yu-huang,
I somehow missed all of the other drama posts, so I did go back and read them.
Honestly, honestly, what you need to know is this: some of us have been posting on one form or other of this message board for years now. We've been around for a while. And I'll relate to you a story that is indirectly related to the whole issue, and will help you understand our frustrations:
I used to manage an art gallery. It was a very small gallery, so an employee and I basically stood near the door for hours greeting people, answering the same questions over and over, and basically being bored. In the gallery, if one wanted to exit the gallery, one had to push on the door handles (swinging the door outward), not pull. For whatever reason, perhaps the look/design of the handles made people think they had to pull instead of push to exit, and it's easy to just ignore the small "Push" sign above each handle - the human brain tends to edit out what looks like unimportant information. The first few times that I saw gallery patrons tugging uselessly on the doors that required a simple push to exit, I was excepting of it - it's a human foible: If you want to exit a place, and your brain tells you the way to go is by pulling on a door handle, then there's a brief moment of confusion when this simple action doesn't yield the proper results. Right?
So, time passes - we'll skip the boring in between part - and it's two years later, and I'm still standing by the doors, and every day I see gallery patrons pull on the push doors. Each time it's someone new. It's not as if it's the same person every few hours coming in and pulling on the push doors. People from all over the world come to the gallery and for many it's their first and only visit. But you know what? After two years of watching person after person pull on the push doors, I had a small bubbling rage, and so did most of my employees. Why the hell couldn't people read the damn sign above the door that clearly says push? Why the hell can't they realize that if they swung the door outward when they entered, that the door again needs to swing outward from them to ext? Why do some people tug repeatedly and aggressively without even bothering to try pushing? There were days where I was just so pissed off at the push door situation, that I thought that if I saw one more person tug on them that I would just go off on them, clobber them over the head and run out of the gallery screaming. Seriously. Why? Because I'd seen the same damn mistake happen over and over again, hundreds of times.
And that my friend is what is happening here with the newbies. We have had so many newbies come and make the exact same mistakes over and over and over again, that it's really hard to keep perspective and remember that they haven' heard us answering the same damn questions over and over and over. We think, "why the hell don't these people just read a few threads before they make their first post!" The complaint in an earlier locked thread, was that the board rules were previously unposted... and well, the thing is, a lot of the required etiquette of the board can be easily gleaned by simple observation of the status quo. If you look at the hundreds of posts under the Achewood category, you can see exactly how each strip - related thread is labelled and hence how to name your subject heading: list the date, month and year, a tag line related to the strip in some way. Simple. But nearly every newbie makes the same mistake of not bothering to notice. Fools rush in. Each time it's a different person making the same mistake, but this is the internet - it's just a faceless void of text when you're making that first post - we don't get any sense of who the newbie is, but the same damn mistakes glare out from these posts like red hot pokers. And it's especially grating when we have problems, because in most cases this board is like a little utopia - lots of fun, lots of laughs, maybe even actual, genuine friendships.
Newbies all get lumped into a category of "most likely to fuck up," simply so that we can preserve our little word of goodness. It may not be right, but it's the way it is. It's sort of like white people in gated-comunity suburbs - it's nice, its safe, and we really only want to let you in if you already know better than to let your dog shit on our front lawn. It's exclusionary, it's rude, it may even be close-minded, but that's how we maintain a happy message board in a world of shitty ones. It's gotta be a tight ship.
Yu-huang, I've done nothing but enjoy having you here - I missed the things that were edited out, so I don't really know what the kerfuffle was all about. I thought it spoke volumes that you showed up at the chat party - I get that you want to be here.
Author
Topic: AugustWest, I object to "reacting poorly" (Read 22766 times)