Be Excellent To Each Other

Can we?

Thanks.

Huh?

I was one of the ones that voted you for SupaMod.

You are awesome.




<edity>

I was going to post this in the thread I assume sparked this post, but it's locked now. Ahem.

I'd suggest leaving stuff alone unless it's obviously illegal/naughty/personal attacks etc unless someone actually clicks the "Report this Post" button, at which point a SupaMod is allowed to act upon it. That way, if noone clicks, we can assume that's everythings groovy, baby.

Don't understand.

Are you suggesting "light touch" moderation? I thought that this approach was already agreed as the best way to go.

What's up Kalmar?

The "[56k beware]" tag that Grimmers has been adding and some messing with peoples' images appears to have generated discord in the monkey house. I'm not aware of the extent of the latter, which sounds a bit much to me, but the former seems fine.

If no-one complained about those posts, they should've been left alone. Some severely non-excellent modding has been happening, without explanation. It's reminding me of somewhere else...

Calm down you pansies!

Tell me what's been going on.

Sounds like technical gremlins to me. I'd rather assume the best of people than the worst.

In anycase, is anyone still actually on a modem? What might be an idea would be to stop the embedding of Youtube clips and limit attachments to, say, 100k?

Just IMHO of course.

Right, really quickly.
The moderators who are in place at the moment aren't really moderators, they're people who needed some 'powa' to set this board up for everybody else to use. As you all know, new mods are being elected.
I assume this thread has been created because I had the audacity to change the subtitle in a thread about pictures of toy chimps to warn 56k users that the first three posts contained just over two megabytes worth of pictures. Then, being an 'excellent moderator', I logged onto Flickr, searched for the actual images that were being used, found the more sensibly-sized ones and changed them for the good of all. Then I made some changes to the forum back-end that measured the size of the pictures and let you know if you were trying to post something huge.

Actual proper guidelines might be set up when 'real' moderators come in, but for now, we're not doing anything maliciously or to flex our mod muscles.

As for doing things in moderation, the change to the subtitle was the first moderating change for four days.

Salt water washes all away, and as our forum sails on to a most excellent tomorrow these difficulties of today will be forgotten. Or someone will go mad with an axe, I'm not sure which.

As long as everyone remembers to go, "Oof. I was wrong there," and we keep thinking 'light touch', and we not bark at the mods but point and go, "nay, lad. Theself haf erred," in a genial manner then everything will be okay.

Now let us not dwell or panic. It will only encourage Mr Chris to implement the sinister Plan B.

EDIT: Cheers for the explanation, Grim... Appreciated.

Check out Mimi's (locked) Monkeh Picture Thread, and all shall be revealed.

Oh - assuming you're talking about something else (and you are, surely) - then I've missed that.
Ignore the last paragraph of my last post if that's the case.

I was just going to say that some of the editing and such on the monkey thread seemed to be un-necessary and irritating to people, and as such it'd be best to not do that, as indeed, it seems to go against the "light touch" suggested.

It's not a big deal but hopefully next time...?

As the thread was locked I started a new one - in retrospect a PM might have been better, so sorry about that, and it's probably best to let it go now.

Before we agree to kill this topic dead, I would assume that a thread with loads of embedded YouTube videos should have this warning on them too? Possibly a THIS PAGE CONTAINS FLASH for those of us on underpowered laptops?

Ok, apologies to Grim... if I was harsh. May I suggest that if a similar situation occurs in the future, rather than changing things directly, the original poster is asked first? If they then refuse, the mod taking action may be appropriate. I've not seen any guidelines anywhere with regards to images, attachments, embedding, or anything similar - perhaps some are needed so people know what the score is?

Group hug?

Nothing is anything to do with me - I'm merely a SubEd, not a mod. I have NO POWER AT ALL, despite my ability to dispense instant biscuity rewards.

Soopah duel rule: If you're going to make a thread about a flash thing and you feel like embedding it, put in the title! Conversely, don't put embedded flash in threads where the warning isn't already present.

Howzat?

Which was probably the right thing to do. Although there is probably fuck all people still on modems, what is very likely is that people may be logging in via GPRS or 3G. I've certainly dropped into the old forum when out and about via a mobile connection and a surprise large file might find me throwing bricks in the direction of the person concerned if no warning was given.

Which is why I think that file attachments should be limited in size and that it is polite to notify people if you are posting a large amount of huge images.

All IMO of course, not meaning to upset anyone but it's increasingly likely people may be connecting to here via mobile devices.

Well, the title of that thread is 'youtube videos' (or something), just like the title of the photography thread has the word 'photography' in it.
I only change things (and I have done this a few times before and no-one has minded) that aren't obvious.

I've just been to Lidl and have shit loads of biscuits, fizzy drinks and crisps. We should team up on a kind of Clinton/Obama super ticket. With our huge stocks of sweet and savoury goodness, we could rule this place for a thousand years.

Exactly. Your Plan B is to sinisterly acquire power. Remember those brain-controlling parasites mentioned earlier on this forum. THEY ARE IN MR CHRIS'S BISCUITS!

Or are those Grim...'s brain controlling parasites making me say that?

