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Originally Posted by ziadel
He described to me his experience getting shot for christs sakes. If you dont want newbies to see someone sharing the details of an obviously painful life changing experience because it might turn them off, mebbe they're just not TFP Material.
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Those are definitely NOT the kinds of things that were troubling in the shoutbox. Those sorts of things were the highlights of the shoutbox. In terms of newbies, the problem was the "chat" nature of the feature. The site is intended to be a mature, adult forum. That doesn't mean supressing our fun sides, but let's be honest here - Tilted Nonsense and Chat are the places for silliness, by and large. We don't want to be Nazis about this, but having a scrolling box that highlights that part of our nature gives the impression that it is a huge part of what TFP is, when it's not. We like to be silly, but adult conversation is our differentiator.
I sent this PM to Will earlier tonight, but given some of the more recent replies, I thought I'd share my message to him with everyone:
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Originally Posted by ubertuber, in PM to Willravel
Good post in the shoutbox thread. One thing we talked about was having an irc client with an interface that was open in the spot where the shoutbox was. Unfortunately, there's nothing like that available on a plug-in basis, and it doesn't seem too likely for someone on ou rstaff to code an IRC platform.
I think there has long been a feeling that #tfp is somehow the bastard step-child of the TFP family. We've had lots of conversations about how to revitalize it (or vitalize it, I guess, since it's always been like this) but no answers yet.
Unfortunately the shoutbox thing also lay on a faultline between some people with philosophical differences, leading to the mess in today's thread.
If there's one thing we can say definitively about TFP, it's that it still isn't perfect...
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Here's what I'd like to have people take from this thread:
The people who work as staff here aren't perfect. They give of their time and try to make good decisions about how to encourage the site to grow according to its owner's vision. Sometimes good decisions make people unhappy, but that doesn't mean that we're trying to set up adversarial relationships with our users. The shoutbox thing is decided for now, and we want to see what direction several aspects of the site will take in its absence. That doesn't mean that we won't continue to look for even better solutions in the future.
If you have suggestions, please share them - in a thread, by PM, whatever. But when you're doing so, please try to remember that we put a LOT of hours and a LOT of ourselves into this place. When we feel like we are being attacked or jerked around, we can get defensive. We're only human.