Moderators Musings

Its certainly been a strange and exciting month on-board. We recently completed our massive Debate Tournament, the first full tournament all year. Large part in thanks to the participants and Moderator Amyorymeltzer. The previous tournament collapsed in on itself because of a number of reasons, most I'm not even familiar with myself. But I can certainly understand how they can collapse, this one almost did. We had a lot of people that were eager to participate, but, as so often happens, 'real-life' concerns can intrude on this little universe of ours. Numerous people had to drop out of the competition entirely at a number of stages within it. At a few points, we were seriously concerned about the survival of the tournament all together. But the remaining posters were able to roll up their virtual sleeves and dig into the topics, blazing new trails in the subjects at hand.

Behind all that we've been working on special debate projects, we've got some really exciting ones lined up for the members.

Some members may have seen the efforts to quell political trolling. The political troll is apparently a sub-species of Homo subponticus, however its difficult to get the proper data to make this analysis since the natural habitat of the troll, under a toll bridge, can be difficult to access. The political troll does retain many of the characteristics of all trolls however, such as being highly agressive, smug, unintelligent, and having 'attention' as a food source. Its not properly understood how a troll is able to live off of posts. Some have become highly adapted to it though and can go through long periods of inactivity, slowly digesting a large serving of posts. But eventually even the most hardy of trolls has to feed again. The troll is unusual in that it gets its nourishment by setting out lures, tapping off posts that will provoke well expected, knee-jerk responses. Often these are easy to identify for the savvy poster, and thus they are able to avoid becoming prey to the troll. However, in an evolutionary arms-race, many trolls have adapted to have very intricate and subtle lures. This, as with all evolutionary processes, isn't intentional, trolls have no real thinking or planning abilities, short of generally knowing where to stop before being booted. Rather, its simply that unsubtle trolls starve away in a well tended to board, and all that remains are ones who tend to have these more complex and less obvious lures. The result of this is that many an unsuspecting prey sees the lure, is attracted to it and feels compelled to 'speak out' against the lure, to 'let other posters know that this troll is spouting off B.S.". And thus the troll receives another much needed meal. Please fellow posters, don't feed the trolls, political or otherwise. The conservation of species and maintenance of biodiversity is an admirable, worthwhile goal, in that 'real life' place, but not on board.

Some people strongly believe in universal concepts of balance between good and evil, or harmony in the world, such that when one set of circumstances tug in one direction, another, often seemingly unrelated thing, tugs in another direction. I don't know about all that, but the recent introduction of Podcasts to our fora certainly helps to offset the discord that problems like the above bring. The board is truly ahead of its time in offering this service to members. Podcasts barely exist as is. They're, in my opinion, equivalent to the internet before it included 'the world wide web', very basic, really interesting, with incredible potential, but almost no one knows about them. Regardless, podcasts have landed. Now individuals already connected to the internet, with little more additional equipment than a simple, single microphone, can broadcast audio content to thousands of Feed Aggregators and regular Browsers with near seamless integration and automation. Referring back to the internet analogy, this is like jumping from ftp technology to macromedia flash and xml tech without going through html; its a Quantum leap into a new dimension.

And all this was accomplished shortly after a full server upgrade, while massive hurricanes wreak havoc for contributors, and that 'real life' thing plays out too. Mind boggling.

     Nygdan
     ATS Moderator





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