What will your reaction be if you are suspended?

This is interesting to me. Even though I'm not an atheist, I agree with you that atheists are a very diverse group and that atheism is not, to use your words, a monolithic system of belief. In contrast, many (if not most) political ideologues insist upon a monolithic party line with the result that so-called moderates or centrists are alienated from the political culture and may even decide to give up on voting in elections, especially when choosing either party would require the violation of one's conscience.

See? Nothing wrong with being upset upon qualifiers you don't belong to..

This relates to negative stereotyping. I once came across a bigoted book that had been written by a sociology professor in which she attacked a particular category of boys and men to which I happened to belong. She ascribed certain negative characteristics to the members of this group that I definitely did not possess. I was quite angry that some hateful stranger living half a continent away from me -- someone who knew nothing about me -- would attack me simply on the basis of a morally neutral categorization. But I did get something out of it: I got an even better idea of how a Jew feels who examines antisemitic hate literature and how a black person feels who examines white supremacist hate literature.

Well, he's not here to dispute this, and I'm not his mouthpiece so I guess you get the last word.

Bullshit. Half those followers aren't posting anymore, and several more are suspended.

What the truth of your claims the man still had 20 followers listed compare to your 15.

I can't wait! If I aint banned by then, Imma start-up a whole shitload of communities where I am the sole dictator, eh? Communities, like, for example:

1. "Don't come round this here joint if you're some no-laughin muthafukka who aint got no sensa humor"
2. "Ya want moderation? Hit the road, chump. There aint none here"

Imma have MILLIONS of members, I tellya!

Doesn't that sound a little like forming a committee to regulate anarchy?

Well, it might sound like that, Rog, and it might be that, but that aint the important thing, eh? The important thing is that I'm the dictator, and when I want to break my own rules, I throw some bums out, see? Whatta they gunna do about it?

Now look here. You can't be both Fats Domino and Edward G Robinson.

I would quit altogether. It's part of my policy against fora with meddlesome rules. I know I don't spam, I know I don't troll, and apart from that, I maintain civility on what seems like a common-sense basis to me. Occasionally, that's not good enough to keep me from violating a form's terms of service. (I don't read them on principle.) If my common sense is not good enough to stay in a website's good graces, I conclude that this is probably not a place where I'll feel comfortable, and leave.

Who sez, eh? I love and emulate both them guys, ya know?

Good thinkin, Tom.

The current software doesn't allow us to provide an message to suspended users other than simply "spam" or "inappropriate" as the reason. It was yet another part of the software never finished and is yet another glaring inadequacy the current platform has. This was compounded with the server that hosts the help desk portion of the site having multiple disk failures and going offline (which is usually where people are supposed to go if they want more information on a suspension) for a few days.

In any case, thankfully the new platform will both bring improvements to messaging for suspensions as well as allow us to not have to become involved in this kind of suspension at all. The current thread format makes it so that any protracted argument ruins a thread, the new one will better support people going at it till they are blue in the face without others having to have their conversation interrupted. Should be a win win for pretty much everyone.

So, then, there's your answer, eh, Timma?

Well basically anyone will be able to start their own community. If you want to start a "serious only" community you will be free to do so, and kick out anyone who violates your rule by cracking jokes. If you want a positive community you can make one, and censor all the negative nancys.

You will also be able to make a complete free-for-all. Where there are no rules other than the very basic ones (mainly no egregious spam and nothing illegal). There will be free communities and paid ones, with the main difference being that the paid ones can use their own domain (that they own) and will be able to be under a looser content policy that will mainly just prohibit illegal content.

The free communities (which will be the bulk of the ones I think users will create) will have a bit stricter content policies, for example we aren't going to host any porn, hate speech etc on the free communities that run on our own domain.

Users will be able to choose what communities they subscribe to, so it's no big deal if you hate the idea of a "positive only" community, just don't join one. And there will be communities around specific topics more often, allowing everyone to better choose the kind of content they want to see.

So here's how it will play out, more or less:

A2K is just going to be one of many communities and will focus itself on learning. It will not be a place for word games and other banter but there will be communities we help start just for word games and just for general conversation.

