind of warning. It'd also be nice if he and hezzy informed everyone of what they were doing, because in this case there was a huge breakdown in communication that lead to whole the fiasco. I think that's something everyone, mods included, would agree with. Am I wrong? I don't think anyone can tell me that garry and hezzy's roll-out of this change was stellar after the events of last night.

I can only go off the currently cut-off event log, but to my recollection, the only threads locked were garry's two threads which got axed because they became clusterfuck's, and also Jerry's thread which gave a bullshit explanation of garry's bans (he even blamed me for their posts lol ok) which garry locked and gave a full explanation for. beyond that I see lots of threads still going just fine? and garry and hezzy do read the stuff posted here, even if they don't reply to it all. things are hectic as fuck right now so i'd give them both time before declaring that they must be ignoring you or some such.

I'd say that a pretty remarkable difference between the 16x16 avatar choice and the current debacle is that that was a bad idea being implemented in a testing environment, whereas this is a bad idea being implemented in a live environment with no alternative. If this was just an idea being floated or tested on a separate forum nobody would be anywhere near as mad about it.

i mean yea but at the same time we didn't really have the luxury of sitting around on VB anymore. the constant account hijackings and threats to user security were just too big of an issue and becoming too frequent to overlook any longer. I guess maybe garry could've set up some sorta opt-in view for this feature, but then nobody would've used it and garry couldn't have gotten a decent look at how people would adapt to it, which is what his goal is with this in regards to too many megathreads. Just gotta roll with it, and if you don't like something, give some calm constructive feedback explaining it.

I had and have no problems with newpunch itself. Losing some features sucked but that comes with moving to new software. Completely changing the way the forum operates and making the bizarre decision to chop up megathreads is not something inherent to the new forum software, none of the current drama is even about newpunch anymore. Not sure what relevance the move from VB has with regards to this discussion.