Thirith on 4/5/2014 at 08:59
I think there's a difference between being a community manager for a company, and therefore in the public eye, and saying something on Twitter (even though it was on his personal account), and being SubjEff (or indeed SubJeff) and saying something on the TTLG forums. I also think there's a difference between the latter and being the CEO of Mozilla and donating to the Prop 8 campaign.
I may well be wrong and you may well be right, but for now I reserve the right to think you overreacted.
SubJeff on 4/5/2014 at 09:08
That's just it though, it's his personal account. This is my personal TTLG account. And it wasn't my opinion that was the issue, it was peoples responses and accusations. If it can happen on a forum where you can read the entire thread at leisure imagine snapshots posted for the now now now crowd.
Kolya on 4/5/2014 at 10:12
You should read the comments in the link you posted. Kotaku editor Jason Schreier explains multiple times how lines between company work and private opinion blur in the kind of PR job Olin had. And he - as a public figure himself - explains the different responsibility you have as a public figure.
Anyway, I'm sure you're not the only one with scissors in his head (German idiom for self-censorship). And indeed, it's not like the old times any more, when most of us had nothing to lose and teachers and bosses hadn't discovered the internet yet. Conscience does make cowards of us all, so for an open discussion atmosphere it may be more constructive to remove the scissors than to endlessly discuss if they're reasonable or not. And making one subforum members-only really isn't a big deal.
demagogue on 4/5/2014 at 10:18
On topic, my thinking about an IRC like box might indeed be separable from this idea of a social-subforum. Well I'm not sure. But my thinking of the IRC box goes back of course to the long history we have with IRC and Steam and Facebook chats, and whatever other kinds of live chat.
There's always been demand for IRC like chatting; but there's not been the best forum for that. It's not meant to be for serious discussion (like a full on social forum may be). It's supposed to be throwaway chatting of little things you don't want to make a whole thread for, like you have some minutes to kill while you're waiting to go out and you want to shoot the breeze.
The problem with classic IRC is you have to go to that channel and hope people are around, otherwise there's nothing there. The issue with Facebook is other things are going on, and the chat comes in & imposes on you while you may want to do other stuff on FB. The advantage of a box on TTLG is it's something you can poke in and out of easily at your leisure for as long or as short as you like, no special place to go (since you were coming to TTLG anyway), doesn't impose on you like FB or Steam chat, it's just there if anyone wants to jump in and chat for a few minutes and then run. No big topics of the day, much less epic threads. Just little things you want to chat about in the few minutes you have before the bus comes kind of chats. And anyone is free to chat along or not, but even if they don't it's not lost (IMO); sometimes you just want to throw something out there & have people read it.
Well that's my thinking on it & why I brought it up.
Muzman on 4/5/2014 at 10:58
You seem somewhat behind the times there SJ.
Where I work there's stuff posted everywhere for the kids to read that "The first rule of talking about work online is You Do Not Talk About Work Online". When you speak online you are a representative of this organisation. Do not name the company, do not talk about your managers, do not talk about your co-workers on any public forum. This includes especially facebook and twitter. Any percieved bullying, racism or other discrimination or anything damaging to the reputation to the company that can be linked back to you is a summary sacking offense! It is in your contract. Read it.
Harsh perhaps (and I'm pretty sure none of this has had its limits tested in court), but this is how cautious companies are being and have been for a while. And it has nothing whatever to with any perceived captious "PC mafia" looking to hang anyone who won't toe the line. It's entirely obeying the law and protecting reputations. You can blame the Daily Mail as much as anyone else who can spin.
Additionally, if I have the impression correct about what happened, the discussion about Eich and the fallout has one central point; it concerns actual acts that he took. Something actually happened. Talking vaguely about relative values and using pedophilia as an example is extreme but not yet supporting actual pedophilia. To paint the internet as a medieval place of Cardinal Reichelieu-esque judgement is, well, hysterical at the moment
demagogue on 4/5/2014 at 11:26
Mmmm, it's not really a matter of it being on a browser. It's a matter of people already being around it for other reasons, so they can see what's going on while independently already visiting, and like a dozen or more people on at all times. That's the advantage Steam & FB chat had, because people (and a lot of them) were on there anyway, all the time. But if there were a side box on TTLG running #thief, if that were technically possible, that might be cool.
But also something always "on", whether you're there or not, you can drop by and see the whole thing and scroll up and see the history, which vanilla IRC doesn't have. That's more like FB chat. Or like the original link I posted in my first post, which is still what I think is ideal.
As an aside, the (
http://forums.thedarkmod.com/) Darkmod site has a sidebar kind of chat ("status updates") that's nice to see what people are up to and little chats. That's another kind of option, although it has a slightly different function too.
Edit: I think the options are like: statuses (like Twitter), status "threads" (like FB, G+ & the darkmod sidebar), chats (IRC, Steam, FB chat), forum threads and their variations, including the subforum idea here.
Kolya on 4/5/2014 at 12:12
Quote Posted by demagogue
But if there were a side box on TTLG running #thief, if that were technically possible, that might be cool.
But also something always "on", whether you're there or not
The first is possible, but only by placing the rest of TTLG in a frameset. Otherwise the chat-connection will be lost every time you load a link. It would still suck because of browser tabs.
The second thing is only possible via external services (eg irccloud.com) that retain the IRC log. But that cannot be embedded. It also raises privacy concerns when an external service starts monitoring #thief or any other channel 24/7.
