Calling Thayne, Can I Help With NOM?

[_Mayan Elephant]

So they refused to set up a bonfire around John Dehlin?

by the way, Alas if full of sugar and spice and every nice rather than what you suggested.

christamighty moksha.

ask amore.

sugar and spice and a star on the forehead has not a damn thing to do with it. errbody nice. you're nice. so what? you don't think nice people can hold stupid damn line?

look. alas is fine. i believe we had some very reasonable conversations over there. but if you don't think the moderation and management over there was assbackwards, you are purple drank full of kool aid. hell, even alas suggested it was upside down over there. if it wasn't, everyone wouldn't be running around forums and making back channel efforts to find thayne.

dehlin's cult of personality over there was certainly an issue, but not the issue. are you suggesting he is the reason the board got shut down by one person?

[_moksha]

ME, you wrote that as I was changing my response to something totally different. If Alas did not take offense, then any defense on my part was unneeded.

dehlin's cult of personality over there was certainly an issue, but not the issue. are you suggesting he is the reason the board got shut down by one person?

No, support or non-support of John Dehlin would never be a warning symptom of unilateral board closure. It was just a guess on my part that John Dehlin may have been involved with your experiences at NOM. Sort of like LDSfaqs going on a rant about how the makers of Hostess snack foods altered the waistline of his pants while he was sleeping.

I had a few posts moved or erased, so I know the reach of moderation. Still, I was not asked to leave like has happened to me at a board which shall remain unnamed and spacious.

[_Mayan Elephant]

ya know moksha. i have a bigger theory on things about that board and the moderators and the community.

it didn't get sideways just because there is no middle way, though i agree that the middle way is a concept and not a practicality. it got sideways first because the keys were turned over to a dysfunctional sole soul. but what did he do, really? and what did the moderator forum do, really? they created this panzyass, sorryass, condescending tone of moderation over there that was absolutely asinine.

it cracks me up to hear, now, after the fact, how the moderating board changed and gave up on the ldsman's agenda and it was no longer a place for people to exist who were non-believing active Mormons. maybe that was a discussion or an idea. but BS. it ALWAYS had non-believers. it ALWAYS had transitioning people. it ALWAYS had people passing through and moving on and it ALWAYS had newbies.

what it did not have was this assholery pretentious condescending sickening moderating side forum and quorum that thought they had to protect these precious flowers that might stumble into NOM. oh, no disagreeing here, it might shake the precious pedals. it was sickening. the hardcore nonbelieving is for us talented and experienced and enlightened people (especially the heavy moderators) and we can't have any conversations here that might put a breeze on the precious little flowers that need US to chaperone a newbie through this the right way. only the moderators knew what amount of disagreement was acceptable and they knew how to control this for the precious little children. if i was a newbie there, in that atmosphere, i would have come to one of two conclusions - these people do not like me, or these people think i am stupid.

i would be more than willing to discuss how dehlin used that forum and how dehlin was treated as the precious not-to-be-maligned because his podcasts are so precious to the newbies, and crap like that. but, as you know, dehlin was only there to sell crap. it was the moderators that made a spectacle of the conversation around the crap he sold there. hell, dehlin came only a few times to defend himself, or to get smoke blown up his ass. the fight was never with dehlin, it was with the moderators who knew how to handle the fragile eggs in their condescension baskets. dehlin rarely, and i mean rarely, posts or contributes anywhere where he does not control the content, moderating and delete button. a few raging screwups here, and maybe a few at nom are the exception. that is very very very rare of him and he was consistent at nom to only go there to sell crap.

in short, dehlin was just a widget at nom. it was the moderating and stupid deletions and locking the threads and then the people with the most friends patting themselves on the back because the threads got, oh, so, oh my heck, mean or some damn thing. and they were so impressed that they predicted the moderators would do what the moderators would predictably do.

again, this is not a slam on alas. not even a little bit. it was the entire management team and style over there. if alas agrees with me, or did, and wanted to change it, she could not have and did not. that's how that institution went under thayne. i am significantly less annoyed by the quorum of the twelve moderators than i am by your apologetics for and in behalf of, thayne et thayne, who is retired.

[_Mayan Elephant]

ME, you wrote that as I was changing my response to something totally different. If Alas did not take offense, then any defense on my part was unneeded.

dehlin's cult of personality over there was certainly an issue, but not the issue. are you suggesting he is the reason the board got shut down by one person?

No, support or non-support of John Dehlin would never be a warning symptom of unilateral board closure. It was just a guess on my part that John Dehlin may have been involved with your experiences at NOM. Sort of like LDSfaqs going on a rant about how the makers of Hostess snack foods altered the waistline of his pants while he was sleeping.

I had a few posts moved or erased, so I know the reach of moderation. Still, I was not asked to leave like has happened to me at a board which shall remain unnamed and spacious.

hey. i was just typing as you were typing. look at us on a friday.

[_RockSlider]

i would have come to one of two conclusions - these people do not like me, or these people think i am stupid.

Nope, just a delicate flower, that those of us that came to know you love and appreciate (well ok, perhaps a prickly pear)


hehe, good to see you old friend/enemy

[_Mayan Elephant]

i would have come to one of two conclusions - these people do not like me, or these people think i am stupid.

Nope, just a delicate flower, that those of us that came to know you love and appreciate (well ok, perhaps a prickly pear)


hehe, good to see you old friend/enemy

whats up slider? how are things? been playing guitars lately?

[_Hagoth]

In my early days of NOM I got frequent moderator spankings. If I agreed that I had stepped out of line I would self-censor. If I didn't agree I would go somewhere else for a while. That was the nature of the board and I decided just to put on my big boy pants and play by the rules. I always had the option to go to another board that was operated differently but I learned pretty quickly how to say everything I needed to say without taking other people down with me.

