Metal Storm Next, The Forums And You
You, yes you.
So Metal Storm Next has seen our code jockeys spend incredible amounts of time trying to update the entire infrastructure of this site to catch up with the modern age. Toss a coin to your code jockeys, oh metalers aplenty.
One thing we won't be updating is the forum.
The current internet is slick, soulless and designed to toss the maximum amount of ads your way (while mining your interests to sell to the highest bidders) and shielding you from the content you want to see. Forums have died in favor of social media platforms where if your thoughts are longer than what might fit on a bumper sticker in 128 size font, it's TL'DR and you'll get dogpiled on by random people for having an opinion that differs from what they deem is correct.
Our forums are old. Not as old as me old, but still mighty old. They come from a bygone era. Take it away, Douglas Adams:
"In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri."
We aim to keep it that way. The forums help us retain a community across the globe. I know this firsthand, having met up with and knocking back cervejas with MS members over said globe - US, Netherlands and Chile if scoring at home. I have found new music here, I have made friends here and I imagine I am not alone in this, most of you likely have as well.
The forums are a key component of our unique identity and spot on the internet. And we aim to protect this.
In discussion during our latest Ice Cream Social (code word for 7 hour boozefest while talking shop) at the MS Towers, we all agreed this is paramount. We want to do what we can to retain existing users as well as attracting new metalheads and having them stick around.
We have been transparent in the other issues, so I have been tasked with being transparent here as well.
So grab a bevvie (or an ice cream), buckle up, buttercup, and read on.
Metal Storm is NOT A Free Speech Zone. Not absolutely. So no fucking whining about it.
If you come here and and want to talk metal or associated topics while treating fellow users with respect, we'll not have a problem. Hell, should you be a swell enough person and Covid ever goes away, I might even meet up and knock back beers with you. (Actually, depending upon your tolerance, that may or may not constitute a problem, but at least a fun problem. And an evening that might culminate in you spewing completos and cerveza all over your city's sidewalk.)
If you come here and start personally attacking other users and dropping the kinds of racist, sexist, xenophobic, whatever kind of language that if you used on the street in real life you'd get punched hard enough in your piehole to spew forth teeth like a piñata does candy, well, we'll do that to you digitally. Whether it's me and my claw hammer, Troy and his favorite hockey stick or Nikos wielding Hercules' great club.
If you are a douchebag bent on being divisive or argumentative for being a troll's sake, you are not worth the users your behavior might chase away. The community, and thus community health, is more important than you.
Moderating and Policies.
Our hierarchy of actions moving forward.
1. Unofficial PM's
2. Official Warnings
3. 24 hour ban
4. 72 hour ban
5. Get the fuck out of the pool now.
Nothing is set in absolute stone like Moses and those tablets in terms of actions we will take, we will take action based upon the severity of the violation combined with things like past history.
If you are a good citizen of Metalstormistan, have been a forum user for many years, have a shitty day, get drunk, log on and call me an asshole in the forum, one of the other mods (not me, as I will recuse myself) will pull you aside by private message and treat you like the Roman Centurion did Brian of Nazareth:
"Now Don't Do It Again."
If you have a rap sheet of past infractions that reads longer than Iron Maiden's discography, we might skip a step or two even if you've been well behaved in the recent past.
If you show up and go off like a hand grenade with invective language shrapnel hitting any user in the adjacent forums, we're not going to debate, but Troy, Nik and myself will combine our Super Mod Powers like Voltron or Captain Planet and wipe you from the MS Space Time Continuum before heading off to the pub for several rounds of cold ones to later piss all over your ashes.
Too bad, so sad.
In closing, there SHOULDN'T be any problems. The only thing you as a user are being asked to do is don't be too much of an asshole. I know, I know, this is the internet circa 2021 and it a bigger ask than it should be, but that's it. If you respect your fellow Metal Stormers and treat them in the way you want to be treated yourself, we will all be a happy family in which everyone will feel accepted and welcomed. We want to have a community that embraces everyone who wants to be included and has good manners. We appreciate people with a sense of humour but do remember that harassment based upon race, colour, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender, expression, gender identity, or sexual orientation will not be tolerated.
Go forth, enjoy the metal, enjoy the forums and, take it away Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted "Theodore" Logan
So Metal Storm Next has seen our code jockeys spend incredible amounts of time trying to update the entire infrastructure of this site to catch up with the modern age. Toss a coin to your code jockeys, oh metalers aplenty.
One thing we won't be updating is the forum.
The current internet is slick, soulless and designed to toss the maximum amount of ads your way (while mining your interests to sell to the highest bidders) and shielding you from the content you want to see. Forums have died in favor of social media platforms where if your thoughts are longer than what might fit on a bumper sticker in 128 size font, it's TL'DR and you'll get dogpiled on by random people for having an opinion that differs from what they deem is correct.
