ConwayLife.com

The quotes are from DMs with Sokwe.

hotcrystal0 wrote:From past discussion of moving the less serious parts of The Sandbox to a different website to escape the moderation (that’s coded for academic discussion mainly) here, someone has suggested for volunteer moderators. (of which azulavoir said she? could be)
So, could a couple volunteer moderators focusing on The Sandbox help deal with things?

I've also sent hotcrystal0 some DMs on this subject, including the following, suggesting specifically three specialist Sandbox moderator candidates, so that they can maybe decide occasional trickier questions by majority vote.

dvgrn wrote:Going by experience so far, non-CA topics tend to need more moderation work on average. There are no current moderators who have in any way volunteered to deal with issues that come up related to non-CA topics. Policing Sandbox denizens who seem to have a weird predilection for kicking sand in each other's faces, on threads that contain absolutely no content that any of the moderators find interesting anyway... is simply not something that we're going to choose to spend any of our limited time on.

I have suggested that the community should find a three-person team of candidate "Sandbox specialist" moderators who want to take on this moderation task (and who the community can trust to take the job seriously and do it well, and who aren't likely to get into arguments with each other, and so on). I would then see if I could convince Nathaniel to set [them up as] a "Sandbox specialist" moderator team.

Nobody has turned up so far [to volunteer for this hypothetical team].

More moderator resources might make it possible that the scope of Sandbox discussions on conwaylife.com might safely be widened a little bit.

But, again, recent experience with things like roleplay threads and Word Chains games ... seems to indicate that if the allowable scope gets widened too much, we'll end up with forums where a good fraction of the membership never post anything outside the Sandbox, and where there are ten times as many off-topic posts as on-topic posts.

To be clear, Nathaniel ultimately decides what is and isn't a good idea on conwaylife.com, so Nathaniel may still perfectly well not decide to implement the idea. But there doesn't seem to be any point in bothering Nathaniel about any of this, until an official slate of candidates exists for the Sandbox-specialist moderator team.

dvgrn wrote: May 6th, 2025, 10:34 pm [...] "Sandbox specialist" moderators who want to take on this moderation task (and who the community can trust to take the job seriously and do it well, and who aren't likely to get into arguments with each other, and so on). [...]

Ultimately, the problem with any such suggestions (i.e. treating the Sandbox as if it were a whole separate forum, or treating the Sandbox as if it were a place where people wouldn't need to follow the exact same forum rules, and so forth) ...
... is that this splits the (already not too large) local community in part, with the two parts diverging further and further away from each other (in their preferred activities, in their preferences, in their interests, in their attitudes, and so on).

AFAICT as long as the Sandbox is part of the same conwaylife.com forums, there should be no need for a whole separate group of "Sandbox specialist" moderators. Even if implemented, it seems safe to predict that that will create more new issues than it could solve old issues.

To give a specific example, there are multiple so-called "roleplay" threads in the Sandbox. Here, instead of suggesting that maybe there should be some "Sandbox-only" moderators reviewing such (aimless and basically offtopic) activity, it would be both simpler and more productive to simply lock or delete all such "roleplay" threads, and to continue to do the same for all newly-created "roleplay" threads of the same kind. Filling the forums with lots of large nonnotable "picture" patterns that are extremely minor modifications of previously-posted "picture" patterns of the same kind fails to translate into any sort of productive contribution to the local community, at least as long as people find it appropriate to say "the local community".

M. I. Wright wrote: December 23rd, 2017, 2:12 pm [...] an interest in those activities would presumably translate shakily (at best) into any sort of interest in GoL, and they would likely after a month or so find themselves isolated in their participation... eventually either quitting or staying in their own bubble and effecting a weird dichotomy between the two sections of the community. [...]

AforAmpere wrote: December 23rd, 2017, 4:01 pm [...] I feel this would create two groups, the roleplayers, and the CA people. This might be a thing to do in some other forums, but I feel that here would not be the place to do it.