Clarification of Spaghetti Posting Rules

[Squishy]

We'd like to thank you for bearing with us. After a bit of discussion, and revision, let me give you a few more details on the Spaghetti Posting Policy...

What is 'spaghetti posting'?

We were actually a little surprised to discover that this is apparently not a known term. Personally I thought the term predated my career on the internet, which started back in 2005, and while it may well have done the term actually appears to have been coined on Spacebattles. Given that, people might find any sort of policy in respect for it a little confusing.

Spaghetti posting is typified by the quoting of individual sentences and sometimes even sentence fragments. It's often used as a rhetorical tool that attempts to undermine an opponent's argument by unreasonable addressing individual components, rather than the argument as a whole. That's a form of bad faith debating, and represents a violation of Rule 4 - don't be disruptive.

What does this mean in practice?

Previously this was presented as a new policy, but after some discussion between the Staff and Council it became clear that it was strange that it wasn't already considered a violation of one rule or another. All things considered, the average spaghetti post could already be captured by rule 4, and this is an attempt to correct course on our end, as well as inform everyone that a behaviour they may not have thought about could get them into trouble.

Simply put, if we see spaghetti posting being used in debates, arguments or discussions, we will intervene, and if necessary we will issue infractions against users who do it.

Our primary interest is in preventing this in debate and discussion, however there is a related issue. It was controversially suggested that this would apply across the entire forum, capturing non-argumentative examples in the creative forums. We want to walk that back, but also register our issues with it.

It's not unusual to find 'line edit' reviews of new chapters in User Fiction, quoting individual sentences or pieces of dialogue and making a short comment. These posts are essentially innocent of any wrongdoing, it's just the way the user engages with the work. Infracting someone for that, or banning it entirely, would be a bridge too far. However, the way that the quote tags format in XenForo means that posts like these take up a lot of real estate on screens, despite their relatively low word counts.

That's nobody's fault, but we would like to reduce the impact those kinds of posts have on the browsing experience. So from this point on we're going to ask that if you're making a line edit review, and your post ends up noticeably longer on the page as a result, that you make use of the spoiler tag to reduce the space it takes up.

In summary:

1. If you spaghetti post in an argument, discussion or debate, you will be opening yourself to staff intervention, including infractions or other punishments.
2. If you spaghetti post innocently, make use of the spoiler tag to reduce the amount of page space you're taking up.

 

[Ford Prefect]

An illustrative example

Here's a post by me:

For better or worse, the wizarding world of Harry Potter ignited and still ignites the imaginations of millions. It might have gaps in some details and it may be relatively shallow, but it works: it paints a picture of a whimsical, strange and fascinating place that readers wanted to inhabit. Quidditch doesn't really make a lot of sense as a sport, but everyone wanted to play it. The economy of Diagon Alley is clearly nonsensical, but everyone wanted to shop there. Hogwarts is an absolutely terrible school, but everyone wanted to study there.

I realise this is something of an appeal to popularity, but if we're talking responses to fictional settings it's hard to ignore the absolute weight of all those people invested in the wizarding Britain. Someone mentioned (ugh) Brandon Sanderson earlier and the comparison could not be more stark. No matter how many tens of thousands of words of exhaustive setting detail that Branderson lays on the reader, he has not even brushed against what Rowling achieved. And he never will, because worldbuilding is at its best when it is evocative, rather than detailed.

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The point that this post is making is 'the world building of the Harry Potter series is shallow but evocative, which is more important that exhaustive detail' and is said in about 180 words. That's an arguable point, but that's the point that should be disputed. However, let's say that I was actually the Ford Prefect from twelve years ago. Then I might try to dispute the point like this:

Spoiler: Example 1

For better or worse, the wizarding world of Harry Potter ignited and still ignites the imaginations of millions.

Click to shrink...

This is just an appeal to popularity, which is basically meaningless when we're assessing the quality of Harry Potter's worldbuilding.

It might have gaps in some details and it may be relatively shallow, but it works: it paints a picture of a whimsical, strange and fascinating place that readers wanted to inhabit.

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But it's the fact that it has all those gaps that makes it bad. It just doesn't make sense.

Quidditch doesn't really make a lot of sense as a sport, but everyone wanted to play it.

