Tabula Rasa
Well this isn’t going to be an easy post to make and it's going to end up being stupidly long because of the shit I need to cover.
So how not to sound like a pompous windbag fuck or like I’m doing a rotary club speech or some shit? How to get across to people I’m making some changes for the best?
Anyhoo welcome to the new incarnation of the legendary Roth Army Website.
I first posted here around 2000. Like many of you I don’t really post at other message boards,
I somehow got drawn into this one. I think that was mainly because of the charisma and plain common sense of the founder who instinctively laid out a way to do this kind of site for all these years which worked so well.
Over the years it’s become a community more than anything else. Yeah Classic Van Halen/Dave Lee Roth has been my favourite music since 1979 but that would not have been enough for me to keep posting and reading stuff here all that time, it’s become a bit more than the music.
Anyhoo I digress. I would like to thank my pal Sarge for trusting me with the site. I see this very much as a trusteeship. It’s not my new toy, an ego thing or whatever. After the pain of going through two penis reduction operations in the 1990s the last thing I would want to do is go through that again.
Sarge wanted to move on and particularly given a number of issues/problems/opportunities at this time I felt I should step up.
I’d like to thank Sarge for his faith in me as the best second choice and all of the kind posts people have made on the news.
So now I have to tell a bunch of people what I’m doing with their site and try to justify doing things they don’t want me to.
Moderators
This is the most difficult part of this for me.
The obvious path for me would be to go to a dozen of my old pals here and from DDLR and make them moderators. I would continue to be reasonably popular and we could all stagger on to the next crisis.
I’m not going to do that.
Most of you will have noticed that there have been huge fights and arguments here among very long standing members and many people are upset. It’s spilled over to affect people who only had the best intentions and motivations and it’s all got a bit ugly and tiresome.
I’ll be honest and say that I’ve only read less than half of the fights and I’m still not completely sure what it was all originally about.
So I have been thinking about why we get into these cycles of appointing great people and then there being fights and problems in cycles.
I’ve been involved in these sites for 13 years now and in the last few weeks in particular really thought about it and come to the conclusion that the model we have been using just doesn't work. Assigning a forum to someone doesn't make their posts better or even more prevalent. Once you have a bunch of moderators there are two possible outcomes.
a) They start fighting with each other which is a misery
b) They collect together and fight as a team in a ‘musketeers’ all for one way.
I used to think b) was cool but it isn't really. If you get into an argument with a moderator where say you both have equally valid points it can give them the upper hand and I don’t think that’s good. To be honest one of the main reasons I hesitated taking up this gig was that I'm really going to miss having big debates on here, I'm not sure that will be possible now.
So why have moderators at all? Well if you are a new website I guess it is a way to attract people into the fold but that novelty will soon wear off. Second reason is to do the essential shit of dealing with the really bad stuff. To that end I've appointed two Super mods who I don’t actually know very well personally but have watched for a long time and respect. These are guys that are very cool headed and don’t get drawn into arguments while having some IT tech skills.
No one has been sacked!
That’s an even more ridiculous statement to make here than on the Apprentice (and I have better hair - just)
In the new model the roles don’t exist.
A minority of people were irritated by some of the actions of moderators here. I think they did an amazing job under crazy circumstances. The guy that owned and defined the site was forced to be an absentee landlord for close to what 8 years? (EDIT: Absentee landlord maybe isn't the best term to use, superhero lifesaver is maybe better).
During all that time the moderators and in particular VA Beach were caught in a completely fucking impossible position of having responsibility without power trying to interpret what Sarge would want done. That’s a terrible trap and if occasionally the odd mistake was made, people should remember that prior to that we had a guy called Mezro…
It’s going to really weird for a short while without FORD being a moderator or whatever but I want to ask people particularly the mods themselves to take a step back and think about what it was like being one. We rarely used our powers as is right, it certainly didn’t make me post any more in my forums, the only thing it did do is give access to a moderator forum which usually consisted of posts about worries and problems and complaints.
I honestly think that once people get used to the idea they will enjoy being here more.
