So to curb future problems, we've made some changes.
Now, people whose account is newer than 35 days will not be allowed to comment.
And once they have received at least 4 upvotes on their comments after that 35 days (I think that applies to any subreddit activity), and their account-age reaches 65 days...only then can they make a full post.
These numbers/requirements can be easily tweaked, and any suggestions for their adjustment are welcome.
This should help to address low effort posting, attention seeking, impetuous trolling, and also encourage reading and practicing before contributing.
15 Comments
And anyone with an actual question always finds someone to private chat.
Those guys are typically not bad players, because if they were they wouldn't have any actual questions about the practice.
Although, I do get monthly "Please take me as an student" type pleas.
No interest in learning, even though they insist they are sincere.
They just don't put any effort at all into it.
Sometimes their effort is, "I tried to get silent, but I just couldn't do it. I tried lucid dreaming, and never found my hands."
Join the club...
That's how it is.
Nothing unusual there.
How sad to have to take these kinds of measures.
But don't dramatize it.
This place is for learning sorcery, and every decision is in favor of that, which is the only thing that currently matters.
I think this will be very helpful.
I wonder if it would help to emphasize the "practice" nature of the group, in a somewhat reworded description? "Exploring" the ideas of... might be too loose.
How's this:
The purpose of this subreddit is to aid in the practical application of the works of Carlos Castaneda, Florinda Donner, Taisha Abelar, & Carol Tiggs to our lives. Topics include, but aren't limited to: sorcery (a.k.a. the mastery of intent), awareness, dreaming-awake, & non-ordinary reality.
I like that. Otherwise I look petty for criticizing people who write questions such as "how many double beings are there and are you one"?
When the person posted right away on showing up and clearly didn't read anything significant.
It's a totally obvious sign of a bad player, for anyone who's been reading daily in here for the last year.
But it isn't technically against anything in the rules.
This makes it obvious, if it's clear you aren't here to learn you don't belong here.
There's plenty of other places for that sort of speculation.
We need one that doesn't use up too much time on people who aren't interested in learning.
Let me remind anyone who reads this of the rewards, and why it's so important to preserve this subreddit.
My inorganic being Lily has been allowing me to change my bedroom into her cave, and then move it around the universe.
Her friends come along.
If that sounds too crazy to believe, it's pretty much just the dreaming emissary teaching you to travel using intent. The way Elias did.
That the cave comes along too is because I don't like to leave the room to go to a place I don't know about.
When you do that technique solo (the way she originally showed me), you end up falling from the sky to land on a distant planet you know nothing about.
So the rewards are worth a little carnage along the way. It's war after all.
I think I'll change it to "Core topics include: sorcery..."
Sounds good to me.
But don't forget that intent is watching!
If we get enough powerful sorcerers in here, you might be able to summon what we want just by changing that text.
God only knows what would be possible!
Maybe even silly things. Like write the community description, and add at the bottom, "And Bob needs a new fridge."
How about, once you can comment , via automod, if you do anything on the following list and someone complains, you have to fill out a questionnaire to see what you are here for?
Advanced techniques in Yoga schools nearly always have a questionnaire, before you are allowed to learn them.
And here, no one is charging you money.
So that seems pretty reasonable.
Shouldn't happen so often it creates much work for anyone. Automod is likely to stop 75% of the trouble, but I'd like to reach 99% since I'm the one they tend to go after.
Not that it hurts my practice. Actually, I get rewarded. The worse the bad player, the more I get rewarded.
It's odd. But I'd still like to see what happens if this place goes without counter intent for a few months.
Rules triggering the questionnaire:
We could add rules as we see another obvious situation.
The questionnaire:
Bad players don't even put in enough time to notice the wiki on the side, so I can't see anyone learning to fake it.
A real bad player will be happy to tell you which other authors he believes can teach him the same thing.
And, we can refine the questionnaire and the rules, until we have virtually zero bad players.
If they violate #2 or #5, the penalty is that they have to keep that to themselves. It's ok to be delusional, but not to try to convince others to believe your delusions.
So if someone already has a mature account with basic minimal comment karma (modifiable), the current automod config won't stop anything.
A complaint would have to be flagging a comment or reporting a post to be picked up by Reddit's code, which removes it from public view and puts it in the mod queue.
That obviously requires direct user intervention.
Apparently automod has a lot of possibilities. You can even program it to remove any post or comment that includes a specific word(s).
It's kind of overwhelming, and I am not a programmer 😔
https://www.reddit.com/r/modguide/comments/gky7lc/automoderator_beginners_tutorial_with_examples/
I've programmed in most languages, including some so obscure there were only 10 programmers ever.
But, if you start doing things like that, it'll break.
None of my code from 35 years ago works on anything.
Troubling that it has come to this. But it is to be expected. Which is actually good as if there was no push back things would not be going well at all.
It's curious that counter - intent seems to have some inverse relationship to intent at least in a public sense.
It certainly seems to be universal 😕. Must be nature's way of making sure things have fitness.
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