(no subject)

Obviously.

Ohhhh Reginald... I DISAGREE! ~Waldo -1

Bad Dan! Bad! This is like catching a volunteer for Red Cross spending the donations they collected on their gun collection. As though instead of helping injured people, I am helping to injure people. Spending those hard earned points to five-vote on this completion of Ethereal Cartography, and none of the others?

I'm not actually upset about this, but humorous derision seemed the best way to make my point. I think some "completions" are bad because they hardly completed anything. Everyday Life, Ethereal Cartography, Centroid Exploration, these are all tasks which are very easy to writeup without having done much at all, so I understand people being very hesitant to flag them, which is normally reserved for outright failures to do what is called for by the task. Moreover, even I am against flagging tasks where a new player has made an effort, and needs a little guidance about why no one is voting for their task as much as they hoped. Things like reading the archives a little, looking at what tasks are highly praised and inpsiring, that sort of thing. But really, there comes a point where as a community we need to self police a little bit. Most players look at a few random tasks, and completions which show some activity (lots of votes or comments), which makes all of us accountable for directing one another's attention to shplank. Eventually some players get more of a reputation for deserving this attention, or a little more clout in directing other people's attention to unnoticed tasks, so it isn't perfectly democratic either. But my point here is, I have to call you out on this vote. This player did something incomprehensible, I doubt they enjoyed it, and hasn't logged in again since.

That makes me sad. They came *this close* to joining an awesome community I love, which gets you to try new exciting things. I feel I owe it to new players to show them the awesome encouragement and inspiration I found when I joined, and let them feel the vibrant community of interesting people who will respond to their thoughts and actions. Some guidance, and particularly some visible evidence around the site of other players caring about the quality of your submissions is key to this. If the majority of completions you see in a few random clicks on the site are like this one, I wouldn't have stuck around either. That's why I made the flagsarefree term, and tagged it until it was the third most popular term on the site. I tag a lot of terms (1060 to date by my count). I want to draw other players' attentions to this issue. If you disagree with me about a task deserving to be flagged, just anti-tag it with "!flagsarefree". Sometimes though, you have to be cruel to be kind. Usually after trying to be supportive first (kudos to Gergely and Brooker).