I've certainly noticed a change in the tone of the RPC, and it's a big part of why I don't participate nearly as much with it. I know there's a big chunk of Tylwyth Narah that likewise tends to avoid the site, for the reasons Merc gives here.
There's a telling parallel that can be drawn with the Eve Online RP community, which I used to participate in quite a bit. In the early days of the game, there was a commonly used RP forum hosted on chatsubo for OOC communication among the RPers. It was pretty similar to the RPC. For a few years it operated relatively smoothly, but as time went on it started to go down a similar route as RPC: Discussion threads started veering away from debates and became flames. This was tolerated at first because the Eve RP community prided itself on being just a little more thick skinned than the typical RP community, and because everyone knew the chatsubo/OOC mod team was pretty thinly stretched. However, after a while, some people started theorizing that the mod team was being more permissive with one clique than they were with everyone else. At this point things blew up, and a lot of people stopped using the site. After a little while, there was a mass exodus from the site to a new one, Eve Backstage.
Eve Backstage was originally created specifically to address what a lot of people saw as the shortcomings of chatsubo/OOC: Moderation was not transparent, and there was a culture of permissiveness towards borderline insults.
While the official rules of the forum are pretty standard, there's also a FAQ covering expected behavior which is pretty remarkable. I'm sure a lot of people here would read the guidelines in that FAQ and snort, thinking "that's so hippy-dippy", but you have to keep in mind that those guidelines were created specifically solve a problem.
And those guidelines are moderated against. But what's interesting about Backstage is that all the moderation is transparent. Moderators will moderate a thread and (with very few exceptions) stick the offending posts in a special forum that's publicly visible. Likewise, there's another forum on the site that's publicly postable specifically for discussing how things are being moderated.
Is this something that RPC could benefit from? Probably. Ultimately, it's not my site and I'm not a mod, so it's easy for me to say "Yes, do this". It's telling, though, that chatsubo/OOC is basically dead at this point while Backstage continues to thrive after half a decade of vigorous use.
There's a telling parallel that can be drawn with the Eve Online RP community, which I used to participate in quite a bit. In the early days of the game, there was a commonly used RP forum hosted on chatsubo for OOC communication among the RPers. It was pretty similar to the RPC. For a few years it operated relatively smoothly, but as time went on it started to go down a similar route as RPC: Discussion threads started veering away from debates and became flames. This was tolerated at first because the Eve RP community prided itself on being just a little more thick skinned than the typical RP community, and because everyone knew the chatsubo/OOC mod team was pretty thinly stretched. However, after a while, some people started theorizing that the mod team was being more permissive with one clique than they were with everyone else. At this point things blew up, and a lot of people stopped using the site. After a little while, there was a mass exodus from the site to a new one, Eve Backstage.
Eve Backstage was originally created specifically to address what a lot of people saw as the shortcomings of chatsubo/OOC: Moderation was not transparent, and there was a culture of permissiveness towards borderline insults.
While the official rules of the forum are pretty standard, there's also a FAQ covering expected behavior which is pretty remarkable. I'm sure a lot of people here would read the guidelines in that FAQ and snort, thinking "that's so hippy-dippy", but you have to keep in mind that those guidelines were created specifically solve a problem.
And those guidelines are moderated against. But what's interesting about Backstage is that all the moderation is transparent. Moderators will moderate a thread and (with very few exceptions) stick the offending posts in a special forum that's publicly visible. Likewise, there's another forum on the site that's publicly postable specifically for discussing how things are being moderated.
Is this something that RPC could benefit from? Probably. Ultimately, it's not my site and I'm not a mod, so it's easy for me to say "Yes, do this". It's telling, though, that chatsubo/OOC is basically dead at this point while Backstage continues to thrive after half a decade of vigorous use.
