Who are you, and when did you get touched in your no-no place?
My understanding of it is that communities.win - the broader hosting here - is run by several people who help run TD itself.
A (probably bad) analogy is to think of TD as the first "default subreddit" equivalent here, with us being among the later additions as the site expands over time to new areas. We just happen to have independent domains as front-end access for users, rather than something like /r/kotakuinaction vs /r/the_donald on reddit (there is a way to access each site here like that, but it's not how things display for most people).
Just some quick addressing of these questions, as they haven't really been asked of us yet outside of some instances offsite.
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More freedom for our users and for us in our moderation. We aren't bound by nearly as restrictive sitewide rules, and - as seen in the major reddit shift yesterday - rules here are far easier to figure out and work within, as opposed to the almost byzantine set of constantly changing "you can't do/say this, but we aren't making the line itself clear" bullshit reddit has become infamous for.
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This was one of the things we discussed when we were first approached by the TD admins. They have not provided us with detailed fiscal reports or anything, but have demonstrated in a few other convincing ways that they are committed to keeping this site and its hosting intact for the long haul.
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I honestly am not sure. I don't have that info in an easy-to-access form here yet on the mod end of things, but we can always make the request so that info can remain integrated into our CSS and such. We have a long tradition of "Get" threads at major subscriber count landmarks that I'd like to retain.
We are still going to be debating exactly what changes happen to it. One thing that will likely not change is Unrelated Politics being off limits, though how it is kept off limits may be adjusted (whether it's kept as-is or altered to more explicitly define what things count as unrelated/verboten). I think we only have one mod making any argument to remove it as a blacklist item, and even he is only doing so because he thinks the other blacklist items and "lack of hitting whitelist" will curtail things that the blacklist item is meant to prevent in the first place.
I am less than convinced by that argument, but it's something we will be discussing over the next couple weeks.
Yeah there are some minor caching issues still - you'll also notice that if you try to delete your own post/comment, it may take a little bit to actually go through. Those times are improving, but can still be visible if you're trying to stay on top of things in real time.
Good to see a more recent compilation since the old Mombot one hadn't been updated.
https://kotakuinaction.win/p/GIEcuq01/thread-people-who-opposed-gamerg/c/
This post? It's up and visible on /new for me.
When we had our last batch of new mod hiring, NoTalent reached out with my approval to ask Dom and Clockwork to apply - neither chose to do so.
BVR is already here (he just had to get to bed finally), and we reached out to md1957 as well before making the public announcement. Other users may or may not come, we will just have to see where things end up.
Rule 3 should end up lighter than it currently is, but we have a lot of debate to have over which parts will stay, which will be able to be cut back, and which parts are intended to stop specific behavior tying into other rules (usually R1 and R7) that may have alternative methods of dealing with the problem they were there to address.
Just to head it off now - we won't necessarily ban you for dropping n-bombs here, but a core of our Rule 1 includes not allowing identity-politics based attacks on other people, so depending how you use it, it may cause you and our mods to come in conflict.
I gave you a partial answer over on KiA2 in my olive branch post, but I'll get into a bit more detail here.
We are not auto-banning anyone for having participated there, we are also not renewing bans on people who had been permanently banned in the past that chose to migrate to 2. We do recognize a lot of names from banned people, and if the first thing someone does is come over here to start shit, they will find themselves taking a long vacation on the spot... but if they come here, chill, and try to work within the new ruleset, we will gladly let them hang around.
We are still refining some parts of the rules before making them public (and waiting on the CSS import to be completed as there are a lot of technical changes between reddit and here that don't make it easy). Some rules will be mostly the same (no reposts, archive shit sites, etc), others will have minor or major revisions - in particular Rule 1, 2, 5 are getting some alterations to make them a bit lighter so we don't have to enforce nearly as hard as we did in the past. Rule 9 is being eliminated outright, though you'd still have to show some kind of relevance under other rules for posts about meta things to stay.
The big one that you and others want to know specifically about is Rule 3, though. Rule 3 will be trimmed down some, but we aren't in remotely a ready position to commit in entirety to which parts are being cut back and which are staying. I expect that to take us a couple weeks to iron out, barring anything else getting in the way. It will not be abolished, but should be a bit easier to work with - and we will retain the policy of "if you aren't sure you can make it fit, you can reach out to us via modmail or similar to see if we can help find a way to make it work".
Twitter/Facebook stuff is going to be relaxed a bit, though we will still retain some hard borders regarding what point we consider "this is viable public info" vs "this counts as dox" - and we will try to make that border as clear as possible going in. One thing that is going to be easier on everyone is that we no longer have the "two clicks out" enforcement to worry about here that we had to do on reddit. That makes it a whole hell of a lot easier to post things like articles which happen to include embedded tweets from technical-nobodies.