I think as long as it's obvious then it's dandy.

We've been doing pretty well thus far. If our biggest issue has been the resizing of some pics then we're sailing on a sea of awesome. I fully trust that everything was done with the best of intentions, and that everyone still wishes only excellence for one another.

Is there no way to make an icon appear next to a topic when the Flash code is used within? I'm not arsed personally, but it's an idea.

This has turned boring. Everyone get pissy again, that was much more fun to watch.

Well, if the thread title is obvious, then of course that's dandy. I was thinking more along the lines of "List your favourite music" thread and people list in text, then someone posts a music video in it, then someone else does at what point does it shift from being fine to being bandwidth wasting?

Also, any mobile device worth it's salt can browse with no images, or just cached images so you can see the forum buttons but not try and download huge things. Even my desktop can do that.

Or even(!) make the youtube tag turn off and onable in your profile. That would be far easier (for us, not Grim... obv) and avoid having to reign back when being excellent in threads.

Fuck you, buddeh!

You donkey-raping shit-eater.

This has been an excellence drill. You may return to your desks now.

Oh, by the way, if this had been a real emergency, 2 people would have died, and one would have had to be rescued from behind the vending machine by the fire service.

RETURN TO YOUR DESKS.

That was one of the things I was thinking of - having a 'YouTube' icon of sorts. Along with icons for cookery icons and so on and so on. Y'know, with like a drop-down or something, so you could quickly say 'This thread contains music or video!' However, nobody was interested, so nothing remotely similar is ever going to happen here, and if it anything slightly akin did appear, then it just proves how fucking awesome I am.

I personally don't like the whole embedding thing myself. I'd much rather we did such threads the old WoS way where you clicked on a link.

I like embedding, personally I think the old WoS way was appalling.

And the bad smell man would have turned up to report on it.

Each to their own. I'm not saying one way is right or wrong, just expressing an opinion.

In the case of YouTube embeds, the file sizes are actually quite small until you click on 'play'. They're smaller than a similarly-sized image, to be honest.

In a bit of non scientfic research, Opera is reporting that without clicking play, each page of the "Music Videos" thread is weighing in at 400ish KB each. Which by my reckoning would take a top notch 56k modem roughly a minute to a minute and a half to load. Obviously nowhere close to megabytes worth, but still a pretty lengthy wait for someone ill prepared. Also opening that page on my laptop would *kill* it unless I turned Flash off first, as Flash is kinda cpu consuming.

Really, I get, er... 59kb. Are you sure Opera isn't caching something you've already looked at?

I think that using the term '56k' is a bit of a throwback, but surely anyone on a mobile device would think to keep away from such a thread also? People have been using the term '56k alert' for years and most people who've been using the internet for a few years should recognise what it means.

I fluffed my numbers a bit, there.

Page without Flash plugin : 415.6 KB

Page with Flash plugin : 618.5 KB (633346 bytes)

The Flash plugin added 200 ish KB, or roughly 40 seconds of loading time on a 56k.

I should point out I'm not massively fussed myself, as I don't use mobiles to view this and I have a 20megabit line, so don't think I'm getting at you for something trivial I'm just trying to follow the "be excellent to 56k" thing as far as I can so we know when and when not it may come in to play.

That's a lot more than I thought.
I'd add an option to turn it off, but I'm thinking that won't help mobile people, as they'll probably want them on for when they use their desktop PC.

How's about instead of embedding YouTube videos, we just draw the artiste concerned in ASCII?

Doesn't everyone use Firefox with FlashBlock? Totally awesome, especially combined with AdblockPlus.

At risk of sticking my oar in even further, can I again suggest that all these suggestions for warning people about all the different varieties of things you might find in a topic are great, but still not really necessary?

* If you're stuck on a slow connection or machine that can't handle 'X', you will quickly find out for yourself which threads to avoid, or make some work-around to view. All you need to do is click "back", after all.
Providing a warning is of little benefit. At most, the "wide load" post icon idea might be worth doing, but even then..

* Additional nit-picky rules just seem nit-picky, and would then need nagging about to remind people. The "nothing too big" is clear and can be pointed to if someone has a problem with what's posted.

* Making it the moderators' responsibility to tidy up messages, add warnings and rescale things is adding work-load to a task that should be largely hands-off (not to mention the likelyhood of irritating people).

Anyway, I'll go away now

It does seem overly picky to me too.

If I am browsing on a bandwidth limited connection then I expect my connection to be limited by bandwidth. I don't expect people to stop doing what they are doing just so I can join in.

If I was to say:"I don't have an XBOX 360, so please can you not play Forza as I'm feeling left out!" you would tell me to either get an xbox 360 and forze or stop moaning and accept there are things you can't do.

This is the same thing. But if there was an icon that could be used as a courtesy then that would be ok.

Malc

You're assuming the device in question has a back button. Warnings may be of little benifit to you (or me, or most people), but they're hardly offensive, IMO.


Quite. That's why there are none. Except for that one.


Well, that's what moderators do. If someone posts huge images, then they obviously haven't thought things through, so who's going to change things? Granted, I could have just stripped the [img] tags and left a link, but I was being excellent