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| Reducing and Understanding Fluff | |
| Author | Message |
|---|---|
| Posted on Sun Aug 13, 2006 10:12 am | |
DanielH
Joined: 27 Nov 2005 |
How would a program like that work? Would it be up to people to teach others a wide spectrum of things? I think that one way we can do that is by pooling people together according to their interests. Pair up people who want to learn telepathy with people who practice telepathy.
I'm not sure something like that would work very well though. I find that far too many people are interested RVing, telekinesis, telepathy, and so on without having any clear field in mind. If we group people in one big pool and then assign them to someone a few problems might arise. You shouldn't usually be pairing up telepathy people with those interested in telekinesis. How can a telepath who's never done telekinesis teach someone about something they know nothing of? This can be easily remedied by simply asking someone who DOES know telekinesis, but that just seems to complicate things. I'm sure you've already thought out how the system is going to work, or at least have a basic structure for it. What are the chances you will actually implement something like this? Another thing I'm curious about is how it will actually work IF it gets put into play. Details please. |
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| Fluff on Sun Aug 13, 2006 10:31 am | |
Rainsong
Joined: 14 Jan 2006 |
Hi, all. The mother hen is going to chime in here, too, with several points that are not particularly related to each other, so the paragraphs are going to be a bit choppy.
Not having been in the chatroom --except once-- in the past three years or so, I cannot speak to the situation there currently. There was a time, however, when most of the folks who were considered "fluffy" appeared to be incapable of expressing their ideas, realistic or otherwise. It looked as though they were typing random sets of letters, and my cat could type a more comprehensible post than they could. And yes, I mean that literally. You can deduce from the fact that my cat could not write or type in any language other than simply walking across the keyboard, that merely understanding what was being asked required skill in telepathy. In related news, during the same period of time, people whose mother tongue was not any form of English, wrote easily understandable posts. Sure, the use of capital letters was irregular within a sentence, but they put capitals at the beginnings of sentences. The conjugations of verbs were sometimes (but only rarely) awkward. Like anyone else, they had the occasional typo. With all that, though, it was not difficult to follow what they were saying, and their written English tended to be better than most of the senior high school students in the chatroom and forum of the time. "Fluffbunny" and "fluffy" are insults in colloquial usage outside the internet. They are more commonly used in some situations than others. Being regional slang, however, the "dictionary definition" may or may not have anything to do with the usage in this context. There is a huge number of terms which are used in regional slang to mean something other than their "dictionary definition". In some cases, the "dictionary definition" is almost never used in certain regions, because of the meaning of the slang term. By way of example, I am told that, in America, the word for "female cat" is almost _never_ used with that meaning. In a forum, if someone posts a question that has already been posted three or more times in the most recent two pages, they are being rude. The equivalent situation in a chatroom is not necessarily rude, merely annoying. The topics discussed in chatrooms tend not to be recorded in readily-accessible places, and some chatrooms are not entered from the parent website, if any. Most of the forums that I've ever been part of, either as an actual member of the community or merely a visitor, have had a waiting period before a person is allowed to post. The period in question is usually between three and ten days. The new person is expected to read the posts which are already there, before posting. They are not necessarily expected to read all the posts in every category, and in fact they might not have access to read every category, but they should have read every post in any category in which they intend to post a question or comment. (I'll point out simply for the record, that the vast majority of these forums were not concerning psionic topics.) Speaking for myself only, I am guilty of accusing certain people who exhibit certain annoying tendencies of being fluffy, when in fact they are merely being f**ffing annoying. Mea culpa. I regularly accuse certain authors of certain popular books of being fluffs, also....not because they are annoying, but because they either exhibit a tenuous grasp of reality in writing about this topic, or because they go on at length about the ethical use of the energy work they are explaining, and then see no problem with advocating actions which go against what they have just said (in the same book, and sometimes in the same paragraph). In my opinion, they are fluffbunnies. If you happen to have an opposing opinion to one or more of my book-reviews, write a review contradicting mine. No problem. Generally, however, when I accuse someone of being fluffy, what I am meaning is that they are being stupid. If you prefer "stupid" to "fluffy", that's fine, too. For the record, I have no problem with people basing their workings on anime and the rulebooks for role-playing games. In fact, I've done that sort of thing myself, regularly. With relatively few exceptions, however, these would be combat-related, and therefore inappropriate for Psipog as the rules currently stand. The rules currently stand the way they do because of the actions of certain people in this community's past. In a like vein, changes in the rules will tend to be prompted by actions of people in this community. Hence this discussion. *steps down and dusts off the soap-box for the next person* |
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| Posted on Sun Aug 13, 2006 10:41 am | |
Amthyst
Joined: 14 Jan 2006 |
I agree with a lot of the opinions posted here. I've noticed for a while that when slightly ridiculous ideas are mentioned (Often by names I've never seen around), they get rudely rebuffed. Being a bit nicer probably isn't much harder than going and reading articles, is it?
