The best defense is a strong offense, so offend often and you will win more.

@CG, I would be surprised if Kestas minded discussing the pros and cons of other diplomacy websites, even if others measured up better than here. This isn't a commercial site and if another site is better, then maybe discussing it would lead to improvements here.

Regarding the units. They are all colored different. Or rather, the area right around them is always colored appropriately. Takes a little getting used to maybe.

Regarding the arrows, I would really like to have a switch that would show the map with arrows and without arrows depending on what I needed to see.

^^ He didn't mind last time we were discussing it, indeed last time I checked he even had a link to playDip (grr) on the dev-forum.

"don't like seeing who has not saved their orders or made them Ready. I changed may orders in one game because I could see a country had not saved any just before the deadline." - Forgive me, but I find it hard to understand how this is the sites fault? Surely if you don't want to know you don't have to look? :S

Forum - Yep, as has been noted, in general the 'teens and students' are very well behaved with the most notable bad language arguably coming from a very few members. That said, I wouldn't be so sure on the demographics, there are quite a lot of working professionals on here.

I'd agree the forum isn't what it used to be. When I was new it was very quiet, but for a year or two it was brilliant, with lively discussions and friendly attitudes.
How we can deal with what must at least be perceived as a negative attitude, I don't know. The more it goes on the more tempted I am to support censorship.

Map/arrows - If anyone has the time to finish the SVG map that would be greatly appreciated, and would enable them to be switched on/off at your wish.

""don't like seeing who has not saved their orders or made them Ready. I changed may orders in one game because I could see a country had not saved any just before the deadline." - Forgive me, but I find it hard to understand how this is the sites fault? Surely if you don't want to know you don't have to look? :S"

I think the OP means that no-one should know who has saved their orders. That is, this introduces a tactical element which should not be part of Diplomacy. I can see his point. I have taken advantage of another players failure to enter orders - I could see this at the end of phase and changed my orders accordingly. Other players not logged on at that time would not have had the benefit of that insight, putting them at a disadvantage.

I'm probably closer to CG's demo: 53, but an experienced player. And I share his opinion about the lack of reasonable civility - but also find it difficult to endorse a strategy of control (aka censorship) due to the slippery slope plus a lack of staffing volunteers to enforce it. Perhaps we could revive George Carlin's list of 70 words :)

I would personally choose CG over any of 5 flamers I can think of... and I try to encourage a more civil tone...but in general, I just let the flamers hit each other and "let it go". If there is another site with the same advantages (GR, points, intelligent play, limited CD's, GREAT functionality, no charge, variety of formats, brilliant (at times) conversations, international reach) AS WELL AS CIVILITY then it will, over time, eat WebDip's lunch. I'd be curious for our experienced players to list the sites they have visited (I've seen it in many threads, CG, Kestas has no issues with it) and rate those sites on 5 major criteria: perhaps: Cost, functionality, civility, ______, and ______

In the meantime, CG, this thread is a good example that you CAN have a civil discussion - you just can't control that ALL discussions are civil :)

There is no negative or offensive energy in the forums.
For those who still hasn't got it we are just having fun.
We just have a strange way of having fun.
If the forum wasn't the way it is, I wouldn't be around.
I have tried all other diplomacy sites out there before ending up here.
Major crap if you ask me. Their forum is just plainly boring and their interface just makes diplomacy look like a really stupid napoleon game for below average IQ adolescents. In fact in most of the sites the communication level in the games is so low it's like playing gunboats.
This is by far the best forum I ve seen in the entire internet.

What never seized surprising me though is that there are so many people here having the same twisted sense of humor as me...
This forum has actually made me reconsider my former fixed impression that Americans are so goddamn stupid.
There is a lot of potential in here...

Yeah. Some of the discussions get ugly, of course, and it can be unsettling. Personally though I'm not really an empathetic person, so I don't mind.

Hi Curious,

As for the forum being a place where abuse is tolerated, I'd have to agree. In defense of the mods, they specifically say that they want the forum to be self-moderated which to a large degree means not moderated. There is no culpability on their part. As someone who has engaged in abusive debates before I'd be quite the hypocrit if I complained about it.


