Basejumper.com - archive

Ok moderators. What gives.
When I say what gives what I really mean is why do you turn a blind eye to the inane rantings of TROLLS.
As a BASE jumper I like this forum for connecting with other like minded people. Namely other BASE jumpers. Information can be shared, connections can be made, in short all the things OUR community needs to make the participation in our chosen activity that much more enjoyable.
This forum also has its place for people that are intersted in pursuing BASE jumping as a future activity for themselves also. Lots of great info to be had and people to guide the new or would be jumper.
However lately I have begun noticing this almost overwhelming and curious number of TROLL posts that serve no purpose to our community but instead just piss people off and create bullshit tension.
So my question is simple. Why are the TROLLS allowed carte blanche on our site?
Don't give me the free speach thing. They are free to go create their own site and call in trollnonjumper.com for all I care. That there is a site I would never visit because it offers nothing relevant to anything I do.
I might be on my own here, though I supect I'm not, but really time to moderate those whinging fuckers outta here.
Oh and to the crazy person that PMd me and dropped the names of a bunch of my mates...WTF?

Not on your own

For people interested in getting BASE, I think this place can be a great resource by READING, and if you see stuff you dont know or want to know more about, usualy a simple SEARCH is enough to find threads where you do find answers. Lurking instead of posting (unless you truly have something to ad).

People posting the same trolly questions/intent to jump again and again. Its only making people (the people you might someday look up for actual training or advice once you ARE jumping) hate your guts and walk around you in a 10 mile circle if they ever meet you face to face...

And those same useless (and lazy! look it up! put some effort in) posts are also what causes more and more clutter, and makes all the good info harder and harder to find, as you have to dig through tons of shit first.

Keep this space clean..read and understand instead of writing and looking for justification for stupid things you want to do.
If you think its a bad idea to start doing this and that without training, and you need to ask if other people also think its not the brightest thing....than it probably is...
And if you have no idea what someone is asking, than dont be the one answering and offering advice..

People like Sangi are actually destroying the help that future people coming forward are going to get. Enough people are getting pissed off with people like Sangi that they wont help the next newbie who asks a question. I am getting very cynical about newbies, the last 2 I have offered to meet have not turned up after I made the effort, there are many more newbies on the forums not helping their own cause. I am sure many more than just me are getting pissed off with the "Sangi type newbie" in this world.... and sadly this means other people will miss out.

THIS is why I am fucked off with Sangi.

I agree with all. While this forum has always had a high level of whining and bitching, it had a fair amount of useful info as well. Lately it's just "let's see how many times we can tell Sangi that he is an idiot before he finally gets it" or "hand that bitch a tanker of Midol".

It is definitely more fun to read, kind of like Bonfire on dz.com - absolutely useless and filled with people who are not part of the sport or did 3 jumps in their "10 years in the sport"

Sangi actually annoys me the most, TLN is ok in my eyes and as she does not protest to jump or wants to jump or offer advice.... this has no effect on me on the forums.... what fucks me off is wannabes fucking it up for the wannabes that follow....

Come to BLiNC or BJO........ see how "unfiltered" boards work....

I'll agree with many of the points made in every post so far. I also try to ask many of the non-jumper/newbie trolls to research.

Heck, I actually let jumpers abuse the regular "how do I start BASE jumping?" posters.

I have seen solid content come from some of the same people (see the interviews). I have seen "abused" newbies get it and start begging other newbies to behave.

We can't fix the troll issue as you suggest for 2 big reasons:
- we have no rules against trolls.
- sadly, much of the trolling comes from experienced jumpers. it was one of the late magot's areas of excellence.

sadly, losing the trolls does NOT promote cooperation and camaraderie. it does permit a whole lot of ego competition. <sigh>

it's better to STOP FEEDING THE TROLLS.

Its probably too difficult/tedious to do it on such a big forum but would it be possible to have a more exclusive area strictly for jumpers? I mean the base community is so connected that jumpers have met jumpers in person and those jumpers know this jumper and he knows these jumpers etc maybe some sort of verification this way to have access to this area? Again just a random thought and probably too difficult to control... But even if it was flawed some way this would definately reduce some of the bs... any thoughts?

It would be easy. Like ABA's Fight Club.

Users have to be authorized by, and personally known by, the admin. Tom knows enough jumpers to pull that off.

Excellent suggestion IMHO.

Cool, then a bunch of "approved" basejumper.com.inc clones can jerk each other off online. But seriously you're right, what the base jumping commiunity needs is more rules and regulation. Right up until the whole fucking thing is illegal. Oh I forgot, it already mostly is illegal.

I'll bite.

I have zero ability to implement the suggestion, even if I love it.

we already have a partial implementation of it. look at the forums without logging in. you won't be able to read certain forums. not all forums are truly public. (that said, it takes very little work to create credentials.)

as I said previously, many BASE jumpers seem to like to troll as well. they like to stir up stuff for their own entertainment. so you want management to put in a lot of effort, for what?

so many people want less moderation, to be more of a free fire zone (like other sites). it reminds me of all the folks who want smaller government. that is, until something THEY value is at risk. thus we have a call for more moderation.

it is always somebody else should do something. (best seen in the "tell me this" & "read this" exchange.)

this site and it's personality is NOT dictated by Tom, me, or anyone else (aside from the Civility part). most topics, posts, responses, etc. are chosen by the users. the overall vibe is thus determined by 100's of acts every day.

