I see we've stirred up an exciting and contentious debate. Oh wait, no we haven't. It seems that following on from my earlier blog and the post, a lot of chatters agree with me. Let me be the first to say, I'm 90% chat and 10% sex - like many of my fine ladies would say I'm 10% dick, not a bad statistic by volume if not length.
But I think what the keen mind wants to see around here is a removal of some of the negative pressure in chat. There's a lot of trollish rudeness in chat sometimes, but for all their faults, the trolls have the advantage of being easily identified and easily fixed - and even trained. The "other" problem is more difficult to solve, and maybe not as obvious to see. Take an example off the top of my head:
There was a time a while ago where Straight English was a big room - there would be 3 or 4 rooms open, all full, without there being a show on. And while I knew and liked a lot of people in the room, I found myself one day looking at the room list and thinking "Eh, I really don't want to be in there". Not just because there weren't any tits out (always a backslider, me), but because the atmosphere had become very very negative and intolerant. There was an exclusionary attitude in the room, where the inadvertant use of a foreign language (or even the hesitant use of stumbling english by a non-English speaker) would be jumped upon with the sort of vigour you'd find at a footballists' rally. Yes, some were ignorant trolls, but some were simply trying to get in the room so to speak. The whole place seemed like a ***** at times - you started to wonder if maybe the negativity wasn't a defensive measure to make yourself feel better by putting someone else down.
Then SE dropped off the map, and everyone was in the Lobby - which was almost instantly a better atmosphere. Different languages, different people, less judgemental attitudes, more sex! Winners all round. I think that's the key to getting back our sexy relaxed chatting atmosphere - we can't just ban and block and mute the trolls - we've got to take the whingers and the moaners and the downers to task too. If a troll can be muted for trolling, then we have to be prepared to mute whingers for complaining too, or downers for dragging the mood.
Women are put under a lot of pressure here with IM's and shit - hopefully admin will get a way around that because from Day 1 this site hasn't needed an IM feature, and now it's tied into chat, it's even worse. Take away the IM feature and a lot of the pressure will decrease, because public "in-room" pressure is harder to sustain. (boom-tish)
I think there's an element of familiar comfort to the chatroom now for a lot of the "showers" of old - Billy and Mel know what I'm talking about here - there's less frisson of excitement in the air that people can play off. In order to get that back, new showers have to be encouraged out of the woodwork, and that takes time, patience and tolerance to get them comfortable.Let people who are new to the place into the room, let them feel free to speak up, ask questions, get help, and get horny. Be tolerant of the new, and of people's mistakes - train people to behave like adults in chat instead of ***** - but remember, if they refuse to listen, we do have the power to boot them - even the oldies sometimes need a kick up the arse.