And sometimes, and I say this from experience, the articles just don't help. I've read every one of them (Got grounded once for staying on the internet too long--oops) and there are still topics that I do not quite understand. And on the "adoption" idea, and a solution to DanielH's forseen problem: I've been on a forum where the adoption idea was put to very good use, and it kept the confusion down. "Adopters" would volunteer, giving a field or more that they were profcient in. They would be grouped in the pool according to field. The "Adoptees" would state, when 'applying' to be adopted, what field they were looking into learning, and they would be assigned according to availability. Adopters, if they wanted, could take on more than one newbie, keeping the backlog down. And then, there's a way to enforce the "adotion" system. The staff forums already have a way of keeping non-mods out. It could take extra work, but perhaps an adoption forum could be set up, the main forums kept in a similar way to the staff forums, and a new group of posters formed-- So that the non-adopted newbies could be kept out of the main forums until they've been looked after. Once the initial starting changes were taken care of, it probably would not take much work to handle the changes in posting groups, and the "Adopter" could simply PM Peebs (Or whichever mod is in charge of the system) for the change to take place. It would take a little patience on the newbie's part, but since when is that a bad thing? |
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| Posted on Sun Aug 13, 2006 12:59 pm | |
InnerFire
Joined: 12 Jan 2006 |
Hmm pooling over the posts, I do like the the adoption idea, although I'm concerned about the number of people that could do it vs the number of newbie traffic we have. Now of course going back to my comment about building up a bigger base of semi-experienced people that could settle it, so maybe execute both ideas.
I think we should go for it and try this out, very little harm can be done either way. |
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| Posted on Sun Aug 13, 2006 10:22 pm | |
Peebrain
Site Admin |
I adoption program as I had originally invisioned it is based off my experience with DreamViews. When I joined over there, I got a PM of someone saying they would be willing to answer any questions I had, or at least point me in the right direction. I was surprised, and assumed the person was a bot... but it turns out they were real  .
This doesn't require a whole lot of experience in psionics. It only requires experience with the rules, forums, and with PsiPog.net. That way, if the adopter gets a question s/he can find an article that answers it, or pull up some forum posts that answer it as well. The idea is NOT to have the adopter just answer questions off the top of their head... it's almost to provide as a friendly human search engine, with some common sense thrown in the mix. Having low requirements, this would allow for a lot of people to be adopters. Honestly, how often does a newbie have a complicated question? Normally it's something along the lines of "is this a psi ball?", or something that breaks the rules. If the newbie has a good question, the adopter can instruct them to make a new thread about it. The idea is to just cut down on the same old shit that gets posted over and over again by newbies. Another point is that I'd like every new person to be adopted, and no "application" required. Again, if the role of the adopter is only to be a friendly search engine, with common sense, and aware of the rules, then this hopefully wouldn't be a hard requirement to fulfill. This is how I personally invisioned it. I don't want it to turn into this huge Teacher/Student thing... that gets way too complicated. The goal is to just cut down on the newbie threads that ask the same thing over and over again, and to stop people from joining and spamming the forums with things that don't make sense. ~Sean |
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| Posted on Sun Aug 13, 2006 11:40 pm | |
SheepKing
Joined: 12 Jan 2006 |
Hmm, I think the creation of a "newbie" forum wouldn't be a problem. Like just one area for people to ask questions about "where to go" and "What to try"?
I think that could possibly help as well. |
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| Posted on Tue Aug 15, 2006 8:09 pm | |
Mikeofmind
Joined: 26 Feb 2006 |
I think that the 'Adoption' idea could really help lessen the amount of fluff that ends up in the forums. When I first became interested in learning about psionics I basically type telekinesis into a google search. I grew up in the cartoon & comic era so all I knew were fluff terms about pyrokinesis, hydrokinesis, and that sort of stuff (curse you X-men!). Luckily, I found a link to psipog and read some of the articles. The difference about this site was that the way they were written made sense and were legible. It wasn't like all those places that either look like they were made by a 10-year-old or scare people off with spiritual stuff. We've got to realize that most of the people who are interested in psionics are still adolecent and really don't know any better. We can't stone a noob for being fluffy unless we teach them exactly where the fluff line is drawn. The fact that someone who they'll never meet will take the time out to help/teach them shows that we really do care and take this seriously. And maybe we could have some sort of literacy test for new members so that when they post they won't be the only person who can make out what it says?
P.S.- that last comment was semi-sarcastic... |
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| Posted on Sat Aug 19, 2006 12:54 pm | |
bladeslinger
Joined: 10 Feb 2006 |
If you ask around then you'll find out this "adoption" system is already in effect toa certain degree. Noobs go on the forum, need help, see the IM addresses in sigs and message whoever is on. People(including myself) can get fromone noob a month to five in one night and many of us will help each other out and teach in groups. 
A two week waiting period sounds great to me. Maybe at the end of this waiting time they could get a simple test(simple as in if they actually read like two article they would pass.) so people joining to flame or to learn things we see as "fuffy" would see it a waste of time to join just to wait two weeks then be tested... |
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