I'd have to agree with Spyman as well. I began visiting this site about two years ago and I came from a site on which the forum was much worse. Literally if you didn't agree with the prevailing dogma then you'd be called all manner of indecent things by a long list of folks with nothing better to do. Our forum has not reached those depths but I do see it headed in that direction albeit slowly. The forum was most definitely a more cordial place and I suppose that's partially due to the site's success and that we have a larger, more anonymous group at the moment.

That sounded awfully negative in re-reading it. It wasn't meant to be. The forum on this site is specifically designed to be moderated by the users. As a result we cannot say anything more than it is exactly the way we want it. If we wanted it differently then I suppose there would be a movement to self-moderate the forum.

That being said, do we care about the Curious George's that we are running off. Seemed like he'd have been a good player that didn't NMR alot.

I've been here off and on for years, and the forum definitely was more civil before, but it was still full of abuse, just it all came from people like hellalt, and mapleleaf, and they were well known to be that way, and we all understood that they weren't completely serious (just my impression of the way it was). I think the problem now, is that we have dozens of these trolls, who are not established in the community, don't usually contribute meaningfully to the serious discussions, and simply abuse other players.

I think a possible solution would be to have two forums, one that only allows members who have been members for a year to post on, and one for everybody. Most trolls won't wait around a year just to be abusive, and those that will, are tolerable and maybe even worth having around.

CG, please stay, the more members we have like yourself the better the site will become, I find your pleasant and uninsulting writing to be quite pleasurable to read, and I'd rather look forward to your contributions on debate topics. Either way, I wish you the best of luck.

For the record, I'm and 18 year old student. Should we start a demographic forum to get an idea?

mapleleaf was the original troll. or my original troll at least. I joined years ago though, when I was living is a squat and stealing internet with a cantenna. I guess I'm not much better off now, living in a foreclosed house.
Anyway, as far as the forum goes, I've seen a marked decrease in intelligent conversation. or maybe just an influx of new people who are less interested in disscussion of philosophy and world events etc.

I think it's appropriate to name other sites, if only for the fact that because this site isn't being monetized, you can't possibly be hurting anyone's business model!

FWIW, I started a lengthy discussion at playdiplomacy.com about some of its shortcomings compared to this site. Because they do try to derive revenue from the site, I didn't name webdiplomacy.net as the "other site."

The forums here are particularly uncivil, but that's their character. It's easy for me to disregard the people and posts that are particularly worthless.

CG offers some reasonable critiques of the move system here. I too have found the maps to be confusing, but now I mostly understand what the graphical representation means. There is often no substitute for examining the actual orders, however!

No one needs a reason or excuse for choosing not to continue playing. But to say one is leaving because the forums are uncivil is akin to canceling your cable television because there's a channel that shows Jerry Springer and Maury. (You are... NOT the father!)

How exactly are the forums self-moderating in any way? Nothing prevents unpleasant people from spewing forth at whatever rate they like.

I've scanned through this (but not all of it) and I wanted to respond to some stuff.

"I don't like seeing who has not saved their orders or made them Ready. I changed may orders in one game because I could see a country had not saved any just before the deadline."

I agree completely. But it's not a huge deal for me.

But re: the general point of the community: I've long been an advocate for the moderation of the forums. A lot of the people on here are mature adults, who don't need to be. A lot of them are high schoolers, and sometimes even middle schoolers, that lack the maturity to deal with people in an intelligent and professional manner. This is not a condemnation - I lacked this as well when I was in middle school. It's simply a fact that they are not as mature.

But I don't think you should leave the site entirely. Just don't visit the forums - that's easy enough.

""webdip is probably the site that is the most blatantly offensive that I visit and I spend a lot of time on the web."

lol that might be true if you spend most of your time on like cooking blogs or something :P

anyway... all this talk about the horrible vitriolic forums, and for the life of me I can't think of very many examples. Theyre sort of few and far between I think.

Maybe that "mod" thread w/ about 200 replies had a little abuse in it, but that's the only recent one i can think of.

anyone care to mention what all this bullying is you're talking about?

and mapleleaf doesn't count, because he's really easy to ignore

Regarding people flaming etc.