ME, you need to realize that, despite your distaste for the evil core that you perceive pulling the levers at NOM, it still worked very well for a lot of people. It had life-changing, overwhelmingly positive results for a LOT of people. Not so much for a few, which is unfortunate.

I don't know what your early experience was with the NOM community but after I joined NOM my only exposure to you was as someone who was not there to give or receive positive support. You always showed up as an angry Chicken Little who needed to remind everyone that the sky was falling. Don't get me wrong, I was entertained by a lot of what you said, and sometimes I agreed with it, but even you have to admit that when you showed up, at least in the time I was there, it was not to participate as a supportive member of the community, it was to call people to repentance.

[_Mayan Elephant]

In my early days of NOM I got frequent moderator spankings. If I agreed that I had stepped out of line I would self-censor. If I didn't agree I would go somewhere else for a while. That was the nature of the board and I decided just to put on my big boy pants and play by the rules. I always had the option to go to another board that was operated differently but I learned pretty quickly how to say everything I needed to say without taking other people down with me.

ME, you need to realize that, despite your distaste for the evil core that you perceive pulling the levers at NOM, it still worked very well for a lot of people. It had life-changing, overwhelmingly positive results for a LOT of people. Not so much for a few, which is unfortunate.

I don't know what your early experience was with the NOM community but after I joined NOM my only exposure to you was as someone who was not there to give or receive positive support. You always showed up as an angry Chicken Little who needed to remind everyone that the sky was falling. Don't get me wrong, I was entertained by a lot of what you said, and sometimes I agreed with it, but even you have to admit that when you showed up, at least in the time I was there, it was not to participate as a supportive member of the community, it was to call people to repentance.

a few clarifications. yes, the nom board had its rules and i was free to leave. generally, i did that too. generally, i self moderated too. we all did. i am not asking for a cookie for that. nor giving them out.

i am not calling the moderators an evil core. never said that. i said, it was a quorum of yes-peeps working for the sole owner who was a bit out of his head in a power grab over a goddamn board. alas confirms that in some degree. and the demise of the board confirms it absolutely.

the fact that it worked so well for so many people was the very and exact reason that i continued to have an interest in the board. Jesus. can i write that in all caps? will that help? THE FACT THAT THE BOARD WORKED SO WELL FOR SO MANY PEOPLE WAS THE VERY AND EXACT REASON THAT I CONTINUED TO HAVE AN INTEREST IN THE BOARD AND COMMUNITY. what in the hell could i ever say that would make that more clear?

call people to repentance? god no. not at all. go back and reread this thread. the facts, and the truth, will eventually make a person dangerous or threatening to others' perceptions, and that is what was going on over there. my bitch was never with the community as a whole, the concept, the origin or the people that were there for the community and the dialogue. my bitch was with the overlording shittiness and propaganda and solicitations. and, frankly, the outright dismissal of hard conversations or disagreement. my other bitches included the outright and open disdain from thayne toward people like nannap and froggie and others that were founders of the community and, ironically, did not see it as a proprietary sole-owned product for selfish-promotion or control. their lack of that sort of ownership along with their sense of community probably created the vacuum that thayne filled and key people sustained until the community (which had done a lot of good) was unilaterally erased.

look man. if what i am saying was not true - the board would still be there. the evidence and the facts do not support this other whitewashed description of contemporary NOM. this suggestion that the community and doing good was some higher priority than the control by thayne and his control of the keys to the kingdom and the sustaining of him (at least publicly) by the quorum of the twelve moderators is just not supported. sure, good things happened along the way despite that top layer of horse crap. but that top layer was obviously there, until it wasn't/isn't.

[_Red Ryder]

ME, you often brought balance to the conversations as did Cwald and others. I think it's a post Mormon maturity that takes time to develop and some personalities just mature faster. Fetchface also correctly pointed out that NOM had a lot of conflict adverse people who couldn't just rip the band-aid off and move on. I was one of them when I first found NOM. I've learned to counter balance that now and to set boundaries. NOM was helpful in that. This Mormonism disaffection thingy does strange things to people on both sides if the issue. It would be so much easier to just walk away from everything Mormon and every one Mormon. But obviously that isn't the right answer either.

It's a sad day that the board went down, but in the end everyone will survive. A new board is in the process of getting built. Hopefully it will address some of the concerns brought up in this thread. I appreciate your willingness to call out the problems you and others experienced.

[_achilles]

I am going to weigh in now. I appreciate everyone's participation in the thread. My intent in making the post was practical--to find out what was going on and to see if I could help to get NOM up and running again.

I have read the explanations of problems with moderation, power plays, etc. I think we've probably done all the post mortem that is productive. I have no interest in politics and never have. Maybe that makes me naïve. I experienced NOM as a supportive community for folks who maybe were out of the church mentally, but had to find a way to make peace long term. The long-time posters there really made it feel like a virtual ward for those of us caught in the middle. It seemed that along with registered members, there were many lurkers who benefited from the dialogue there. Personally, I need that kind of support in my life, and when NOM suddenly went t*ts up, I wanted to find a way to continue this kind of community either in the original location, or a NOM 2.0.

I agree with the green alien that there is no middle way. And to define my terms, I see the so-called middle way as an attempt at a way to make orthodoxy work. You know, mental gymnastics and all that. But from the day I first read NOMs purpose page I interpreted its goal as helping people maintain as much orthopraxy as needed to keep the peace with TBMs in their lives in spite of being mentally "out". There is a need for NOM, and I want to be a part of continuing its purpose.

Corsair, you say things are being worked on. Do we need to create NOM 2.0 from scratch, or is there some way to salvage prior content?

Edit: I didn't see Red Ryder's post before I submitted. So something is happening?