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But no one would actually play it, precisely because it doesn't make sense, and was designed from the ground up to make Harry look impressive.

The economy of Diagon Alley is clearly nonsensical, but everyone wanted to shop there. Hogwarts is an absolutely terrible school, but everyone wanted to study there.

Click to shrink...

That's just because the books are full of shiny things to attract the reader's attention. There's no substance underneath either of those places.

I realise this is something of an appeal to popularity, but if we're talking responses to fictional settings it's hard to ignore the absolute weight of all those people invested in the wizarding Britain.

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You're right, it IS an appeal to popularity. Lots of things are popular while also being bad: are you going to tell me that Twilight has great worldbuilding just because lots of people like it?

Someone mentioned (ugh) Brandon Sanderson earlier and the comparison could not be more stark. No matter how many tens of thousands of words of exhaustive setting detail that Branderson lays on the reader, he has not even brushed against what Rowling achieved.

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That's besides the point. Sanderson is probably never going to achieve similar popularity to Rowling, but hardly anyone will. What really matters is that he invests a lot of thought and effort into the surroundings of his stories, making them believable and even realistic given the assumptions of his writing.

And he never will, because worldbuilding is at its best when it is evocative, rather than detailed.

Click to shrink...

That's entirely your own opinion. The point of worldbuilding is to build a world, and a world can't be flimsily constructed. In science fiction and fantasy you're already asking your readers to accept a lot of fantastical concepts, and it takes grounding them in a sufficiently believable setting for readers to get invested. If they don't have that then they're going to end up lost by the story. So you need all those details to convince readers.

Can you see why this is deleterious to a debate? This hypothetical post does contain a pertinent point and counter argument at the end, but often spaghetti posting lacks any sort of substantive point, leaving just the needling and the nitpicking. And it's hard to constructively dispute that nitpicking. It just gets you bogged right down in minutiae which are essentially just supporting statements. The point in my post does not turn on the fact that Quidditch would be popular, it's just an example of one of the ways in which Harry Potter's popularity manifests. A post like my example above would almost certainly fall afoul of rule 4.

Let's also look at a couple of counter examples. For the sake of a hypothetical, let's assume that the Harry Potter series is not popular. You might see a post like:

Spoiler: example 2

For better or worse, the wizarding world of Harry Potter ignited and still ignites the imaginations of millions.

Click to shrink...

What? It didn't and it doesn't. We know the sales figures for the series and they're not high enough to support this kind of statement.

This has one of the characteristics of spaghetti posting, in that it quotes a single sentence. My position relies on Harry Potter being popular - it really has touched the imaginations of millions - so if that could be falsified then it would genuinely undermine my argument. Picking out falsifiable claims in a post and disputing them directly with counter-evidence is not likely to fall afoul of rule 4.

Here's another example of posting that wouldn't constitute spaghetti posting, graciously provided by @Simon_Jester:

Spoiler: Post by Simon_Jester

Would something like that really be worth the effort/resources? I mean from my, admittedly casual, perspective it seems far easier to simply slowly retire those ships and use their crews for rennies etc. since I feel like we are past the point where we need to focus on quantity instead of quality (especially considering our success on the diplomatic front as for example the closer cooperation with the seyek will massively bolster our cardassian front. )

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As noted, we want the option of refitting the ships should we so desire, and we really need to keep our combat powerhouse ships free to be combat powerhouses if we want a secure margin of safety for operations in the Gabriel Expanse while keeping the other border zones secure. We're still some years from it being safe to retire the Constellations. Upgrading them is desirable even if we end up retiring them, too, because we may want to be able to pull them out of mothballs for garrison duty at some future date.

But do we truly benefit hat much from our affiliates having upgraded Constellations (if they even get them in anything resembling a reasonable time-frame...)?

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It means that the member worlds can have more ships and better ships. That matters if we need to draw on the member worlds for backup in a large scale war (fairly likely), or if we tap into their forces to help us in a specific regional crisis (as we are already doing in two places at once).

If that's the case, maybe we should be the ones asking them which style of refit they prefer.

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We don't have a good mechanic for that. Most of the Constellations (maybe all) are distributed among the founding four member worlds, and they've been letting Starfleet call the tune in terms of "what ship classes should exist in our fleets" for the past hundred years or so. They'd probably turn around and say "I thought making calls like that was your job, buster."

