Abusive Mods.

[Ziergdsx18]

Originally Posted by who_cares973

Tengo un gato en mis pantalones

Nice "Toy Story" related reference.

[kommisar]

also, I speak a tad of german, just have a hard time understanding it orally.

french is my first, english was my 3rd oups

+1 for multlanguage board since i'd love to be able to learn some new languages where I can actually practice it

[ddrxero64]

Well, even if we are allowed to speak other languages where appropriate...

where appropriate? I wouldn't know. If there was a specified place I could speak spanish it would help. I like learning from others as well, as kommisar phrased it. My spanish isn't top notch but talking with others helps. Hopefully something can be done (multilanguage forum, etc.), and I'd love to see more diversity here (not that there isn't some to a certain extent).

[who_cares973]

I've always wanted to learn french. Maybe you can help me kommi ;*

[ic0slay3r]

Originally Posted by Ziergdsx18

Nice "Toy Story" related reference.

"Tengo una serpiente en mi bota" is the toy Story reference :P

EDIT:

Damn I really wanted to help the community, but yeah being active and staying most of the time in the tournament section of the forums doesn't help much in getting noticed.

[ddr_f4n]

Originally Posted by Velocity

I think we stopped caring about it. Anyway, according to Jae it wasn't a different language he was banned for, it was talking in caps.

Then it turned into this, funny. By all means, talk in another language, just where appropriate.

You guys should go and update the rules a bit then.

I mean, I don't even think of it as a bannable offense, just a really friendly reminder that the forum's main language is English and that not many would understand them if they spoke a different language. As long as you don't spam in another language it's fine. It's even better if they kept it in comments with those who understand it and such, good to encourage foreign users to join with those knowing the language to help them out around the site :P

[Sprite-]

If there isn't a moderator who understands the language (and actually moderates the area), then it's a ban in my opinion. If I (or another staff member) can't understand what you're saying, it's automatically something illegal. That being said, I do not agree with a multilingual subforum, as I am pretty sure it will cause more problems than it's worth. However, I don't care enough to argue about it so Velocity can handle this since he has already decided to change the rules on his own accord.

[ELRayford]

Здравей! Името ми е ELRayford! Аз говоря български.

I love my eastern European spouse :3 She has taught me a good bit of Bulgarian. I am still learning all the grammar. Macedonian and Serbian are very similar to Bulgarian. Russian is also Slavic based but nowhere near as identical to BG as MC and SB. Sign me up for eastern block support

also ITT: babies first ban.

[devonin]

Few things:

I have complete faith in Nois-or-e's moderation, and if nobody has screenshots one way or the other, my confidence in his moderation says you either spoke in caps more, spoke non-english more, or did either of those things even ONCE after being asked to stop. Also a one-hour ban from profile chat barely even counts as a ban by any reasonable site standard. As far as I'm concerned, any ban from anywhere that lasts less than 1 day should pretty much just be sucked up and dealt with.

I can ban you from the -site- for 24 hours for making three forum posts in a row, and if you were using all caps, using a foreign language in chat, and potentially though obviously not confirmedly spamming same, and all you got was an hour, then you were incredibly NOT abused in any way.

Second: The foreign language rule on sites is exactly as Sprite- describes. The purpose is that if the staff in charge of monitoring the content of the site can't understand what is being discussed, there's no way for us to know that you're not doing something hideously illegal that could get the site shut down. Suggesting it's a free speech violation is absurd, you have no free speech in private domains. Suggesting it is racist is even MORE absurd. All that is happening is that we need to make sure we can actually monitor and control the content being discussed on the site.

Third: If you feel the staff pre or post crash were uniformly abusive, then you never once spoke to me about any issue. As a site super mod pre-crash and an admin post-crash, at any given time the only people over my head were Synth/Tass, and now Synth. If you feel abused by a moderator that is -exactly- when you need to come to one of the admins and tell us what's going on, and exactly the wrong time to make a forum thread misrepresenting what happened and calling the staff abusive and racist.

Fourth: As the forum admin I don't see any purpose to a foreign language forum even if we had moderators fluent in the language who promised to moderate the threads there. There are several issues with it:

1/ once we establish a foreign language subforum how do we enforce the use of only languages with a fluent moderator? Do we ban people who speak in a language besides one we authorize? It's the same objection you all just made to 'only english.' A spanish speaker says 'only english' is racist and unfair, but a japanese speaker is going to say the same thing about 'only english and spanish' and a german speaker is going to say the same thing about 'only english, spanish and japanese'

At a certain point we have to say "every language, but if you happen to pick one we don't speak we can just ban you even if it turns out you're talking about snuggly puppies" or we say "Only english" It's staying 'Only English' as far as I'm concened. If we're going to offend people we might as well offend them equally.

