910CMX Community: DanShive - Viewing Profile - 910CMX Community

It's worth noting that Noxy had, I believe, previously earned a banning. The actual forum policy was to make warnings last forever, and three strikes, you're out. If memory serves, Noxy had two warnings at one point, and I felt they needn't be there forever, so I removed them. I know I did that with at least a couple of people, and I'm fairly certain Noxy was one of them.

Point is, unless I'm mistaken, Noxy has had at least five strikes on a three strike system ^^;

I would still be willing to discuss coming back with Noxy, but she'd have to contact me first. I'm not going out of my way unless she shows a genuine interest in coming back.

My only objection to talking things over with Noxy about the post and inviting her back is what I've heard about her trying to get banned. Even if this last post wasn't part of that plan, if getting banned was her eventual intent, then that's definite trolling. I would like to think that there's been some mistake and Noxy didn't have any such intent, but Noxy has tried to subvert things she didn't like about forums in the past. In particular, I recall the posting of images of classic artwork that had nudity, and workarounds of the obscenity filter.

If she took issue with the moderation of these forums, I can easily picture her attempting to get banned on purpose to make her point. I don't picture her viewing it as malicious, but as making a statement.

The problem is that these forums are not our lives. It is something that we provide for free, at an expense to us, with the only expectation being that certain guidelines are followed. When those guidelines are broken, such as by circumventing the obscenity filter, it's similar to being invited to someone's home and refusing to use a coaster. None of us want, or are able, to be policing this place all the time looking for rings left on the coffee tables. If people are regularly a source of moderation woes, we need to suspend or ban them if for no other reason than reducing how much time we need to spend cleaning up after them.

Many thanks

It was my intent to look into this and most likely go to bat for Noxy. Noxy has a long enough history of repeated warnings that there was almost certainly justification for moderation, but Noxy never seemed particularly malicious to me. She got carried away at times while otherwise being an insightful poster who contributed to the forums as a whole. Long story short, I was hoping a compromise could be reached that would un-ban Noxy.

I was then informed that Noxy was apparently trying to get banned, and I felt like a tool for wanting to help her.

At this point, I'm not going to do anything unless she contacts me and makes a good case for why she should be unbanned. I'm easy going enough that it probably wouldn't take much to convince me to at least discuss it with the other admins, but if someone wants to be banned, I'm not going to lose sleep when they do.

That was a detailed and reasonable assessment, Blort. Thank you. I still argue that the angst in the Swedekea story was delivered in a way that amounted to dark humor, but I get the point.

My thing is that I actually like the mix being together. One of my favorite thing about Scrubs was that it could have me laughing uproariously one second and being smack-dab in the middle of a highly emotional and serious moment the next.

On the flip side, that approach is a tricky balancing act. There was one episode in season five with a very serious A story and an extremely silly B story, and I personally would have preferred those two stories being kept separate. Any number of less silly (but still silly) B stories would have been better in my opinion.

I think the main thing I as a writer need to work to avoid is making EGS too depressing, which is harder than it sounds. It is very easy for me to see the negative side of things and the potential for things to go wrong. It's not something I try to do; extremely depressing worst-case scenarios just pop into my head. You can put me in whatever is literally the happiest place on Earth and I could probably instantly list what's sad about it. EGS has narrowly avoided super-angsty and serious storyline and character developments well beyond anything that has actually made it into the comic, and one of my biggest challenges is keeping it that way.