I just had a thought. Could we do a deal with the Hawk faction to get the Amarki to sign up with Ainsworth's task force? Offer the Amarki first dibs on the next colony site Starfleet discovers or something? Might make it easier for Ainsworth to go aggressive.

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I think that's aiming too low for a deal. Deals should be game-changers, not just "convince someone to do something they probably considered doing."

These 4 are almost certainly going to be 500/500 when the 'no more ratifications' period ends - the Development faction is going to hate having 4 Ratifications the quarter after that runs out .....

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The Council isn't a bunch of mindless robots; it's likely that the ratifications are going to be staggered out over an extended period of time (a year or two).

If we were to spend a Sousa Deal on such a thing, I'd like to add a transfers office to the MWCO. That way we have infrastructure in place to do crew swaps or move around resources more frequently.

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That... is a very good idea.

And it's generally now agreed that pushing Bajor was a mistake, if only with the benefit of hindsight. Why repeat a mistake after we see how it turned out the first time?

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The obvious response is "because we couldn't actually stop the Cardassians from muscling in on Bajor until they'd already done it, and arguably not even then, whereas we COULD stop the Sydraxians from muscling in on the Gretarians because we have enough firepower to do that."

Except...

We're forbidden by treaty from crushing them. We signed an agreement to leave the Sydraxians alone outside the Gabriel Expanse. What makes you think them formally occupying the Gretarians would release us from that treaty?

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That you are 100% right about this part. At best, we'd have a significant fraction of the Council bickering over this. Over whether our intervention to protect the Gretarians from the Sydraxians constitutes the Federation violating the Treaty of Celos, or whether it constitutes us responding to a Sydraxian violation of same.

There is a significant risk of us touching off a general war this way.

Back then I was among those who pointed out pushing Bajor would be a mistake because the Cardassians would obviously panic over it. I don't see the situation with the Gretarians as even slightly similar in any of the relevant aspects. Learning that particular lesson from the Bajoran matter would be generalizing from the wrong thing, like being afraid of black animals because you were bitten by a black dog. It's possible that approaching another black animal at another time could also be a mistake, but it would have nothing to do with the color.

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I'd argue that it's a similar situation- just with a smaller dog. It would be totally in character for the Sydraxians to go in with a task force to forestall the Gretarians from ending their tribute payments. That is not an unreasonable fear on our part.

The big difference is that at Bajor we were bitten by a black Great Dane, while at Gretaria the direct bite would be coming from a black Chihuahua.

The real danger is that if we react to the Chihuahua as its yappiness and violence deserve, we may be attacked by the Great Dane leading its pack.

Which is completely bonkers IMO. Someone fire the person the Council has in charge of districting in that area, for Q's sake. The Orions cut in half, Ferasa and Risa and Qloath and potentially the Dawiar in one sector while the Seyek have their own despite Seyek and Qloathi space overlapping...

A more sane route by far would be to put the Orions wholly into Amarkia and have the Qloathi in the Rethelia sector.

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To be fair, as far as I can recall, that districting was drawn when only the Amarki and Caitians were members. When the Risans were a looong way out, and when we hadn't even discovered the Qloath. Redrawing sector boundaries as new members join the Federation is an entirely reasonable and probable course of action.

We don't draw our sector boundaries on the assumption that species will join the Federation when they have not yet done so. That would be colossally arrogant.

In this case, Simon is quoting several different members, and generally engaging with their points, not picking at individual components of their posts. This is the kind of thing which we wouldn't consider spaghetti posting, even though at first blush it looks like it.

Hopefully that might give you an idea of what to look out for. As always, if you're unsure you can always seek guidance on the matter and the staff will endeavour to assist.

 

[AlphaDelta]

Ah. That makes more sense.

Fortunately, I'm too lazy to do much more than quoting the relevant-ish part of a post.

 

[Glitchrr36]

This is much better than the original. I have no issues, personally

 

[Stratagemini]

So it's still okay to do line item posting of atguments when you're addressing different points though, right?

Like if someone talks about vatious legal reasons something can't hapoen in story, you can address each of those arguments one at a time, right?

 

[Battleship_Fusou]

Much better, I no longer have any issues with this rule setup.