2/ The forums already have a surprisingly small amount of activity for the active population. Adding in a foreign language section makes the forums less active overall not more, because every thread made in a foreign language excludes every user on the site who doesn't speak that language. English VG and Media, Spanish VG and Media, and Korean VG and Media, we'll have three dead forums instead of one slow-moving one. The general assumption, true so far in at least 99.99% of cases is that if you're on the site at all, you have at least functional english skills. You're free to speak any language you like in private messages, and maintaining a list of users who speak various languages somewhere as a "So you can maybe talk to them if you're jonesing for another language" is fine, but again, don't see it on the forums.

[ichliebekase]

<--- Deutsch ;] minus the umlaut because when I made this profile I was in middle school and very lazy.

Used to have conversations with Xayphon back in the day on profiles in German together. I also know Panic4Me speaks German too and a couple other people randomly come to my profile and speak in German to me.

[qqwref]

Originally Posted by devonin

1/ once we establish a foreign language subforum how do we enforce the use of only languages with a fluent moderator? Do we ban people who speak in a language besides one we authorize?

Yeah, that's how it would have to work. Ideally there would be some kind of thing atop the subforum saying "Currently allowed languages: Spanish, Korean". Or we could have a sub-subforum for each language. I assume we'd add all the really popular ones with time.

Originally Posted by devonin

2/ The forums already have a surprisingly small amount of activity for the active population. Adding in a foreign language section makes the forums less active overall not more, because every thread made in a foreign language excludes every user on the site who doesn't speak that language.

This is a good point, but I'd say that the vast majority of current active users would be talking in English anyway. So rather than having a splintered community, we'd really be adding a relatively inactive subforum, which could potentially be more active if someone who didn't speak English at all joined the site. Who knows, maybe we'll end up with a non-neglibible Korean community.

[DotKritic]

Originally Posted by nuclearsamurai

So un po' d'italiano, ma non molto.

Ciò è fresco. Imparo da un software di lingua.

edit: You guys can't possibly put up a list of who can understand "this" language and put that person (or persons) in charge of that section?

[championanwar]

Hej kanin, hej hej hej kanin.

[kommisar]

as long as I'm allowed to type in french on french users' profiles I guess it doesn't matter. Otherwise I'd have a huge problem with it.

[Shaydow]

I just met and played Nois-or-e a few days ago in mp, and he seemed like a straight up good guy to me. Didn't strike me as the kind to go ban happy for no reason.

[DJMAYYYNE]

I'm very fluent in spanish, I'm from Puerto Rico and I have to speak it in my house everyday lol. La Isla Del Encanto =)

[Partisan]

Originally Posted by devonin

Second: The foreign language rule on sites is exactly as Sprite- describes. The purpose is that if the staff in charge of monitoring the content of the site can't understand what is being discussed, there's no way for us to know that you're not doing something hideously illegal that could get the site shut down. Suggesting it's a free speech violation is absurd, you have no free speech in private domains. Suggesting it is racist is even MORE absurd. All that is happening is that we need to make sure we can actually monitor and control the content being discussed on the site.

This. The entire staff will be held responsible for anything that happens, regardless of it being in another language or not. Legal issues would involve the entire staff, not just the one moderator in some sub-forum. I don't think it's too uncommon for entire websites to be shut down over things like that either. I've never heard of legal action only taking down a single sub-forum. Is it worth the risk?

[nuclearsamurai]

Originally Posted by DotKritic

Ciò è fresco. Imparo da un software di lingua.

Ah, ho imparato da due anni di italiano al liceo.

[ic0slay3r]

Originally Posted by DJMAYYYNE

I'm very fluent in spanish, I'm from Puerto Rico and I have to speak it in my house everyday lol. La Isla Del Encanto =)

Hey another puertorican, i never thought that there where so many of us here

Are you from area metro?

[Velocity]

Closing this for now for 3 reasons:

1.) Devonid makes very good points
2.) Even though there's much support for it, the user base now doesn't exactly call for it currently.
3.) The original thread is no longer the focal point of this topic.