Our forums are old. Not as old as me old, but still mighty old. They come from a bygone era. Take it away, Douglas Adams:
"In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri."
We aim to keep it that way. The forums help us retain a community across the globe. I know this firsthand, having met up with and knocking back cervejas with MS members over said globe - US, Netherlands and Chile if scoring at home. I have found new music here, I have made friends here and I imagine I am not alone in this, most of you likely have as well.
The forums are a key component of our unique identity and spot on the internet. And we aim to protect this.
In discussion during our latest Ice Cream Social (code word for 7 hour boozefest while talking shop) at the MS Towers, we all agreed this is paramount. We want to do what we can to retain existing users as well as attracting new metalheads and having them stick around.
We have been transparent in the other issues, so I have been tasked with being transparent here as well.
So grab a bevvie (or an ice cream), buckle up, buttercup, and read on.
Metal Storm is NOT A Free Speech Zone. Not absolutely. So no fucking whining about it.
If you come here and and want to talk metal or associated topics while treating fellow users with respect, we'll not have a problem. Hell, should you be a swell enough person and Covid ever goes away, I might even meet up and knock back beers with you. (Actually, depending upon your tolerance, that may or may not constitute a problem, but at least a fun problem. And an evening that might culminate in you spewing completos and cerveza all over your city's sidewalk.)
If you come here and start personally attacking other users and dropping the kinds of racist, sexist, xenophobic, whatever kind of language that if you used on the street in real life you'd get punched hard enough in your piehole to spew forth teeth like a piñata does candy, well, we'll do that to you digitally. Whether it's me and my claw hammer, Troy and his favorite hockey stick or Nikos wielding Hercules' great club.
If you are a douchebag bent on being divisive or argumentative for being a troll's sake, you are not worth the users your behavior might chase away. The community, and thus community health, is more important than you.
Moderating and Policies.
Our hierarchy of actions moving forward.
1. Unofficial PM's
2. Official Warnings
3. 24 hour ban
4. 72 hour ban
5. Get the fuck out of the pool now.
Nothing is set in absolute stone like Moses and those tablets in terms of actions we will take, we will take action based upon the severity of the violation combined with things like past history.
If you are a good citizen of Metalstormistan, have been a forum user for many years, have a shitty day, get drunk, log on and call me an asshole in the forum, one of the other mods (not me, as I will recuse myself) will pull you aside by private message and treat you like the Roman Centurion did Brian of Nazareth:
"Now Don't Do It Again."
If you have a rap sheet of past infractions that reads longer than Iron Maiden's discography, we might skip a step or two even if you've been well behaved in the recent past.
If you show up and go off like a hand grenade with invective language shrapnel hitting any user in the adjacent forums, we're not going to debate, but Troy, Nik and myself will combine our Super Mod Powers like Voltron or Captain Planet and wipe you from the MS Space Time Continuum before heading off to the pub for several rounds of cold ones to later piss all over your ashes.
Too bad, so sad.
In closing, there SHOULDN'T be any problems. The only thing you as a user are being asked to do is don't be too much of an asshole. I know, I know, this is the internet circa 2021 and it a bigger ask than it should be, but that's it. If you respect your fellow Metal Stormers and treat them in the way you want to be treated yourself, we will all be a happy family in which everyone will feel accepted and welcomed. We want to have a community that embraces everyone who wants to be included and has good manners. We appreciate people with a sense of humour but do remember that harassment based upon race, colour, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender, expression, gender identity, or sexual orientation will not be tolerated.
Go forth, enjoy the metal, enjoy the forums and, take it away Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted "Theodore" Logan
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Comments: 15
Visited by: 189 users
| Embridioum Posts: 36  |
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| Bad English Tage Westerlund Posts: 62026  |
Better old forum as no forum at all, sortha miss those days when forums were place for nice discussion, then facebook groups tock over and so on.
---- I stand whit Ukraine and Israel. They have right to defend own citizens. Stormtroopers of Death - "Speak English or Die"  I better die, because I never will learn speek english, so I choose dieing
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| Deadsoulman Elite Posts: 8004  |
Written by Bad English on 12.09.2021 at 11:18 Yeah, call me an old fart but I think there's nothing quite as comforting as a good old forum. Even during my short stint as an actual Facebook user, I've never really got used to the ephemerality and the short-termism of social media posts.