 

[tigros40208]

User fiction was the one forum where I thought this might run into problems. With this clarification everything looks good. Thanks for all the work done on our behalf.

 

[keios]

Thank you for the clarifications!

2. If you spaghetti post innocently, make use of the spoiler tag to reduce the amount of page space you're taking up.

Click to shrink...

Here's another example of posting that wouldn't constitute spaghetti posting, graciously provided by @Simon_Jester:
[(snipped)]
In this case, Simon is quoting several different members, and generally engaging with their points, not picking at individual components of their posts. This is the kind of thing which we wouldn't consider spaghetti posting, even though at first blush it looks like it.

Click to shrink...

Just for clarification, "innocent" spaghetti posting seems to refer only to line-level responses to user fiction, but should we also be using spoiler tags for posts similar to the Simon_Jester example, i.e., that are not spaghetti posting but appear to be so at first blush, since they also use up a lot of page space?

 

[searcher8]

So, what's the official staff stance on if @Datcord's style of posting C&C violates this rule? Because this clarification doesn't say anything about that at all, despite it being clearly brought up in the last thread.

 

[Arcus]

TL;DR: Always keep in mind that you are responding to an entire argument, not a few lines of text taken out of context.

 

[Ford Prefect]

So it's still okay to do line item posting of atguments when you're addressing different points though, right?

Like if someone talks about vatious legal reasons something can't hapoen in story, you can address each of those arguments one at a time, right?

Click to shrink...

It takes a little judgment here, but if a user is making several falsifiable claims then it'll usually be okay to address those directly. There will be edge cases for spaghetti posting, but there will always be edge cases.

Just for clarification, "innocent" spaghetti posting seems to refer only to line-level responses to user fiction, but should we also be using spoiler tags for posts similar to the Simon_Jester example, i.e., that are not spaghetti posting but appear to be so at first blush, since they also use up a lot of page space?

Click to shrink...

Out of courtesy to other users you should consider it. The thing is that long posts generally aren't the issue. If you put a lot of effort into an essay like post and write a thousand or two thousand words, then sure, it's going to take up page space. The issue just comes from the spacing of quote boxes. A one sentence quote takes up a lot more space than one sentence normally would. e: this post is a good example of how quote boxes artificially lengthen posts.

So, what's the official staff stance on if @Datcord's style of posting C&C violates this rule? Because this clarification doesn't say anything about that at all, despite it being clearly brought up in the last thread.

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I believe that is addressed:

It's not unusual to find 'line edit' reviews of new chapters in User Fiction, quoting individual sentences or pieces of dialogue and making a short comment. These posts are essentially innocent of any wrongdoing, it's just the way the user engages with the work. Infracting someone for that, or banning it entirely, would be a bridge too far. However, the way that the quote tags format in XenForo means that posts like these take up a lot of real estate on screens, despite their relatively low word counts.

That's nobody's fault, but we would like to reduce the impact those kinds of posts have on the browsing experience. So from this point on we're going to ask that if you're making a line edit review, and your post ends up noticeably longer on the page as a result, that you make use of the spoiler tag to reduce the space it takes up.

Click to shrink...

Someone like Datcord, and I hate to single him out, is not malicious or anything, but relative to his word count he takes up a lot of the screen. Out of courtesy to users Datcord, and people who post in similar ways, should make use of the spoiler tags, to reduce the impact on other users.

 

[searcher8]

I believe that is addressed:



Someone like Datcord, and I hate to single him out, is not malicious or anything, but relative to his word count he takes up a lot of the screen. Out of courtesy to users Datcord, and people who post in similar ways, should make use of the spoiler tags, to reduce the impact on other users.

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I don't exactly see why him "taking up a significant amount of the screen" is in any way a problem. Is scrolling down the page really so difficult? It's not exactly hard to read, and if anything is even easier to read than if he'd just used a giant block of text to illustrate his point. It can't be because of people reading on a phone either, since again, that is still much more preferable than just reading a gigantic block of text.

 

[Blazinghand]

All my concerns are satisfied by this new clarification of policy. Thanks!

EDIT: I now have some concerns. You can read them later in the thread here: (link)

 

[Vebyast]

In this case, Simon is quoting several different members, and generally engaging with their points, not picking at individual components of their posts. This is the kind of thing which we wouldn't consider spaghetti posting, even though at first blush it looks like it.

