Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-4714463-20140727035153/@comment-4714463-20140802040248

CassistRabbit wrote: Okay, I don't get it.

I've been here for a few months and I have a pretty good sense of being in a community. I know some of the users a bit more personally than others. Stifled? Hostile? Where on earth are you getting these from? And clearly, if you're active "only intermittently" (with a rather small edit count for two and a half years, 288) then you won't experience much of a sense of being in a community. This is a well-reasoned claim. However, it ignores some crucial information, which is understandable and to be expected, seeing as how I left that information out. My bad.

When I say I'm active only intermittently, what I mean is that I'm active only intermittently AT THIS TIME. I was previously a great deal more active, and indeed there was a sense of community, but it was a private sort of sense. I was in a few small communities containing small collections of fellow users. However, the user base as a whole lacked a sense of community.

There were many individual small communities, and those who shared one or more such communities played well together, but pairs who did not share any such community behaved in a hostile manner toward one another. This became especially clear in dealing with new users, who came into the site with no connections whatsoever, thereby being outside EVERYONE'S circles.

Maybe my expectations are too high, but I would like to think that we as people can be civil to each other - not all close and cuddly or anything, but at least basically civil - WITHOUT getting to know each other first. But, like I said, maybe my expectations are too high. Yes, I think maybe they are. This is the Internet, I suppose.

All this was over a year ago, of course. So why do I bring it up now? Because from what I've seen, it would still seem to be relevant. I've taken a look at the chat and the forums, and it seems as if nothing has changed. There are new users, to be sure, but they merely regurgitate the same age-old attitude.

Sloshedtrain wrote: I always saw the community as a giant book club at a library we help create. Usually, wikis tend to have strict regulations on the content that gets uploaded here. Though we tried structuring the wiki's administration by Wikia's standards, but it doesn't work out so well.

We structuring the wiki into more of a democracy... well you know how that worked out.

The problem is that there's a lack of a long lasting community. Users constantly leave while new ones come in. Different people, different ideas and leadership. Most of the users I first met here are no longer active.

I forgot to mention the evolution of creepypasta itself. Creepypastas four years ago aren't the same as they are now. All Creepypasta communities expect higher quality work and less rehashing of tropes. Which is fine for older, seasoned creepypasta users, but newcomers have a harder time adapting to the regulations. Mainly because many newcomers want to emulate stories like Slenderman or Jeff the Killer, but only to realize that the community does not want it.

The community shapes how these pastas get known and accepted. Cutting out the community just leaves a site without discussion or interaction. Which we need for the progression of creepypasta itself. I see. Well said. Thanks for your insight.

So what I understand from what you're saying is that the site - rather, the medium itself - can't exist without a community. Without the efforts and interest of a considerable reader and writer base, the very art of creepypasta loses its purpose; besides which, continuation and upkeeping of its practice becomes impossible. Indeed, the community IS the site; without us, without you and me, this website would be nothing but an historical record of a past civilization.

I still maintain there may one day come a time when our civilization SHOULD die, and leave nothing but its historical record behind. But upon consideration I suppose it's not now. And besides that, I suppose, if such a time ever comes, it will be unnecessary to discuss it, for it will be our natural tendency at that time to abandon the wiki, without need for any call to action - or inaction, as it were. Considering that, this thread seems pointless in retrospect.

Shadowswimmer77 wrote: Yeah, what I get from this is that it is a thinly veiled post regarding the chat ban. I think it would be more direct if Skellie didn't threaten banishment to the next person starting another "chat themed" thread.

In that regard, considering that the mods work on an entirely volunteer basis, that there is a vast array of different types of individuals with an equally vast array of sensibilities, and coupled with the whole free speech thing, chat just becomes a big gooey can of worms that can explode at any second.

I don't feel like instant communication is necessary for what (I believe) the intent of this site is, namely to collect quality pieces of scary writing from as many people as possible. If people want to set up a chat externally, that's all well and good, but from personal experience (not on this site) if you have unregulated membership and anonymous contributors, it doesn't take too many bad apples to poison the whole concept.

I can't say I mind forums over chat. Everyone can still see what I post, but this way I can direct it to specific people on their talk pages or start a topic of conversation (like this one) and have it be less likely taken over by a conversation about cats or penis size or whatever. Really the biggest issue I've seen so far is a general lack of participation with regard to leaving comments and providing feedback. There are dozens if not hundreds of people logging onto this site every day (more? I'm trying to go low here), and yet even on the writer's workshop people are lucky to get 2-3 people commenting on their work. Yeah, what I get from this is that there was a chat ban.

This comes as a surprise to me.

I honestly didn't notice until you brought it up; though, looking through the forum, and looking through my initial post, I can see how I may have given off that impression to such people as yourself who are more in the know about current goings on than I am.

I'd like to clarify that I did not mean for this thread to react to or address the chat ban in any way, and was in fact unaware of it at the time of writing. Rather, it was meant as an honest question.

I actually wasn't very fond of chat either. If anything, this inquiry was a reaction to chat itself, not to the chat ban.