If in time it turns out I'm wrong about this I will change, you know me I'm Mr Rationalist.’
Also I'm going to be getting in touch with people to ask if they would be willing to do specific jobs for the site rather than the non-job of being a moderator. Surely it’s much cooler to, for example be the guy that holds the DLR Army Guitar Online Workshop Session advertised on social media than the guy who moved a thread from the Non forum to the Music Forum last March?
So a bit of an outline on where we're going here. I'll tidy this up and sort out the inconsistencies with the other parts of the site. All the fucking fun stuff...
The Dump Forum
We’re going to try this as a virtually unmoderated forum again. That means if it isn’t illegal and it’s not physically on the site then whatever goes. It will only be accessible to members and will be marked as being NSFW.
If something is horrendous we will just delete it. I don’t want to define horrendous here I think we’ll know it when we see it.
Rules
Writing rules about what is essentially meant to be a bit of fun pastime is so not in my nature(I don’t think it was in Sarge’s either), but I guess someone has to and better us than the kind of person that likes doing it.
A) Personal Information
No posting of other people’s personal information without permission, names addresses etc. I think it’s self evident that people should be allowed to post here anonymously.
B) The Spit Roast Rule
No posting of photographs of other people that they haven’t put on this site themselves. If they subsequently ask for their original picture to be removed we will do that and remove any use you have made of it.
To clarify this rule, if for example you post a picture of your maiden aunt’s 90th birthday party here and someone photoshops her being spit roasted by a shaking Gary Busey and Oprah wearing a strap-on and posts it in the Dump forum we will not touch it. That is totally fine. If you ask for your original picture of the party to be removed we will do that and remove the spit roast picture. BUT if someone finds your Facebook page, lifts the picture from there and does the same photoshop we will delete it and ban them. I would take from this rule that it’s probably not a great idea to post pictures of your maiden aunt here but maybe you don’t like her? Or maybe you like her too much.
We’re going to call this new rule the ’Spit Roast Rule’ for shorthand.
C) PENISES!
There has from the start been a ban on posting any male LOVEAPPARATUS™®© at this site. In the past ladies or at least girls have complained about the obvious, blatant misogyny and hypocrisy of this rule.
This rule has to remain for posts in moderated forums because without it things quickly go to shit. Without it you end up with penis avatars and hardcore porn everywhere which will trigger Websense™®© type software and stop all the people who come to the site as an all too brief relief from tiresome office jobs.
If you have to come here to find proper porn on the internet then I’m afraid you are too dumb to post here.
D) Personal Threats
No ‘credible’ personal threats. Credible is the key word here. If you want us to go to the police, try and make yourself credible.
E) Don’t be a total dick!
Having a small team and the owner around more means in technical terms we can be more common law rules rather than a codified system. Guitar Shark knows what I mean... in plain English because we won’t need to second guess what was meant by a rule made by someone who can’t be there we can be more flexible and reactive. If you invent a new way of being a total dick don’t expect to get off on the technicality of it not being covered by the above.
In the last week I've read posts where people said that at the DDLR site we didn't censor as much as was traditionally done here. That's entirely untrue, but we did it more but with attitude and in an amusing way.
Banning
This is also going to really annoy some of you but this is a clean slate. We will be unbanning genuine posters. That of course doesn’t in any way make them immune from being banned again in 20 minutes time. This is an amnesty, a time for peace and reconciliation. Before you get too annoyed at past crimes remember these were just words on a forum on the internet, nobody died. I’m sorry but this is the nature of what this site was originally about. It was and is going to be a little more ‘robust’ than many forums online – heat and kitchen. I received a life ban from my football teams Forum a few years back because I was flicking between it and here and replied to a post there as I would here…
Banning is going to be a last resort, just don’t be a total dick. We will be using temporary bans rather than permanent unless you are persistently just ruining the site. We don’t think it’s equitable to stick lifetime bans on people because they do something dumb one night rather than kicking their cat.
That said this should not be seen as a new soft limp wristed approach, just more flexible. We won’t hesitate to use cruel and unusual punishment.
Cheers and have fun!