Click to shrink...

To be certain, this exception looks like it should cover cases where there are multiple discussions going simultaneously, even if I have a single post containing multiple quotes from a single other post? For example, I might write another post like Simon's shortly after his, in the process quoting his post five or six times weighing in on a separate topic with each (quote, block) pair.

As an extension of both that and the guidelines for line-by-line copy-editing, quest votesmithing will also be safe, albeit possibly in a spoiler if it becomes obnoxiously large?

Spoiler: Votesmithing example, synthetic, small

[x] Task A with reasoning foo and bar
-[x] Details addressed by talking to this person
-[x] And then talk to this person but make sure not to give away too much information

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[x] Task A with reasoning foo and bar

Click to shrink...

Yes. However:

-[x] Details addressed by talking to this person

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Talk to this other person instead, they have more information, c.f. the update where we talked to them.

-[x] And then talk to this person but make sure not to give away too much information

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We should specifically be giving them this information. It's part of the new plan to manipulate them into doing this thing that'll benefit us down the line.

[x] Task A with reasoning foo and bar
-[x] Details addressed by talking to this other person
-[x] And then talk to this person, making sure they understand what's going on

Click to shrink...

Ultimately, I think that this:

It's often used as a rhetorical tool that attempts to undermine an opponent's argument by unreasonable addressing individual components, rather than the argument as a whole. That's a form of bad faith debating, and represents a violation of Rule 4 - don't be disruptive.

Click to shrink...

Sounds reasonable? It's just a tool, one with a relatively common abuse, but that abuse should be targeted specifically instead of attempting to treat a symptom.

 

[Kinematics]

While Squishy actually provides the start of a definition, it seems to be distinct from Ford's definition. That is, Squishy focuses on the mechanical aspects of what he calls spaghetti posting, while Ford defines it in terms of content and degree of significance of what's said.

Essentially, what Squishy calls spaghetti posting would encompass every single example Ford gave, despite Ford explicitly stating that not all of them qualified for the term. Further, the mechanical elements are not strictly necessary in order to qualify a post as 'disruptive' under Ford's definition.

In other words, no additional information is being conveyed in defining this rule in terms of so-called spaghetti posting, as neither provided definition supports or requires the other. Further, as no information is actually conveyed to the users, and the definition is still horribly ambiguous, with an "I'll know it when I see it" type of description, the addition of this specific example of bad faith rhetoric does not seem to adequately define the scope of what's being objected to.

The entirety of what's presented here seems to be a warning against using content-less rebuttals in a debate. The quantity of quoted text associated with that seems irrelevant, other than perhaps being more noticeable when presented as a series of short snippets of text.

If Ford's example of a 'bad' post was presented purely as a long monologue response, would that be equally infractable? If so, then the specific association with "spaghetti posting" isn't necessary. If not, one has to question the basis of the infraction.

 

[Great Greedy Guts]

I don't exactly see why him "taking up a significant amount of the screen" is in any way a problem. Is scrolling down the page really so difficult? It's not exactly hard to read, and if anything is even easier to read than if he'd just used a giant block of text to illustrate his point. It can't be because of people reading on a phone either, since again, that is still much more preferable than just reading a gigantic block of text.

Click to shrink...

But if behind a spoiler you can scroll all the faster on a phone, and sometimes the page loads strangely so you'd have to scroll past it multiple times if you keep coming back to the discussion. No need to block text it instead, that's not the recommendation here.

 

[Ford Prefect]

I don't exactly see why him "taking up a significant amount of the screen" is in any way a problem.

Click to shrink...

Ultimately it's something that we don't like the look of, and we're going to make calls like this from time to time. However it is true that otherwise it's not malicious, so this is a compromise.

To be certain, this exception looks like it should cover cases where there are multiple discussions going simultaneously, even if I have a single post containing multiple quotes from a single other post? For example, I might write another post like Simon's shortly after his, in the process quoting his post five or six times weighing in on a separate topic with each (quote, block) pair.

Click to shrink...

We're not really after people who quote multiple times, we're after that habit of breaking things down to component sentences. There are going to be novel things that occur, such as someone quoting Simon on all the different matters he addressed. It's just something that has to be worked out in the moment.

