planetf1.com

This is probably futile but could you try to hassle the powers that be to upgrade the forum software to something less..... nineties?

Covalent wrote:This is probably futile but could you try to hassle the powers that be to upgrade the forum software to something less..... nineties?

I'm limited in what I can do, but if you scroll to the bottom I added a button that allows you to turn the forum to something that looks less nineties.

Mod Aqua wrote:

Covalent wrote:This is probably futile but could you try to hassle the powers that be to upgrade the forum software to something less..... nineties?

I'm limited in what I can do, but if you scroll to the bottom I added a button that allows you to turn the forum to something that looks less nineties.

Strewth !! I thought my laptop had suddenly gone radioactive. That should not be allowed

Mod Aqua wrote:

Covalent wrote:This is probably futile but could you try to hassle the powers that be to upgrade the forum software to something less..... nineties?

I'm limited in what I can do, but if you scroll to the bottom I added a button that allows you to turn the forum to something that looks less nineties.

Awesome!
Not exactly what I had in mind

This is absolutely fantastic!

This is actually a LOT easier to read

Something like this would be possible:

I didn't realise that the ability for a thread to change peoples mind was a requirement for a thread remaining open.

As you said yourself, the thread was entertaining. It was also lacking in abuse, racism, sexism etc, yet it was shut.

If locking polite, entertaining threads becomes the norm, what's the point?

Asphalt_World wrote:I didn't realise that the ability for a thread to change peoples mind was a requirement for a thread remaining open.

As you said yourself, the thread was entertaining. It was also lacking in abuse, racism, sexism etc, yet it was shut.

If locking polite, entertaining threads becomes the norm, what's the point?

Fair enough, I have unlocked it - but it was showing the signs of becoming less than civilised and with Italy starting tomorrow it didn't seem to make much sense to keep going around in circles.

That's very good of you. Many thanks. Now, watch as the thread instantly derails into abusive posts. Either that or nobody posts in it again.....

Unless it's just me, the thread isn't unlocked.

Asphalt_World wrote:Unless it's just me, the thread isn't unlocked.

Oops. Forgot to click yes on the are you really really sure you want to unlock this button

Help please.

How do you guys customise the name of a hyperlink?

Been trying to work it out for a while now but it seems a lost cause as this point.

Jezza13 wrote:Help please.

How do you guys customise the name of a hyperlink?

Been trying to work it out for a while now but it seems a lost cause as this point.

Click the URL button above the full post editor. In the first set of square brackets it will say 'url'. Make it 'url=' and paste the link you want after the =. Then between the opening and closing tags, write what you want displayed.

Here's an example, which you can see the workings of in the post editor if you hit quote:

YouTube

P-F1 Mod wrote:

Jezza13 wrote:Help please.

How do you guys customise the name of a hyperlink?

Been trying to work it out for a while now but it seems a lost cause as this point.

Click the URL button above the full post editor. In the first set of square brackets it will say 'url'. Make it 'url=' and paste the link you want after the =. Then between the opening and closing tags, write what you want displayed.

Here's an example, which you can see the workings of in the post editor if you hit quote:

YouTube

PF1 Mod, I thank you.

Please click here

Has there been a single report of a issue with the autotrim feature? I think it's safe to remove the warning pop-up.

Covalent wrote:Has there been a single report of a issue with the autotrim feature? I think it's safe to remove the warning pop-up.

I'll pass on the good news to Mod Aqua

In relation to the 'Mercedes sack employees' thread:

Firstly I completely respect the moderators' decision. The opinion of the poster WAS clearly offensive but I just wanted to point out the reason for my post suggesting that those comments be allowed to stand.

Often on forums there is a 'vocal' group of posters with strong opinions and a grasp of the English language who put up their argument and are robust enough to cope with a challenge, even if that challenge is sometimes offensive.

There are also however a vast number of forum members who post little or never post at all, happy to read what others have written. On contentious topics there will always be a split of opinions some who agree with Todd's opinion, some who do not and some who are still deciding where they stand.

If the forum makes public its disapproval of, for example, racism and closes off the argument by removing posts or banning forum members it could be argued that it prevents the counter argument from being made public. For those still formulating their opinions they lose the opportunity to "change their mind".

Your job as a moderator is unenviable and a stand does have to be made I just think that it might have been helpful for the poster to put up his opinion so sound argument can be put up to counter his opinion so all can see the pro's and con's.

I hope you appreciate what I'm saying and don't want you to think this is a criticism in any way.

Thank you for taking the time to write this. I won't address every point, partly because it's 1am here and partly because I know Mod Yellow has sent you a comprehensive reply already, which the mod team as a whole broadly agrees with.

Come November, it will have been 8 years since I took over this forum after a protracted and far-too-public argument with my predecessor about how he was running the place. For various reasons I'll leave it at that, but since dealing with the fallout of the change of power, Sunday was probably the most stressful day I've had on this forum, and that includes having to fire mods for abuses of power, and at one point arbitrate when real-world violence was threatened by one user against another.

