I appreciate that it must be a lot harder to moderate a thread such as this or LoR. My thoughts were more along the lines of an LoR-esque thread having lower standards of moderation, though. Not allowing people to really cut loose and scream at each other, of course: just giving them an opportunity for catharsis. (That was one of the great things about the old Idiots board, imo, by setting aside that place specifically for rants people knew what they were getting into, and didn't visit that part of the forum if that wasn't their respective cup of tea.) By doing that, giving them a place to vent, you not only make less work for the admins/mods (assuming lower standards of moderation there) but it justifies coming down much harder on flaming elsewhere in the forum. "You want to flame, go to LoR", you know?

Clearly everyone needs to take time and chill out with Rainbows, Unicorns, and Dolphins.

I want girls to be able to bow too!

And, I still want guitars for bards to play!

emote bows.

Lame! Double lame!

Also: My mammoth is done incubating! She is too cool, she got kicked out of school. Cooler than all of you. I don't even care that I got a female mammoth instead of a male anymore. She is awesome no matter what.

Fear my big fluffy elephant thing!

Veonira's mammoth was better.

I don't normally like being the resident but sometimes you just have to blurt it out to people to get an answer.

If you want to rant then the why not take it to an independent forum? There was at least one after Verthirax's hilarious failure. Or make a new forum.

I'm not ranting, I'm tweeting.

The catharsis tended not to actually happen though, or if it did it made things worse anyway, because people would get into flamewars over it, which would further agitate the people originally posting most of the time, etc. We also tried leaving rants only for small things that don't deserve their own thread and wouldn't get argued with and spark flamewars, but people would inevitably just blatantly ignore that and post everything in lack of rants. It detracted more than it added. I'm less convinced the entire subforum needed to go, but that thread in particular really had to be sacrificed, and this one will too if the bans don't work out (and I can just imagine all the complaining likely to happen when people actually do start getting banned for turning this into lack of rants, especially if people they feel are equally guilty don't get banned.)

*sing* Harmony, Harmony, Oh Love!

I'm not terribly concerned. Eventually those who do perpetuate the Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde affair of the thread will reach enough warn bumps to be permanently banned from posting. It is unfortunate, but one supposes that is the nature of the beast.

And the Idiots! board had to go, and will not now nor ever make a return.

Designing a creamy pumpkin tea is making me wish I actually had a creamy pumpkin tea to drink... all I have is green tea right now. Sad. Nothing wrong with green tea, but I like some variety! Nevermind the fact that I have about five different green teas to choose from.

I find this happening a lot when I design food. Just this feeling of man, I really wish I had some of this right now. I think if that feeling is missing, you're doing something wrong! I even kind of wanted fruit when I was making my (TOTALLY NORMAL) fruit platter.

That platter is not normal. I kept wanting to add quote marks around the inconspicuous part, but...wasn't going to change a fellow designers design. I'd love some pumpkin ice cream. I keep seeing my pumpkin ice cream design, and keep thinking, man, I want some...then I realize, I have no ice cream.

Ever try reading Brian Jaque's Redwall series? I swear, the man has some of the best food descriptions in fantasy writing. Makes me wish I was a tiny little squirrel feasting on a ridiculous cornucopia of cakes and other sweets.

I've read a few of those!

It's really a very good series.

Oh my god, yea he does. It is really hard to read any of those books without suddenly wanting to be there eating the food. *drools*

Yes, Ongaku is the awesome.

Maybe I'm biased because I started Lack of Rants, I dunno. I feel like I've given birth to Hitler or something.

TWEET: I have started my newest abortion, which I will probably dump several thousand credits into and then abandon. Since he's a Trill, it's a literal tweet, too.