 

[rkyeun]

Here are my concerns.

To the goal of avoiding line by line refutation/nitpicking: The cynical side of me suggests this subjective distinction will fall afoul of whatever bias is possessed by the person called in to judge the report. If you agree with your fellow supporter's line by line refutation of the wrongthinker's gish gallop, you'll judge it acceptable. If you disagree with the shill trying to corrupt the record against your fellow supporter, you'll judge their unwanted factrevising to be mere needling and disruptive. That said, the pragmatic side of me really does want to stop gish gallopers from getting away with it solely due to their ability to commit more falsehoods than words to their posts, and when someone who exhibits fractal wrongness comes along to say, drop thirty individual lies each of which need correction and a paragraph of explanation... spaghetti posting really is the answer so everyone watching can see no point go unchallenged, and to prevent the gish galloper from holding up the few unrefuted points skipped in the interest of saving space as unanswerable arguments proving the truth of his conviction.

To the goal of avoiding taking up retail space: I admit the vertical spacing on quotes is terrible. My suggestions are:
1) Allow some kind of column tag, [columns]This text on left.[nextcol]This text in the middle.[nextcol]This text on the right.[/columns].
2) Similar to option 1, make it very easy (holy hell have I tried, even manually editing the bbcode) to insert a table that doesn't display lines between cells and which wraps very tightly to its contents, without having a huge real estate buffer outside its edges too.
3) Some kind of hovertext, such that when I mouseover a rebuttal point that contains hovertext, I have a hover over of some other text. Like a footnote or a reference that I don't have to scroll down to.
4) Some kind of invisispoiler, such that when the affected text is clicked it opens into a spoiler box, and when closed goes back to being inline.

Any of the above you expect to stop spaghetti posting should be made roughly as easy to apply to a post in progress as quoting is, or people won't prefer it.
In short, I think many of your style elements take up too much real estate and should be shrunk or made tighter or have their buffers taken down a notch.

This line is size 1 text.
And that space between this line and the previous is big enough to put two more lines of text in it.

And this quote box should be a tiny shrinkwrapped box around this text, not a giant space hog that eats six lines worth of size 1 text. But that's how you told quote boxes to gobble your space.

Click to shrink...

 

[Pax_Empyrean]

I don't exactly see why him "taking up a significant amount of the screen" is in any way a problem. Is scrolling down the page really so difficult? It's not exactly hard to read, and if anything is even easier to read than if he'd just used a giant block of text to illustrate his point. It can't be because of people reading on a phone either, since again, that is still much more preferable than just reading a gigantic block of text.

Click to shrink...

My take on that style of posting, which I use myself in pretty much the exact same way (albeit with a different ratio of puerile giggles to pithy one-liners) is that it's a matter of how large the post is. If it ends up being huge because you're quoting half the story a line at a time, put it in a spoiler so you don't have multiple screens worth of post sitting there. Particularly if it's things like spelling/grammar corrections, since that's of little interest to people who aren't the author. Less comprehensive responses and posts that are generally interesting to most everybody (jokes and observations, discussion) wouldn't be a problem unless you're trying to MST3K practically the entire thing a line at a time.

At least, that's how I'll play it.

 

[Alturangga]

unless you're trying to MST3K practically the entire thing a line at a time.

Click to shrink...

Example of such, I guess: https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/posts/3029720/

 

[Zedalb]

My concern is that it seems like a place for moderator bias.

So if someone "spaghetti post" the reviewing authority (mods or whatever level it's at) have to decide if they were "generally engaging" with each line.

So in a place like debates, with spirited emotional topic, trump, abortion, various legal rights,etc it seems that it would be easier than in most instances to call something an infraction if you disagree with what is being said. Because someone has to decide if what they are saying is valid and worth the "space" the spaghetti posting takes up. If you agree with what there saying it seems very easy to decide there statement is "generally engaging".


TLDR: It seems to be nearly 100% grey area and I think that's bad.

 

[Ford Prefect]

Even if there is the possibility of bias in the enforcement of rule 4 against spaghetti - and there is always that possibility - it doesn't seem like the risk is any higher for any other potential rule 4 violation. Our track record on this is good, as well.