I say this not because the consequences were particularly steep - at worst, we'd have been rushing to fix things after our delayed reaction early in the thread - but because this is probably the easiest situation to get wrong. Threats of violence, abuse of power, both have pretty black and white solutions. Islamophobia, while in flagrant breach of our rules and obviously not something we either want on this forum nor condone, is far more difficult to manage.

The mod team wasn't always in agreement on Sunday. As soon as I saw Todd's first post, and taking his history into consideration, my instant reaction for the good of the forum was to ban him and remove his post. However, I was talked out of it by some of my colleagues and on reflection I completely agree with them. Almost every post that addressed Todd, no matter how open they were to allowing him to air his views, made it clear that he was in a minority, and that the vast majority of the forum was more open-minded, more tolerant, and, frankly, has exactly the welcoming, inviting atmosphere that I wanted to establish back in 2011.

But it also meant that we didn't make Todd a martyr to his own cause, as Mod Yellow (I think? Might have been Aqua? It was a long day, sorry!) pointed out to me. So we elected not to censor it. I know dpastern and JN23 in particular raised concerns at our inaction - and rightly so - but aside from them each sending me a PM, there was no formal report of any posts in the thread, so we let everyone else keep tearing Todd apart. Special mention there to AlienTurnedHuman, who put together a meticulous takedown, and I'm sorry I had to edit out parts of Todd's comment, but I'll explain why shortly. It did hurt to dismantle such a well-crafted post!

As many of you no doubt saw, we left the posts up for a few hours before suddenly appearing to flip a switch and employ a less laid back approach. The reason for that had nothing to do with the above arguments for or against leaving the post in situ. On re-reading the thread, mostly to take the time to enjoy the counter-arguments, I noticed that parts of Todd's post were libellous. At that point it ceased being a free speech/bigotry/odd perspectives issue, and became a legal one. At that point we had no choice but to remove the posts, and taking again Todd's history into account, a ban had to follow.

We don't ban users lightly. I can count on one hand the number of users we've booted out permanently this year. There's a been a few holidays handed out too, but the only permanent bans recently were Todd, and a case of sustained transphobia which was an issue for two reasons: the user had a wider reputation for being rude to fellow users, and was making their anti-women stance (of which the aforementioned transphobia was the latest twist) increasingly overt; and the fact that a lot of our membership is female (including one openly transgender user) and we didn't want to allow one user to make many others feel less welcome here. I trust that most of our existing users were taking such posts with a pinch of salt, and in some cases fighting back, but we're not going to attract as broad an array of new users with such posts being freely allowed. In the end, while we do allow free speech and largely trust you all to be self-moderating, there is a limit to what we'll allow.

To end on a positive note though, it is wonderful to see how little moderation work there really is to do. The entire mod team are volunteers, and they all do an amazing job. It's great that they don't have to spend all their free time on the forum just to keep on top of trolls and the like, and I'd never expect them to put in those hours. This is the only forum I'm a part of where that seems to be respected.

Planet-F1 is the only place I've seen American gun violence issues discussed without anyone losing their temper and hurling abuse around. It's the only forum I've seen female racing drivers given serious discussion. It's the only forum where there's no hard and fast rules about what can and can't be put into what sort of thread. And it's this general maturity that lets us give you all a lot more freedom than most forums are comfortable with.

Mod Yellow wrote:

Covalent wrote:Has there been a single report of a issue with the autotrim feature? I think it's safe to remove the warning pop-up.

I'll pass on the good news to Mod Aqua

Finally got this taken out. Let me know if there are any issues.

Any reason why we can't start an "Official Carlos Sainz Jr." thread???

Make one, post the link to the official threads list thread. The only reason none exists is that nobody made one.

P-F1 Mod wrote:Make one, post the link to the official threads list thread. The only reason none exists is that nobody made one.

Thx!!

To address the points raised in the Mexican race thread:

1 - Yes, it is commonly accepted that given how integral the floor is to the balance of the car and to the overall downforce levels, losing that chunk of floor made a considerable impact on Hamilton's raw pace, and not for the better.

2 - We have banned 4 people all year. One for libel. One for constant trolling. One for a concerted attack on Vettel fans throughout July. One for a lot of racial stereotyping. We have mostly issued informal warnings, along with a few formals and temporary bans. It takes a lot to get permanently booted out these days.

I've admitted in the past that when I first took over in 2012, I and my team were draconian in our enforcing of the rules. This we felt was important to weed out the regular troublemakers who happened to be on the right side of the old regime (or members of it) because they were the ones we were seeing reports against en masse from the start. And in the last year or so we've relaxed our moderation a lot. We've overhauled the rules so they all more latitude for both users and mods. We've turned blind eyes at times. We've made it a policy that we won't usually interfere without a post being reported by a regular member (although obviously we have to make the odd exceptions) and that shows in the reduction in bans over the course of this year. It's worth noting that most of those bans were of users that were here less than a year as well.