Think of it like different forums on a forum just like old school forum sites but each forum will have its own membership and leaders and will be about whatever they want it to be, and be run however they want to be.

So there will be a "general" or "water cooler" community or whatever the person who creates it will call it (we will start a bunch of them ourselves to get things going). There will be a politics community, there will be communities about areas (countries, states or cities) there will be communities about subjects (programming, art, science, sports, poker etc) there will be communities about tone (positive, no censorship, conflict etc) and there will be communities about random nonsense.

You'll be able to choose which ones you are a member of, you'll be able to start your own and run it your way. It's a platform for community and the fabric to make this a community of communities. The content policies will be very lenient and users will be able to choose what kind of subjects and what kind of moderation they want to join.

Basically this is going to become a platform to make your own communities. I'm gonna get a2k back to the knowledge sharing etc focus it was meant to have, as well as make a bunch of other communities that a2k has come to include as microcosms within it. Others will rapidly do the same and make communities about whatever they want.

Should be interesting, and yes I too think more people should be curious about what kind of communities they want to either create or be a part of. Both in terms of what kind of subject matter they want to follow (some will relish the fact that politics will have its own community and others will relish the fact that word gamers can have their word game community) as well as in terms of what kind of leadership and policy there will be. Some will be a lot stricter (enforce a "scientific answer only" policy on a science forum, for example) and some will be a lot less. Some will probably do a better job at running their communities and some will do worse.

And we'll no longer have to have one tone that works for all, we'll all get to vote with our feet and if they don't like the science community's rules they can start their own science community with their own rules allowing users to use whichever they prefer.

What!? No porn!? That's misrepresentation then. That aint free.

Whenever I've found myself suspended from a forum it usually was because of some rule I didn't know about and I either came back or not based on whether I found the forum valuable.

One of the early big webmaster forums was so strict about "spam" that they had a no links policy (except for famous newspapers for news). You couldn't discuss your site with a link to an example, you could only copy and paste code etc. It wasn't very useful as a result. You also weren't allowed to argue at all. Not even politely.

I got suspended to find out those rules, and while I disagreed with them a lot I don't base my participation in a forum too much on how much I agree with the rules. Everywhere on earth has a bunch of silly rules ("no shirt no shoes no service" in a beachside restaurant was one I thought particularly silly) and if you want to get in you have to play by them.

So each time it came down to the value the community had for me. The webmaster forum was the largest one around and before the age of twitter etc it was one of the sources for google employees to talk to webmasters before they started their youtube channels etc to better communicate.

The rules were silly and ended up helping kill the community but while it was valuable I stayed around and kept to them.

Other times I've been banned for having a point of view contrary to that of a community and in those cases I mostly just let go, I can live with a corner of the internet not being represented by my point of view.

Some people take things very seriously and I've heard death threats, threats to sue, and accusations of all variations of Nazihood. Some people take it real hard. I think that by being on the other side of the fence and it just being about trying to have a community you want to be about a certain something or run a certain way for the moderator makes me not really take it personally.

If a community doesn't want me I'm not gonna waste my time forcing myself on them, if a community suspends me for breaking their rules my participation in the community remains dependent on what it always was: whether it is worth the time to read it in the first place. The rules will influence that very slightly, the members and content are what matter. I've never felt embarrassed at all about being suspended from a community, it's just some idiot like me on the other end who decided to do it and if I want the content enough to tolerate what I need to get it I'll play by their rules, if I don't want their content enough it doesn't matter what their rules are anyway.

I know you are just being facetious and making a throwaway joke but I don't wanna pay to host it, if someone else wants to use the platform for that they'll have to pay to have their own porn community on their own domain.

We don't allow it now anyway, so this would actually be an example of the new platform being more open. I'm never going to agree to pay to host porn on my domains but if someone wants to host a porn forum on their own domain using this platform it is something I think is going to be allowed (the content policies are going to evolve, but where it stands it is intended to be very permissive since users can vote with their feet more easily).

This is what I'm talkin about, right here, eh?: