gravy
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now i only VAGELY remember
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The Muppet Central Mysteries
- Thread starter D'Snowth
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Old Thunder
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not a dam word
No, you're right, there's nothing mysterious about that. But the reason why the particular examples of which I've written about are mysterious, are because of their unusual and strange circumstances.
Chapter 4: The Disappearing MCer
Over the years, MC has accumulated a vast collection of threads that have gone on for countless pages - despite the turn over in community, and members coming and going - these threads offered something for everybody, at any given time, hence their longevity. More often than not, because of the general, off-topic nature of these threads, they would often be derailed into a series of muffining, penguin tossing, and impromtu fanfics and RPs.
In recent years, however, these massive threads have, one by one, been disappearing, without a trace. Some of the casualties of these deletions have included, but are not limited to: "Boy, is This Forum Dead Today, or What?", "The What Made You Smile Today Thread", "The What Made You Frown Today Thread", "The Am I The Only One? Thread", and "The Quote Thread", among others. But, these threads were popular and active, and have been for years . . . so, why delete them? Was it a bandwidth issue? Were the threads taking up too much server space? Were they just so massive that they needed to be pruned to help conserve space and bandwidth on the forum? Surprisingly, no. None of the above. Those seem like logical, and even understandable reasons for these huge threads to be deleted from MC . . . so, what's the actual explanation for these threads being deleted? According to MC moderator, Ed - who also goes by the aliases, The Count, and Jim Thundercloud - these threads were deleted because of an anonymous member requesting that his or her posts in these threads be deleted; Count Jim Edcloud has reasoned that it would simply be easier, and less time-consuming, to just delete the entire threads altogether, rather than go through these massive threads - page, by hundreds of pages - to delete this one member's individual posts within.
Due to confidentiality, Thunder Jim has never revealed the identity of the anonymous member who has made multiple requests to have his or her posts removed from these threads, which has resulted in the deletion of these threads altogether - much to the frustrations and annoyance of other MCers, who were extremely unhappy about seeing such large threads that they've dedicated years to disappear (not to mention more than a few members being angered at their post counts suddenly dropping, drastically). In a sense, you can't really fault The Cloud Count for wanting to go the route that would require less work and effort . . . but, to sum up this brief chapter eloquently, and succinctly: who the frog is this mysterious anonymous member who keeps inconveniencing the rest of us, and why is he or she so ashamed of even being here?! If this member doesn't want to be here anymore, or have their posts seen by everyone else, couldn't they just request their account be deleted, and wouldn't they remove their content as a result?!
Old Thunder
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I would bet money on it being multiple people.
Blue Frackle
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Every time I hear about that it peeves me... time to go to the pet peeves thread, until it gets removed.
Bumpity-bump-bump bumpity-bump.
This one is hardly a mystery at all, however, it's pretty much old history by now, and I am unaware of any of the members involved in this scenario are even still on MC (some of them have disappeared almost completely), so I suppose this could serve as an interesting history lesson for members who weren't around when such an incident went down . . . and, it will also serve as an example of when the community got so fed up with the lack of moderation around here that they took matters into their own hand.
In the early New Tens, MC suddenly saw a boom of new members joining the forum, many of whom were, for all intents and purposes, just kids. Certainly not anything wrong with that, after all, the Muppets are a mostly family-friendly franchise, so it's no surprise that we'd have some newer, younger members join our ranks here . . . heck, some of us now-considered "old-timers" were actually kids ourselves when we first joined MC (I, myself, was but a mere fourteen-year-old, having just started high school, when I joined).
As I said, there is certainly nothing wrong with having younger members join in on the fun we have around here . . . however, with younger blood in the system, there was also the issue of a lack of a certain amount of maturity as well. This Baby Boom on MC ended up resulting in a lot of unintentional "spam" around here . . . nothing inappropriate, mind you, but a lot of these newer, younger members had a tendancy to hijack and derail a lot of threads with their own personal little side-conversations among themselves that had nothing to do with the topic at hand within the threads they ended up hijacking . . . clearly, it was a case of replying to each other and posting just for the sake of posting (and possibly increasing their post counts, since more people cared about such way back when). Granted, they were only having fun with each other, and there certainly isn't anything wrong with such . . . but the problem was, this was becoming far too commonplace, and frankly, it was starting to become something of an annoyance to find that certain threads had increased a number of pages with new replies, only to turn out it was more of these newer, younger members derailing the threads with their "spam." One specific example I can give was when we used to have a "Hug Thread" (not sure if we still do or not), where members could tag other members for a virtual cyber hug . . . it was not uncommon for these newbies to spam the heck out of this thread, often like this:
OP: Hugs to (tagged member)!
TAGGED MEMBER: Aww, thanks! And here's a hug back to you for hugging me!
OP: That's sweet of you! Here's another hug for you for hugging me back!
TAGGED MEMBER: Thank you! Since you hugged me back, I'll hug you back as well!
OP: You're too kind! Here's another hug for you!
TAGGED MEMBER: You too! Another hug for you!
OP: And another one for you!
TAGGED MEMBER: And you too!
See what I mean? That's just one specific example; there were many popular threads back then that they would end up doing this in. To the best of my memory, there were attempts to resolve this little issue privately, but nothing was ever achieved by doing such, so finaly, some of the older, longtime members (myself included) staged a public intervention, calling these members out, and asking them to please refrain from this excessive behavior.