I'd like people to set examples, act responsibly, encourage others to do the same, and resist the urge to respond to every troll or otherwise delinquent thread. let then die. move on. don't get riled up.

or, more simply:

how is that a rule or regulation? all my suggestion is is to have a more exclusive area to which only active/verified jumpers would have access. IMHO that has the potential to be a place that is far less restrictive as to the content that my be discussed there. The rest of the site could remain the same and the people who would still want to reply to non jumpers and people asking where the base academy is could still do so. Depending on how strict the requirements would be to join this area, the content could potentially have very few limitations if any.

It's a regulation by definition, you want to regulate who can participate in the forum or in some part of it. The next step would be to ban those who don't say the proper things, then ban those who don't agree with you.

The background horseshit that is bound to occur in an open forum is somewhat annoying, simply ignoring it is the easiest solution, you'll be less aggravated and the trollers will lighten up if you don't feed them. Also keep in mind that what you find annoying may be humorous or even valuable to someone else.

So do you moderate based on a set of rules?
By my account you do.

Hello there one and all.

Just to introduce myself, I am a regular lurker on this thread and a total wuffo. I don't post (well apart from this one) because of this but I do read and try to absorb as much advice as I can.

I'll be the first to admit that I know fuck all about BASE but when I first set out I knew a lot less than fuck all.

This website and the UK website basejumper.org (amongst others) are a font of sensible, decent and honest information that help people like myself understand what they are looking to get into. And whilst I have the opportunity, may I just say thank you to one and all for the information and knowledge which has helped me so much.

It is directly because of the information I have read from posters and submitted articles that I am starting my RAPS course next month. I'm going to get many, many jumps behind me (and learn about packing, canopy control, basically as much as I can) before I even consider asking to ground crew, never mind seeking someone who'd be kind enough to be my mentor and then do a FJC.

My fear is that if parts of the site are blocked to people like me because a few bad eggs that in the future people who are in the same position as myself will end up taking the wrong path (in so many different ways).

Anyway that is just my 2p worth (Scottish for 2c worth) I shall return to keeping my trap shut.

Peace and slainte mhath

I'd say your reply is more Irish than Scottish....Care to add more? PM if you like...Apologies to all the rest for the side steer on this topic!

However, might aswell add my own opinion on this one!

It's a dot com directly related to BASE jumping. Why wouldn't you expect to have every man and his dog giving their opinion, question, bulls***, story etc. etc. etc.

The search option is a BS bypass that we can all use. Some very good stuff there without ever going to the main board. Also, the Tech and incident forums are gem stones, the latter being a bit sad at times!

In this thread I can see people calling for both more and less moderation. That makes it difficult to see what direction we ought to be moving in here.

Matt, what would you suggest we do about non-jumpers posting here? Just ban them outright? Wait until a sufficient number of people are pissed about them, and then ban them? And, in all seriousness, are you interested in helping moderate this forum?

Mac, I personally tend toward leniency on people like Sangi, because of the sheer number of those guys I've seen over the years, and the number of them who went on to actually BASE jump. I've also seen a lot of them become the older guy who hates those newbies--it's kind of a natural cycle.

Regarding a "private" forum:

I think it might be possible to create a forum that could only be viewed if your user "trust" was high enough. Currently, we're only using this feature for auto-approval of photos, and setting it either by hand (which means me doing it) or by photo uploads (if you get 10 photos approved, all your future photos get approved unless we see one that's out of line, pull it down, and manually reset your "trust" rating).

There are lots of issues with setting up a forum that way, though.

How would we establish the trust (aside from me manually allowing people in, which would be a giant pain in my ass and take up way too much of my very limited time)? Just by number of posts on the site? By personal referral (again a lot of my time that you'd be asking for)?

I'm not willing to set up a forum for just 20 or 30 people. There has to be some sort of system for recognizing and validating a wide spread of actual jumpers who want to use it. And it can't be too personal, because then you get the "they're all Tom's friends" problem.

On the other hand, there are a lot of advantages to creating such a forum. You could freely talk about specific objects, and give directions to them (and tips on jumping them). You could discuss techniques for less than legal jumps more openly. You could spread the word about some legal action, just to jumpers.

I think it boils down to the issue of how to control access to the forum. It needs some kind of system that's either automated and closely monitored, or run by a group of committed people who are willing to keep reviewing new users. Do we have people here who would be willing to give the time to do that? Does anyone have suggestions for the criteria you could use?

A word of unsolicited advice from someone who's seen more newbies than I care to think about:

If you find yourself getting cynical or tired, just walk away, do your own thing, and recharge. In the end you're doing this for you, not for them.

At least, that's what Dwain Weston told me back around 2001.

Just an idea, and dosent necessarily have to be applied to a new private forum but might even be useful for basejumper in general:

Creating something that networks those jumpers that have actually jumped together. I.e. "Homies I've Hucked With" haha that's lame but seriously like a friends list but not just added because someone wants to be your friend on basejumper. Must be added only if you have physically met the person and jumped something with them. Then when you add them you have to give them a trust rating. maybe three rating levels like Jedi knight(trust them with any knowledge) not sure but seemed cool, or reckless. Anyone rated in the top two categories could have access (maybe you need five or more ratings or something like this) reckless would require justification like they burned something etc by whoever gave this rating and access would not be allowed to anyone with a "reckless" rating. Users would rate whoever rated them cause they obviously jumped together. After a while many jumpers could be established and then anyone there would be able to view everyones ratings and get a good idea about jumpers that they might potentially invite to their local objects and whatnot... Again, just an idea to throw out there...

I don't trust anyone with most object information. I'll openly discuss some common sites but if you want specifics for an unusual site, it's not going to be in a forum even if I trust you personally.

That's what I mean those that wish to protect what they will protect will still do so.