As a longtime Comstar player, allow me to say "nice choice of name".
As I mentioned in the OP, we will be cutting down on some of the rules we had in place. The one that will take the longest to sort out will, of course, be the ever-controversial Rule 3, but that is getting some modification.
Our "olive branch" is that we are not preemptively banning any users who got banned previously on KiA (under the same name) unless they manage to fuck up and immediately throw themselves across the line of rules that are not being changed - the most obvious example being TentElephant who has been shouting about his own getting banned here... for making his first comment here outright IDpol antisemitic shit with a "Hitler did nothing wrong" thrown in at the end. We are willing to grant a bit more leeway on a lot of things, but that's gonna be a hard no for anyone.
There are active links to all existing communities over on https://communities.win/ that you can navigate from, though I expect that to get tougher as more are added to the pool over time.
As we get things more in order here, we will likely renew our weekly community threads for "what are you playing/watching" and recommendations stuff. May take us a few days to get to that point, though, as we have a lot of backend things to iron out, but it will be coming.
Quoting what I think is the part of that you are referring to - if it's not, please correct me.
While some of those admin actions against T_D might have been illegitimate, they did show a pattern of hostility between admins and sub that we haven't experienced recently
That statement is ambiguous enough to place the hostility at the feet of both parties, it's not stating anything about provoking. I fully understand mods getting annoyed at inconsistencies from the reddit admins, I've had to deal with that shit on a regular basis since I was first hired on as a mod at KiA back in mid-2015, and it only escalated in some ways after I became head mod in mid-late 2016. I also have direct experience in dealing with both hostility from some admins, and getting actual almost-friendly cooperation from other admins because we all stepped back to look at the broader picture from their view as well as our own on some issues.
That clearly is going to be a lot harder on more firmly established political lines when it's blatantly obvious most reddit admins are in deep blue San Francisco, and are going to carry over TDS in many of the interactions with TD itself.
My reference to the one TD mod making a false accusation was a very specific incident right around when they were having their "admin approved mod replacement" mess happen, when one of their mods (not sure if he was active or had been forcefully removed) made the accusation of the KiA mod team being entirely replaced with admin plants during the david incident. We got that ironed out to a degree with the site admins here during our discussions leading up to where we are now - it's not a view held by all or even most TD mods, just one guy expressing his view based on faulty information in a very public way... that happened to sour the view from a lot of our mods on chances of maintaining neutrality towards TD itself.
They made a post on their sub earlier saying T_D provoked the admins so they deserved the ban in a way.
Was that before or after a TD mod made the provably false accusation that our entire mod team was replaced with plants when david-me tried killing the sub?
I'll make clear - we had no problem with TD existing, and mostly wanted to be left to our own shit, as we were an extremely politically diverse sub, including a lot of lefties, and quite a few right wingers both in the community and on our mod team. We enjoyed being able to have complicated discussions on issues from different perspectives without either side entrenching and shutting down the other side of the conversation. We also came into the decision to set up here after lengthy talks with several of the site TD.win site admins about some of those very things.
We aren't here to try to take over, or displace anyone else. We are here to be what we always have been, with a bit more freedom to actually do what we used to do.
I've been alternating between ARK and CoronaVirusSimulator2 (TheDivision2) recently, with a side of My Time at Portia - which has been surprisingly fun to play, despite a bit of weirdness to it.
Will have to see what else tries crippling my wallet before the Steam sale ends.
Sure, there's no problem with that if people ask for it.
It's being worked on, there are a lot of issues importing the CSS. Hopefully will be fixed within the week.
We are still importing our rules and modifying them for the new environment. Our existing policy on advertising is "We don't mind you self promoting/advertising a stream as long as you are participating in ways outside of that self promotion, so we are more than just a cheap way to get clicks". Basically, try to become part of the community itself, not just using it for extra views. We actively encourage supporting folks who make the effort to be good with us.
Looks like there's a GavinMcinnes, ConsumeProduct (one of today's ban victims) and OmegaCanada (which is the /r/MetaCanada community). I am not aware of who else has made the leap, though I was told there are quite a few more in the process of getting themselves set up.
MetaCanada set up over as OmegaCanada.win a few days back. I think we are the first gaming-related community here, and we have a much larger reddit-side userbase than they did.
I had set it public earlier, should be fixed now.
Just to expand on this, while we are enforcing Rule 1 actively, we have been giving a bit of leeway on things like our Rule 3 (posting content guidelines) due to getting settled in. We will not be enforcing that retroactively, but will slowly begin doing so from here forward.
As mentioned, we are doing a review of Rule 3 and making some further changes to it to lighten it up more, but that may take us a couple weeks to sort out, so please bear with us until we get it done.