Said goodbye to an online community I’ve been a part of for the last three years today. Last night, one of the relatively new members posted some inane racist crap about Asians, and was too stupid to know the difference between talking about people, and literally being racist. I’d hoped that the mods would have the common sense to enforce some of the values we actually used to really hold dear – that we would not tolerate racism, misogyny, or any other form of discrimination. But the problem is that the moderators apparently have some completely fucked up sense that quantity is more valuable than quality, despite a single person basically driving off two long time regulars, several months ago. Of course, the other person that was responsible for them leaving was a mod himself, so basically, that situation was just fucked from the start.

So, I’m sad – there are members there that I genuinely hope to keep in touch with, and have formed what I consider valuable, hopefully lasting friendships with. And the only reason that I feel ok leaving the community because of the actions of this one jackass are that I think that those friendships are strong enough to continue, even in a diminished capacity, without the forum.

This brings up the question, though, for me – can an open community survive being open? Can it survive being closed? If it’s closed, it stagnates – there needs to be some constant influx of new people, to keep things interesting, but at the same time, letting in any ol’ shit-for-brains ends up with situations as we have now. I think the key is proper, vigilant moderation. The Gamer’s Forum lost that, when some warped concern for not hurting this guy’s precious feelings got in the way of actually telling him to shut up when he was saying idiotic bullshit. But even then, vigilant moderation leads to disagreements, or the strict enforcement of a single point of view on how to run a community.

For me, I would have preferred that, and had people leave because they thought a community had a certain style, and it turned out that wasn’t the style, then having new people come in, screw up the established community, then force people who were there from the start to have to choose to leave or not based on whether they find this new iteration of the community acceptable. For me, it simply finally crossed the line when overt racism became grounds for a slap on the wrist, rather than a kick in the balls.

C’est la vie, on one hand, on the other hand, I hope my friends from TGF remain so. I realize that in these times, that’s somewhat of an unlikely proposition, yet still, I remain perhaps naively hopeful.