hopeandlove opened this issue on Jan 27, 2016 ยท 72 posts
hornet3d posted Wed, 17 February 2016 at 1:19 PM
Razor42 posted at 6:40PM Wed, 17 February 2016 - #4255475
Hi Hornet, I was trying to avoid entering this discussion.
I just wanted to say that I truly appreciate your comments, they are always well worded and well thought out and always written in a reasonable tone.
I was just curious you have alluded a few times to some kind of "issue with the Poser Forums getting out of hand". I'm just curious when you think this began to happen. From my experience the Poser forums were always a little like the wild west. Have a look at this thread from 2003. You guessed it people arguing about Daz and Poser, people flaming and trolling each other. Request for the mods to not close this thread please. Name calling. All with seemingly no mod intervention.
I especially like this little gem, one member says to another "Ryamka you are an insignificant little flea whom if he spoke to me in person the way you spoke to me here that I would swat. Ex army rangers like me just love swatting bugs like you." It doesn't really seem to be an isolated thread either there are many like it over the years.
And another from 2012 full of attacks on Daz, some light hearted some quite aggressive and extremely negative:
From that thread "Wow 2.5 hours of a Daz thread and no serious fight yet. Is that a rendo record?"
You are right and, there have certainly been some heated threads in the Poser forum in the past and, in truth, this is to be expected when you have people who are passionate about their art or their software. For me that is the whole reason for mods, not to censor people but to try and cool the odd heated debate and give combatants a space and time to cool down.
For me personally the situation dropped to a all time low when the Daz started the split with Genesis and I say that as a factual statement not as a negative comment. Threads often got personal after some very suspicious statements usually along the lines 'it is Daz fault because they took this veiw' or 'it is Poser fault because they took this view'. The point is, the poster often stated information that was presented as fact and inside knowledge. It could never be verified and my suspicions are that if it was inside knowledge they would be constrained by non-disclosure agreements. This often lead the very personal attacks that went for page after page. That was the first change but it really became to a point when almost every thread would quickly turn to the same well trodden argument irrespective of what the original thread title started as.
The same argument ran for four years and was so regular that most threads contained no useful information and if it did, it was so hard to find that it was not worth the effort. The mod line at the time used to be that responses were not against the TOS just because you do not agree, actually the complaint was more along the limes this has been said so many times it is boring and it is no more valid now than when it was first written four years ago.
There is also the subject of thread drift and most threads do, it happens in a community and to me is a healthy sign but when the drift was always towards the same topic there should have been some actions taken. It reached the point that regular visitors could see a thread would end up being locked and would even say so early on. Some OPs were asking to have their threads locked as it had gone in a direction they never intended or expected. Usually the threads were locked many pages later but only after yet another forum war had broken out. Trouble was that some very interesting threads went the same way because personal attacks started to become the norm and not the exception. To my shame I started a thread when the Scarlet figure was released and I was looking for views from others who were much more skilled in rigging than me. What happened was it quickly became a vicious assault on the vendor in question and I regretted starting the thread before we reached the end of page two. I don't think I have started a thread in the Poser forum since.
Of course this was made worse by the web changes. When someone as helpful and talented as Bagginsbill suggest you move the discussion to RDNA because the forum here does not work people tend to do just that. Many others have left and I have met up with a lot of them in other forums. The end result was it has left the Poser forum in a position that those with other agendas are in a much higher majority. Having achieved their goal, in the main, they no longer post although they all crawl out of the woodwork if you start a thread that challenges their views. End result, a reduction in interesting threads, less help for those that are looking for information and a forum that has pretty much ceased in being an asset to the 3D art community no matter what software you use.
A heavily personal view but anyone who wants to look deeper need go no further than pick a genesis thread here and a similar thread at RDNA and see how they progressed. The outcome was very different despite the fact that the same people were often involved, even if they did use different names. The only conclusion I can come to was one thread was well moderated and the other was not.
I use Poser 13 on Windows 11 - For Scene set up I use a Geekcom A5 - Ryzen 9 5900HX, with 64 gig ram and 3 TB storage, mini PC with final rendering done on normal sized desktop using an AMD Ryzen Threadipper 1950X CPU, Corsair Hydro H100i CPU cooler, 3XS EVGA GTX 1080i SC with 11g Ram, 4 X 16gig Corsair DDR4 Ram and a Corsair RM 100 PSU . The desktop is in a remote location with rendering done via Queue Manager which gives me a clearer desktop and quieter computer room.
