ePlaya in exile - please read this first

[Traveller]

Thought for the day - a thimble's worth of understanding is worth more than a tome's worth of rules. With that thought in mind, I will now inflict an analogy on the groaning lurkers, who will be expected to read and think about it. Such is life.

Let's say my neighbor gets flooded out of his house periodically. I don't completely like the guy and I certainly don't agree with him about everything, but he's still a human being and I'd like to think that I still qualify as one, so up to a point, I'm going to care about what he's having to put up with, especially when it just seems to be a string of bad luck. I'm going to do what I can to help. So I let him stay in my guestroom from time to time, and during his stays, that guestroom is his home away from home. Now, maybe there's a little bad blood between him and one of my kids. Odds are fairly good that I'm going to feel that my kid was in the right, but all the same, I'm going to tell my child to give the neighbor his space, and respect his sullen demand to "get out". His home away from home would be no kind of home at all were he to have no authority within it, and that would just be poor hospitality on our part.

There will, of course, be limits to our good nature. If he puts a poster up on his wall announcing that his host ... um, pulls in air really strongly (no profanity allowed on Proboards) .... or goes wandering into the rest of the home looking for family members to abuse, I'll show him the door with no further ceremony. I'm not going to take abuse from somebody I'm doing a favor for, and I'm not going to expect others in my household to do so, either. This is not oppression or censorship, it is a common sense expectation that others have the sense to not abuse the hospitality that they are enjoying. As much as the standard Burning Man mantra may run to the contrary, there are always a few expectations that we should hold, in any situation, because without them, a decent life can not be lived.




Recently, ePlaya seemed to have yet another outage, and at least a few of these seem to be due to pranksterism. On one occasion, according to a post I saw, somebody called in a meritless complaint about the registration information about the burningman.com domain and GoDaddy took the domain offline for about a week until all could be confirmed. The LLC was being harassed by some anonymous coward, and regardless of what we may think about how they conduct their own business, for somebody to do something like that is inexcusable. Even if they had a quarrel with the LLC or the ePlaya staff, or whoever they trying to strike out at, assuming that this was anything other just pure malevolent mischief - what did they have against the thousands of registered users of the ePlaya? Being in the middle of a conversation that suddenly is interrupted for a week just because some unknown party has engaged in unlawful activity has got to be frustrating.

One might also say something about the inconvenience worked on those who wanted to look somthing up on the burningman.com site, which was also unavailable recently, but one problem at a time. If you look at this subboard, you might notice that its structure largely parallels that of ePlaya. That is deliberate, as are the brief quotations from the descriptions of the sections on ePlaya. The idea is that if you're in the middle of a discussion on ePlaya, and some twit sabotages the place in some way, while their staff takes care of the problem, you can still continue the discussion.

Just go to the section of this subboard that corresponds to the board you were having your discussion on. The titles parallel each other, and I've even included brief quotations from the descriptions of each, so finding your way to the right place should be easy.

[Traveller]

This section of Travel to Burning Man is like the guestroom I'm lending out to the neighbor whose home was flooded out. The normal rules that guide the rest of TTBM are not the rules that apply here. The ePlaya community guidelines do apply to this section of TTBM. The heightened expectation (oh, there's that word again) of civility that defines the rest of our board does not. Flaming other users is a very quick way of getting yourself bounced off of Travel to Burning Man, in general, but regular flaming is a regular fact of life on ePlaya. In the spirit of letting my guest be himself, I'm going to turn a blind eye to many of the antics on this part of TTBM and warn those who feel uncomfortable with the atmosphere on ePlaya to not post to this section of our board, which should, to an extent, be thought of as being an unofficial extension of ePlaya. Those who ignore this warning should expect that they will be on their own, should they come under attack.

Even worse, the moderators from ePlaya are being invited to sign up for TTBM, and become moderators on this board, with the obvious exception of those who've been very publicly engaged in some very dirty politics at our expense on other forums, as I do have the sense to not leave the foxes guarding the chicken coop. If they accept this invitation, that means that if you've been banned from ePlaya, odds are that you're going to get banned from ePlaya in exile as well. You can be on great terms with the rest of us on the rest of TTBM and still be persona non grata here, because just as with that child who ran afoul of the grumpy neighbor, I'm going to expect you to give these folks their space. What the mods for this subboard say, goes - within reason.




There are going to be limits.

1. We are still on Proboards, which has its own Terms of Service (TOS), as any ad supported service must in order to hold onto its advertising revenue. No profanity, no nudity, no adult material, no hate oriented material - nothing that would go beyond TTBM's PG rating or fall into the usual realm of "offensive material".

2. This board can not be used as a staging point for attacks against TTBM or its management. As the cliche goes, we may be dumb, but we're not stupid.

3. There will be no baiting of the users of the rest of this board, the part outside of ePlaya in exile. If they wander in here on their own, then what goes on is between you and them and maybe your lawyers and clergymen, and I won't want to hear about it. But if one of our people hasn't been on this subboard for a while (or ever), and you start posting provocative material clearly designed to incite a response or draw him in, that's different. That would be like our hypothetical flooded out guest pulling out a bullhorn and pouring out the obscenities. That would be an abuse of our hospitality, and I would not stand for it or ask our membership to stand for it, either.

If somebody comes in here in response to such provocation, and I find out that this was the case, he is not going to be on his own.

4. Those who've been banned from the rest of TTBM are banned here. This is not open to discussion. Back to the flooded out neighbor analogy - if somebody was putting you up to help you out, and you knew that somebody else was not a welcome guest in your host's home, would you expect to be allowed to disrespect your host by bringing that other person in as a guest of your own, in your temporary home away from home? Or would you show a little gratitude, and understand that you have to make an effort to respect your host's sensibilities? This is not business and you do not have a contract. This is courtesy and so there's going to be a give and take.

4. Elastic clause - Remember, you are guests here, and hospitality is a gift, not a contractual obligation. If you create a genuine scandal here, or give your host ample cause to regret his kindness, that gift can, to the extent the host sees fit, be withdrawn, so don't try to play lawyer.


Are we on a common wavelength?