Needless to say, the younger members who were called into question were not at all pleased about this. Almost all of them felt they were being ganged up on by older members who were looking to be bullies, though that certainly was not the case at all. They insisted they were only having fun, and that was why they came here in the first place; we explained to them that we want them to have fun, we're not stopping them from having fun, but that they should have fun a little more responsibly, and be a little more mindful of how they behave on the forum, citing that it's not them having fun we were having issues with, but rather, just their excessive posting for posting sake that we had issues with. Some of them rebutted by saying we could have tried to resolve this with them privately, rather than call them out publicly like this . . . even though we did, and nothing was resolved, which is why we ended up doing this publicly to get results.
Things did finally begin to settle down afterwards . . . to the point that I don't believe any of these members are even still here anymore. It would be a shame to think that we may have actually driven them away, however, as The Cat In The Hat once sang: it's fun to have fun, but you have to know how. Enough was enough, and order needed to be restored. As much as people around here complain about a lack of action on Phil or Ed's part in regards to things getting out of hand around here, this is, perhaps, the biggest example of the community stepping up to the plate and taking matters into their own hands to get results.
Now, hold onto your bibs, kids, because the next chapter is going to be a loo-loo!
Chapter 5: The Babies
This one is hardly a mystery at all, however, it's pretty much old history by now, and I am unaware of any of the members involved in this scenario are even still on MC (some of them have disappeared almost completely), so I suppose this could serve as an interesting history lesson for members who weren't around when such an incident went down . . . and, it will also serve as an example of when the community got so fed up with the lack of moderation around here that they took matters into their own hand.
In the early New Tens, MC suddenly saw a boom of new members joining the forum, many of whom were, for all intents and purposes, just kids. Certainly not anything wrong with that, after all, the Muppets are a mostly family-friendly franchise, so it's no surprise that we'd have some newer, younger members join our ranks here . . . heck, some of us now-considered "old-timers" were actually kids ourselves when we first joined MC (I, myself, was but a mere fourteen-year-old, having just started high school, when I joined).
As I said, there is certainly nothing wrong with having younger members join in on the fun we have around here . . . however, with younger blood in the system, there was also the issue of a lack of a certain amount of maturity as well. This Baby Boom on MC ended up resulting in a lot of unintentional "spam" around here . . . nothing inappropriate, mind you, but a lot of these newer, younger members had a tendancy to hijack and derail a lot of threads with their own personal little side-conversations among themselves that had nothing to do with the topic at hand within the threads they ended up hijacking . . . clearly, it was a case of replying to each other and posting just for the sake of posting (and possibly increasing their post counts, since more people cared about such way back when). Granted, they were only having fun with each other, and there certainly isn't anything wrong with such . . . but the problem was, this was becoming far too commonplace, and frankly, it was starting to become something of an annoyance to find that certain threads had increased a number of pages with new replies, only to turn out it was more of these newer, younger members derailing the threads with their "spam." One specific example I can give was when we used to have a "Hug Thread" (not sure if we still do or not), where members could tag other members for a virtual cyber hug . . . it was not uncommon for these newbies to spam the heck out of this thread, often like this:
OP: Hugs to (tagged member)!
TAGGED MEMBER: Aww, thanks! And here's a hug back to you for hugging me!
OP: That's sweet of you! Here's another hug for you for hugging me back!
TAGGED MEMBER: Thank you! Since you hugged me back, I'll hug you back as well!
OP: You're too kind! Here's another hug for you!
TAGGED MEMBER: You too! Another hug for you!
OP: And another one for you!
TAGGED MEMBER: And you too!
See what I mean? That's just one specific example; there were many popular threads back then that they would end up doing this in. To the best of my memory, there were attempts to resolve this little issue privately, but nothing was ever achieved by doing such, so finaly, some of the older, longtime members (myself included) staged a public intervention, calling these members out, and asking them to please refrain from this excessive behavior.
Needless to say, the younger members who were called into question were not at all pleased about this. Almost all of them felt they were being ganged up on by older members who were looking to be bullies, though that certainly was not the case at all. They insisted they were only having fun, and that was why they came here in the first place; we explained to them that we want them to have fun, we're not stopping them from having fun, but that they should have fun a little more responsibly, and be a little more mindful of how they behave on the forum, citing that it's not them having fun we were having issues with, but rather, just their excessive posting for posting sake that we had issues with. Some of them rebutted by saying we could have tried to resolve this with them privately, rather than call them out publicly like this . . . even though we did, and nothing was resolved, which is why we ended up doing this publicly to get results.
Things did finally begin to settle down afterwards . . . to the point that I don't believe any of these members are even still here anymore. It would be a shame to think that we may have actually driven them away, however, as The Cat In The Hat once sang: it's fun to have fun, but you have to know how. Enough was enough, and order needed to be restored. As much as people around here complain about a lack of action on Phil or Ed's part in regards to things getting out of hand around here, this is, perhaps, the biggest example of the community stepping up to the plate and taking matters into their own hands to get results.
Now, hold onto your bibs, kids, because the next chapter is going to be a loo-loo!
Pig'sSaysAdios
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I forgot this thread exists! But, fascinating stuff
Old Thunder
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It’s finally back! Is the intervention thread still around, by the way?
Ed may or may not have deleted it; I'd have to grab a shovel through about 400 feet of rock and mud to possibly dig it back up, but I'm up to the challenge . . . besides, I need to go back in time to refresh some details regarding my write-up for the next chapter's mystery. 