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"Toxic Quake Community" Amnesty And Apology Thread.
Warning: This is a positive resolution / solution thread, not a beef thread. You wanna beef, go elsewhere.

It has come to my attention that there are occasional accusations of the Quake community having some negative social aspects. Indeed in the words of rebb (compiler coder) in 2018:

I have known the Quake community for a very long time as one of the most toxic and narcissistic creative communities.
For a moment in time things appeared to have improved, but it turned out to be little more than naive wishful thinking.

Between all it's newfound glory, hyperdetailed maps and "god mappers" still sits the same deep prideful arrogance and highly toxic nature that has most likely been there since the very beginning.
It is a cold and self-obsessed place.


Strong words (which I personally entirely disagree with as someone who has been in the scene from Day 1, both as a player AND contributor). Unfortunately he doesn't specify what actually happened nor who he is referring to. And it's hard to have sympathy without actually understanding what's going on, and it's hard to make progress from that without having some clarity and openness.

IF there is any such "toxicity" in the Quake scene, then I think it needs to be made explicit what the problems are, who has been "toxic", and whether such behaviour is explicable, redeemable, or even simply a misunderstanding of casual behaviour, as per the wise words of Kinn (sometime mapper):

ok, here it goes - there is a lot of really obvious playful pisstaking in this community which is good.
as a man of this sceptred isle, a man of rosy-cheeked chappery and good-humoured banter, I welcome the very obvious joking around and tomfoolery
but perhaps a lot of people don't "get it" - perhaps it's down to cultural differences, or perhaps some even are "on the spectrum" as it were, and struggle to differentiate a malicious comment from an obvious mickey-take


---

This is not to start arguments or flame wars. This is to CLEAR THOSE UP by explaining what is going on discussing calmly, apologising if needed. There's no point moaning about toxicity and not trying to sort it out, so...
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@shambler 
Well put. Will give this some thought. 
#3 Ijazz 
Something I forgot to add to my screed above was "good for you" for taking responsibility for past behavior.

Goofy mods are always welcome. 
Hmmmm 
To be honest, either a forum is moderated, or it's not. If there's posting rules, and you breach the rules, then blammo, mod should delete post. "It's a fair cop, guv" says the errant poster.

Func is func. As far as I can tell, it doesn't have "rules". The closest thing to posting guidelines appears to be found here: http://www.celephais.net/board/faq.php

and I quote:

About This Site
We are a community of hobbyist and professional level designers who share insights, opinions, rants, and flames.


Pretty self-explanatory. "Go hog wild".

I don't think we need to engage in great big discussions where we try to create "soft rules" or "etiquette" when I'm sure half the people here don't give a damn about them.

I think if this site needs posting rules and this kind of moderation then it should be explicitly written somewhere and the forum should be moderated accordingly. Is that really what func needs after existing just fine for two decades?

For my part, I don't think we need to moderate anything, but we should do some obvious tightening up of the basic site mechanics to remove spam and anon shitposting as much as possible. 
The Root Cause Is Lovecraft 
 
Hmmmmm 
I think it's good to have some level of sensibility respect and not let things get out of hand. Half the people might not give a damn but half the people might and if some people are finding it really bad it might be worth looking at to see how much of a real issue is it. 
 
If one wants to make somewhere like func "not get out of hand" (more than it has been 20 years) to attract / welcome everyone at large it is simple : func will become something entirely else than it is.

Diversity is desired, yes ?

Turning all existing community bases into heavily moderated and controlled "everyone" welcome type of spaces does not, ironically, achieve welcome for "everyone".

To this I welcome the existence of **both** types of community spaces (and more!) and hope this stays so.

This though does not mean the community needs to be split, god no, this is rather a question of the different spaces acknowledging and promoting each other, informing any new comers of what kind of spaces and flavors are around.

On the chat / discord side a real strong approach for this would be instead of integrating places like discord QM into a TF subchannel or vice versa (hey! #tf was first :P) the real beauty would be to have shared/fully mirrored Subchannels such as the News / Releases threads and other meutral "cultural" ones.
Another could be a identical shared read only information channel with a summary of community spaces/resources.

Sadly Discord does not allow this simply :/
Could likely be ugly-hacked up with bots/scripts and the like though. 
Otoh The Duke Community 
 
func, as far as I'm aware,* does not harbpr any open Nazis or Stalinists, people with loli avatars, or Nazis/Stalinists with loli avatars. Those facts alone put func ahead of plenty of internet communities I've observed, despite a small group of cantankerous grumps.

*I don't use IRC or Discord or whatever the hell else so I'm unaware of what goes down there. 
 
Soooooo the func / TF community are not toxic ? Could it only be that drama queens have been drama-queening around ?