“Because half a dozen crickets concealed beneath a fern; make the field ring with their importunate chink while thousands of great cattle chew the cud in the shade of the great British oak and are silent. Pray do not imagine that those who make all the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.”

"lack of staffing volunteers" - This should never be a reason for anything. If it were deemed there were not enough staff members then more could be found! :)

@a few things/people

1) You can see when someone drops orders into a hat in F2F dip. Why are the check marks different?

2) I would actually encourage knowing which sites other people visit. We've had discussions like this before and it's helpful to know what people like. And, if I may suggest: you should try vdiplomacy. It is a sister site of ours, but it doesn't have such a hostile forum. A lot of our members are members there, so you'd be able to keep some of your connections.

3) IMHO, an unmoderated forum is much, much better than an overmoderated forum. For those of you who know me, I hope you'd agree I've usually pretty reasonable and docile. Well, I can tell you, I've been banned from many gaming communities for merely questioning the admins, even in a polite fashion. I would not like to see that happen here.

^ true facts. once you start censoring i have noticed a bit of a.... slippery slope.

not to mention the fact that so few people read the rules to begin with... how many would the part about forum rules? many who broke it would just say they didnt know.

not to mention the fact that i like to cuss on here from time to time... i dont think i want to stop

Is it censorship to ask an unpleasant person to leave your house?

There's a difference between cussing from time to time and the uncivil discourse that Curious George finds intimidating.

I don't think anyone wants a speech code, but the site would certainly benefit if, in the case of a few key individuals, the moderators asked them to clean up their act or find a new hobby.

Mind you, I'm not saying this out of some prudish bent. I personally couldn't give less of a shit what anyone has to say. It's better for the community (and thus for me, indirectly) to keep players such as Curious George at the expense of the people I'm talking about.

again what is this intimidating uncivil discourse? i mean we're not over-nice here but i dont remember anything getting really out of control recently. call me ignorant or desensitized but i dont even know what we're referring to

@Thuc - Ignorance is/should be no defence. It wouldn't be hard to add the rules to the default signup email, and that would certainly be a good idea.

@grep - If I was given the direct choice I would definitely choose to keep the polite and interesting members of the site.

I must admit I'd quite like to have some degree of censorship. I don't buy into the slippery slope argument: its not hard to set limits on things.

" I've seen a marked decrease in intelligent conversation. or maybe just an influx of new people who are less interested in disscussion of philosophy and world events etc."

Seems to imply that you're only intelligent if you are happy to discuss philosophy and world events! I like to think I can string a few words together, spell them correctly (typos excepted!) and have an intelligent conversation inflused with a little humour.

I just feel that a forum on a website for playing Diplomacy should predominantly feature threads about playing Diplomacy! Fair enough, I won't read the others....I actually don't often read the others....

Is there a way to somehow split the Forum into sections? Even if there are just two - maybe Diplomacy Section and General Discussions section, I think this would be a very useful way for people to find (and avoid) the threads they want to.

@ Thuc, go read the "mod priorities" thread. It was all about one user using an offensive epithet about Jews and his target spamming him back via PM.

It doesn't need to be about "rules." I don't make visitors to my house read my special rulebook about how to behave, because most people know how to behave appropriately. If someone gets out of line, I ask them politely to stop. If they keep doing it, they're no longer welcome in my home. Why should a website be any different?

Because, in your house you'll know if they walk back in after having been kicked out. On a website, they just create a new username with a different email and IP address and they can go undetected for awhile. Now, it still sends a message and maybe they'll decide to behave, but they may just keep doing whatever and keep making new users.

Better if they stay the same user but everyone can blacklist them so doesn't see their offensive posts.

I know splitting the forums has been discussed before, and I certainly understand not splitting it into dozens of sections which can kill a forum, but splitting into just three forums (game-related forum, general forum, and a uncensored forum) might be worth a reconsider.

^^ The idea of sectioning off a censored board sounds nice, but tbh if we are deciding to have censorship it might as well be the whole place and let other conversation go to a different site surely?

You might want to try the sister site, vdiplomacy.org, which has almost no trolling on the forums, a bunch of variants, and generally more consistent players.

To add to that, vdiplomacy is run to much stricter social rules (although you wouldn't know it since they haven't been tested yet)