 

[foamy]

The trouble with spaghetti posting is that one point balloons into fifteen, and the overall context of any discussion rapidly evaporates unless people consciously try to reset things. That makes it very difficult for anyone other than the direct participants to track things. This is particularly relevant when, as Staff, we're called to moderate such a discussion and are seeking context for the behaviour on display.

Moreover it's not uncommon, since they get so embroiled in the fifth subpoint of clause nine, subsection B, that the participants themselves forget their original point and/or things they've already said, which can lead to bizarre contortions and people posting mutually contradictory material because by the time they get to the end of a line-quote reply they have lost track of what they said at the beginning (an hour or more ago).

This stuff happens very commonly in Current Affairs, for obvious reasons, but it isn't unusual in debates concerning quest plans or fiction analysis or what have you. It's a natural thing when using a forum, but it impedes discussion. And if someone is using it to impede discussion, that's a bad faith manouver and violates our rules concerning disruptive behaviour.

 

[Zedalb]

Even if there is the possibility of bias in the enforcement of rule 4 against spaghetti - and there is always that possibility - it doesn't seem like the risk is any higher for any other potential rule 4 violation. Our track record on this is good, as well.

Click to shrink...

Well there is a difference.

Normally you would enforce the rules for WHAT someone was posting so it would have to clearly be bad content.
Now you are enforcing HOW they are posting it. So the content doesn't clearly have to be rule breaking (otherwise) and could generally be fine content, if something hotly debated.

That seems to be a place for greater bias , conscious or not.

 

[Nixeu]

To the goal of avoiding line by line refutation/nitpicking: The cynical side of me suggests this subjective distinction will fall afoul of whatever bias is possessed by the person called in to judge the report. If you agree with your fellow supporter's line by line refutation of the wrongthinker's gish gallop, you'll judge it acceptable. If you disagree with the shill trying to corrupt the record against your fellow supporter, you'll judge their unwanted factrevising to be mere needling and disruptive. That said, the pragmatic side of me really does want to stop gish gallopers from getting away with it solely due to their ability to commit more falsehoods than words to their posts, and when someone who exhibits fractal wrongness comes along to say, drop thirty individual lies each of which need correction and a paragraph of explanation... spaghetti posting really is the answer so everyone watching can see no point go unchallenged, and to prevent the gish galloper from holding up the few unrefuted points skipped in the interest of saving space as unanswerable arguments proving the truth of his conviction.

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Yeah, the issue is that, sometimes, nits do need to be picked. And drawing lines between individual points isn't always neat or pretty, either. Composite and/or transitional sentences can make lines blurry. So it's not necessarily something you can tell at a glance.

More, I think the term isn't particularly useful, in this context. If the issue is that it's a bad-faith argument, then it's a bad-faith argument, and is against the rules already. If you're going to have to look at spagetti posting on a case-by-case basis to see if it's in violation of the rules, when there's already a way in which the kind you are having the most problems with defies those rules, is it really a good use of a mod's time to add yet another thing to look for? I dunno, it seems to me that, if the bad kind is already against the rules, then there's no reason to change the rules?

This seems like it would have maybe gone better as a PSA: 'Don't be a disruptive jerk, especially this kind: *insert example here*. Also, put giant posts in spoilers, please'. That could have helped avoid a lot of the confusion and panic from the User Fiction folks. Hell, keeping it as mod-only alert to be on the lookout for specific violations that have spiked would also have worked better. Not trying to tell you how to do your jobs, that's just what I'm seeing from the basic gist here.

Moreover it's not uncommon, since they get so embroiled in the fifth subpoint of clause nine, subsection B, that the participants themselves forget their original point and/or things they've already said, which can lead to bizarre contortions and people posting mutually contradictory material because by the time they get to the end of a line-quote reply they have lost track of what they said at the beginning (an hour or more ago).

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Yeah, I've been there. It can get bad.

This stuff happens very commonly in Current Affairs, for obvious reasons, but it isn't unusual in debates concerning quest plans or fiction analysis or what have you. It's a natural thing when using a forum, but it impedes discussion. And if someone is using it to impede discussion, that's a bad faith manouver and violates our rules concerning disruptive behaviour.

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Thing is, it's not necessarily going to be an obvious maneuver. Genuine and fake confusion can be very hard to differentiate. And again, you're talking about bad usage, not the thing being bad in-and-of itself.