Now would be a good time to post and offer some insight to not have one's complaints dismissed as above. 
Lpowell 
Well that's something at least, that the community avoids the internet-political tedium.

As for discord: on the original worldwide quake mapping community server at least, there's a clear balance between keeping it liberal and fun, but drawing a line before any actual abuse (the only person to get kicked for a post content had said a racist jest in a cruel context). In the guidelines...

@everyone : Please note that while #terrafusion is proudly maintained as a liberal open-minded discussion platform that is accepting off and sometimes promoting off foul language, vulgar banter and sordid topics of discussion, IN CONTRAST: actual extremist views, genuine harassment, xxx-phobias of most forms, and persistent targetted banter when requested otherwise are not tolerated. PLEASE if you feel uncomfortable with aspects of the channel or think anything like that is occuring in a genuine way, RAISE THE ISSUE FIRST (in the channel or message a moderator) to prevent further problems.

Come along and give it a go: https://discord.gg/d5mytUj , everyone is welcome. 
Killes. 
Maybe so??

It does seem to be that there are mutterings about a "toxic" community but when it comes to actually clearing it up, finding out what is going on, being accountable for stuff or open with issues....people are suddenly clamming up.

Surely if anyone has an actual problem, this would be a good place to raise it and resolve it??

Or maybe it's just not that bad... (which personally I think is the clear truth, but I don't want to dismiss others concerns if they're actually going to raise them). 
 
From the newcomer's point of view a portion of the community suffers from the typical "Internet doesn't understand free speech" syndrom. Free speech protects from govt shutting down one's ability to critique govt actions. Being an ass and crying that soy snowflakes don't like one's "sense of humor" isn't covered by free speech. It's just being juvenile and not willing to own it. Not being as toxic as, say 4chan is a very low bar. But I guess it's hard to ask for more on teh interwebz these days. 
Thusla 
That sounds worth looking into, can you be more specific what problems you've encountered??

I don't know what this "soy" trend means and I've never visited 4chan so that's not a context I understand. 
 
Soy acts like estrogen. So soy or soyboy has the same meaning calling one a pussy does. 4chan and places like that are pretty good at using covert language of this kind.

This divides people into there groups: those who are in on a "joke" and play along, those who understand and aren't and if they complain, the third group will claim that they either don't understand or don't think it's that big of a deal, effectively siding with bullies. That's why it's so hard to get rid of pepe and ok sign which are nazi winks and nods - many simply can't or won't believe this is happening. :)

But to be clear, I'm not claiming that someone did attack me here. I just read tons of threads from the last 10 or so years and it's a general observation of mine. It is possible that some of this behavior toned down but I'm also watching discord servers and it doesn't seem to be the case. All that seems to indicate is that func became less relevant as a form of day to day communication, not that people, behaviors and attitudes have changed. 
 
I'm starting to think this is becoming an imagined problem. Every community has shits, and the only difference between them is that some communities ban the shits, and some have no mechanism to ban the shits.

We don't have a mechanism to ban the shits so we have to put up with a very, very occasional shitstorm. It's pretty easy to dig up one of these shitstorms from 2008 (for example) and say "look how shitty this place is" whilst kinda forgetting that this is a post someone made in 2008.

AFAIAW the common or garden internet edgelord doesn't really post here. These are the chaps that go on massive rants about muslims or gays or jews or women or whatever. Already that elevates us above 95% of internet forums. 
Recent Examples 
These examples are not for the sake of calling out individuals, but rather some common patterns of behavior. Maybe it is "banter" and I'm not picking up that tone, but both cases seem to have pushed people away from here:

1 - in the SM189 thread, there was talk about TBA143's map. It was a first map with some rough edges, but also some promise. AFAIK, TBA143 hasn't made any more mapping efforts for Quake. http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=61660
This is a case where we could've said "What kind of experience were you trying to create? I didn't get it / it wasn't for me, but the brushwork was really promising! Hope to see more maps from you in the future". See also the recent SM196, 195, and JamX conversations around Ing and Pinchy maps. They're doing something different with the tools, and it won't be for everyone, but we should welcome that variety and be glad that folks are trying different things (even when they fail).

2 - The General Abuse convo around "RetroPew". Again, maybe this was banter and I'm failing to pick up the tone, but I think there may have been a more constructive way to have this conversation. http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=1&start=30994&end=31010

Are either examples "toxic"? It's absolutely not 4chan, but these conversations come off a bit more like meatheadded miscommunications, but they're also both about maintaining a kind of orthodoxy of Quake, which is rather rigid. 
Nice Examples. 
TBA143 made multiple later maps as Ukko though. 
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