Is anyone else having an issue with being logged out despite ticking the "keep me logged in" box?

It happens from time to time to me, probably a coding glitch somewhere.

Option or Prime wrote:Is anyone else having an issue with being logged out despite ticking the "keep me logged in" box?

Chrome does this to me on my phone if I have the most agressive form of page caching on, perhaps worth checking your browser for something similar.

Mod Yellow wrote:

Option or Prime wrote:Is anyone else having an issue with being logged out despite ticking the "keep me logged in" box?

Chrome does this to me on my phone if I have the most agressive form of page caching on, perhaps worth checking your browser for something similar.

I've now tried with, Safari, Firefox and IE, cleared cache and tried 2 different laptops one Apple and Windows 10.....same.

Option or Prime wrote:

Mod Yellow wrote:

Option or Prime wrote:Is anyone else having an issue with being logged out despite ticking the "keep me logged in" box?

Chrome does this to me on my phone if I have the most agressive form of page caching on, perhaps worth checking your browser for something similar.

I've now tried with, Safari, Firefox and IE, cleared cache and tried 2 different laptops one Apple and Windows 10.....same.

Only other user side issue I can think of would be a cookie one. Unfortunately, we dont have the kind of access to the back end of the forum to rule out anything on the site side, though I will recommend that the Boss pass it on to the techies.

Apologies.

No need to apologise, I'll try on another ISP, also clear the modem cache. It will no doubt sort itself in the end.

Are there any statistics available to confirm or disconfirm my feeling that the post count has been on a steep decline recently on this forum?

Forum contributions are down across the internet, but there hasn't been a major drop that I've noticed. I'll look through the system later, see if I can find anything.

And we wonder why numbers are down on this forum!

Another race thread locked despite a decent conversation going on. Yes, we can open multiple threads, one for each of the issues being discussed, but that would cause the mods far more threads to monitor. Of course, the forum could keep race threads open to discuss matters arising form the race weekend, but why would F1 fans want threads about races to keep going?!?!?!?!?!

It's almost like the mods close these threads when they're bored of them, even if other users aren't. I'm probably just being cynical.

Asphalt_World wrote:And we wonder why numbers are down on this forum!

Another race thread locked despite a decent conversation going on. Yes, we can open multiple threads, one for each of the issues being discussed, but that would cause the mods far more threads to monitor. Of course, the forum could keep race threads open to discuss matters arising form the race weekend, but why would F1 fans want threads about races to keep going?!?!?!?!?!

It's almost like the mods close these threads when they're bored of them, even if other users aren't. I'm probably just being cynical.

I agree. Another one closed today. Not to imply anything, but also to imply something, it seems like these threads are being closed early a little too suspiciously. No need for closing them at all, especially when they're the main discussion thread on the forum.

Schumacher forever#1 wrote:

Asphalt_World wrote:And we wonder why numbers are down on this forum!

Another race thread locked despite a decent conversation going on. Yes, we can open multiple threads, one for each of the issues being discussed, but that would cause the mods far more threads to monitor. Of course, the forum could keep race threads open to discuss matters arising form the race weekend, but why would F1 fans want threads about races to keep going?!?!?!?!?!

It's almost like the mods close these threads when they're bored of them, even if other users aren't. I'm probably just being cynical.

I agree. Another one closed today. Not to imply anything, but also to imply something, it seems like these threads are being closed early a little too suspiciously. No need for closing them at all, especially when they're the main discussion thread on the forum.

Yep. All the race threads are shut quickly. Odd, when racing is the entire reason we watch the sport.

We brought in the policy of locking race threads 3 days after the event after a series of threads became circular and ever more aggressive. It's still broadly applied, mostly as a preventative measure. Abu Dhsbi also didn't take place in 1997, so the thread had gone off topic anyway.

P-F1 Mod wrote:We brought in the policy of locking race threads 3 days after the event after a series of threads became circular and ever more aggressive. It's still broadly applied, mostly as a preventative measure. Abu Dhsbi also didn't take place in 1997, so the thread had gone off topic anyway.

But was there any harm in leaving it open?

I never understand locking threads that have gone off topic. It's just a lose for everyone. The person who started the thread that has been taken over doesn't gain anything and the people enjoying the off topic discussion don't either.

mikeyg123 wrote:

P-F1 Mod wrote:We brought in the policy of locking race threads 3 days after the event after a series of threads became circular and ever more aggressive. It's still broadly applied, mostly as a preventative measure. Abu Dhsbi also didn't take place in 1997, so the thread had gone off topic anyway.

But was there any harm in leaving it open?

None whatsoever.

But if you go into a topic expecting a certain subject to be under discussion and find that it's not what's being discussed, it gets confusing.

Most people visit this site on a regular basis and keep up with things. I mean, if you want multiple threads to moderate, all based on different aspects of the race and the natural progression that kind of discussion brings on, then fine. Personally, I'd prefer less threads.

I also wonder how many new people come here to have a look and can't believe that the main threads about the sport are so quickly locked.