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| Bad English Tage Westerlund Posts: 62026 |
Written by Deadsoulman on 12.09.2021 at 12:03 I agree. I never used a Facebook group, I miss old forum magic, what we had back in a days. In those days coolest people were in forums, now to see coolest people you actually need go out to some craft beer pub, because whole internet are full whit people what in those days were out Sad that those way boozing days ;( waist of youth, waist of 10 years
---- I stand whit Ukraine and Israel. They have right to defend own citizens. Stormtroopers of Death - "Speak English or Die" I better die, because I never will learn speek english, so I choose dieing
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| Karlabos Posts: 5736  |
Written by Deadsoulman on 12.09.2021 at 12:03 Plz Orkut... Come back =/
---- "Aah! The cat turned into a cat!" - Reimu Hakurei
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| Deadsoulman Elite Posts: 8004 |
Written by Karlabos on 12.09.2021 at 14:56 It pains me to admit my ignorance, but I had to check what Orkut was and I have no idea how it relates to my post  I think you're gonna have to explain this to me like I'm a 2-year-old.
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| Karlabos Posts: 5736 |
Written by Deadsoulman on 12.09.2021 at 15:40 Oh I thought you knew. It was the site there was before fb, twitter and all the other stuff. It was like a social media consiting of subforums. Like FB has thematic "groups" where the posts all get lost, Orkut had subforums where ppl posted on organizeds topics and they all became saved to the db and could be even searched afterwards. It was like a mix of a forum and social media. Too bad it's defunct now.
---- "Aah! The cat turned into a cat!" - Reimu Hakurei
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| ScreamingSteelUS Editor-in-Chief Admin Posts: 5927  |
Written by [user id=117337] on 12.09.2021 at 16:00 It may come off as harsh, but that's just the COld being Bitter in his own way, as he likes to be; we felt that it was important to be firm in laying out our rules and expectations so that new users know to be on their best behavior and old users know that we'll be making more of an effort to keep the forums civil. You and I may think to check the posting guidelines before engaging with a site like MS, but for a lot of people, that isn't a reflex; though things have quieted down, it was just a few years ago that we had a number of users who routinely caused problems and entire threads that had to be avoided, locked down, or even nuked from high orbit due to the types of language and argument that dominated them. We've been too lax at times in dealing with users who made Metal Storm a hostile environment for others. We thought that the relaunch of the site would be the perfect opportunity to examine our policies and procedures - hence this restatement of the rules. It's important to us that Metal Storm be a place where open discussions can be had, but more important is the idea that this should be a welcoming place for everybody who shares an interest in metal. We hope to be more judicious in monitoring users who employ discriminatory language or argue with spite. Maybe that means treading on some common free-speech arguments, but we're after what's best for the community as a whole, and thus we want to let our users know that we mean business. All of this is not necessarily in direct response to you, but your comment gave me a good excuse to explain another perspective on this post, so thank you for allowing me to piggyback.
---- "Earth is small and I hate it" - Lum Invader I'm the Agent of Steel.
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| corrupt With a lowercase c Admin Posts: 3543  |
Written by [user id=117337] on 12.09.2021 at 17:36 Adding to what SSUS outlined regarding your "you might shoo away some people" argument, one thing has to be clear: We will always be fine with alienating assholes over having them scare away regular folks with their assholery. Anyone who has a problem with this statement, has no place in this community.
---- 
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| GreenDream Posts: 7 |
Written by ScreamingSteelUS on 12.09.2021 at 17:02 As someone who has mostly been a lurker on this site, making this kind of approach it attitude more transparent and upfront makes me feel more comfortable with and interested in becoming more active on the site and in the forums
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| Roman Doez Hallucigenia Posts: 974  |
Written by Bad English on 12.09.2021 at 11:18 That made me realize I was really young compared to this website, I'm too young to have known either Facebook groups or the golden age of forums
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| BitterCOld The Ancient One Admin Posts: 15288  |
Written by Roman Doez on 13.09.2021 at 19:37 Amusingly after vocally discussing it, suddenly this 18 month old vid popped up on my YouTube suggestions. It's nostalgic and depressing. As low traffic as our forum is now compared to the hey-day (and more spreadout), it's still kicking and not just a ghost town with the occasional tumbleweed blowing through. So many cool sites I remember just gone now.
---- get the fuck off my lawn. Beer Bug Virus Spotify Playlist crafted by Nikarg and I. Feel free to tune in and add some pertinent metal tunes!
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| The Melting Snow Posts: 675  |
Sad to see no mention of creating a bot that fixes Bad English's English for us. real issues, always ignored.
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| corrupt With a lowercase c Admin Posts: 3543 |
Written by The Melting Snow on 14.09.2021 at 09:18 That's actually not a bad idea. I'll have to look into it
----
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| BitterCOld The Ancient One Admin Posts: 15288 |
Written by corrupt on 14.09.2021 at 10:38 Like Time Travel or Nuclear Fusion, that is well beyond the horizon of today's technology.
---- get the fuck off my lawn. Beer Bug Virus Spotify Playlist crafted by Nikarg and I. Feel free to tune in and add some pertinent metal tunes!
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