Tour threads

[Spark]

I mean, I might be overplaying it a little, but I definitely think it's a problem, not least because when I first raised it with someone whose identity you can easily guess, I didn't actually expect to get anyone to agree with me - but when I had several people independently say they were concerned about the quality of tour threads, then I definitely thought it was a problem worth thinking about.

 

[Spark]

And where are you from, by the way?

a blood rainbow.

More seriously, though, it is worth pointing out that this has very little to do with "nationalities" in the sense that I don't think there's any one posting bloc that can or should take any more or less blame than any other. I want to get it fixed.

 

[Athlai]

Snarkiness and bull**** patriotism makes for a pretty unattractive cricket chat.

 

[Spark]

Snarkiness and bull**** patriotism makes for a pretty unattractive cricket chat.

Very true.

 

[Furball]

There are certain English fans who just don't like when people call it as they see it and don't call the English team the best cricket team to have ever played the game. They throw little girlish tantrums. Saw it in the Pak/England series and we're seeing it again. Boo ****ing hoo.

Yeah, it's all our fault. Don't know why I didn't realise this last night.

 

[Prince EWS]

There are certain English fans who just don't like when people call it as they see it and don't call the English team the best cricket team to have ever played the game. They throw little girlish tantrums. Saw it in the Pak/England series and we're seeing it again. Boo ****ing hoo.

Ironically this post actually supports the idea put forward in this thread, because several people have been doing exactly that in tour threads, spoiling the atmosphere of them. It's certainly not limited to England fans though.

 

[benchmark00]

Ironically this post actually supports the idea put forward in this thread, because several people have been doing exactly that in tour threads, spoiling the atmosphere of them. It's certainly not limited to England fans though.

That's because it's cause and effect. English supporters, and there are more than a few, talk up their team stupidly and talk down the opposition, causing people to pull them up on it when they're wrong. So who's in the wrong do you think?

 

[sledger]

Yeah, it's all our fault. Don't know why I didn't realise this last night.

Your brain was obviously lacking the nutrition it needed from an intensely fricasseed poultry repast.

 

[benchmark00]

I'd really hate to lock this thread, so there is a zero tolerance for feuding and petty flamewars from now, btw.

Let's see this.

 

[Prince EWS]

There is maybe a bit too much of fans of one team telling everyone else who good they are and they everyone else gloating at the misplaced hubris when they get owned by visiting South Africans, er, another team.

No-one pumps up their team's tyres worse than the English and I always die inside slightly when I read "We're great, us. 2-0, no doubt" posts. The potential for egg on face is massive.

There is an element of this, but I don't even really think that's quite the problem - not to me, anyway. I don't mind reading someone knowledgeable about their side pumping up their players as such as long as it's not ridiculous; I'll often disagree but it makes for a decent discussion.

What's been getting increasingly annoying is the other side of the coin - fans of one team rubbishing high quality players from the opposition as soon as they have an ordinary match or, as we've started to see, an ordinary innings or even an ordinary spell (as a bowler). The increasing trend is to find ways to call every highly rated player on every other team in the world **** in order to make your own players look better, and it completely turns me off tour threads when it happens as regularly as it has been lately, particularly when the blokes doing it start posting as if the last twenty minutes cricket is the first time they've seen the player in question. I'm not talking about people pointing out weaknesses in the opposition (Bopara, Petersen, Tahir for example in the current series), but people deliberately trying to tear down players who are rated similarly to those they support in order to indirectly push their own barrows. There's a big difference between pointing out that someone isn't looking good or is having a poor game, and extrapolating that to declare they're rubbish based on a really tiny amount of cricket as if everything that has gone before is irrelevant.

I've been a member of this forum for nearly ten years now and I've seen dozens of "this place isn't what it used to be" threads come and go; I'm usually quite critical of such posts but in this instance, the tour threads really have been on a downward spiral. I've been discussing it with a few people of late and it looks like it's a more widespread opinion than I anticipated.

 

[Spikey]

Seems like this could simply be helped corrected by using the report button. which i admit i didn't use last night when social came in intending to create a war (which, iirc, everyone ignored. yay!) but still.

 

[Flem274*]

Haha, I feel kind of bad for triggering this thread in a random off-beat rant or two. But having done so, it's only fair that I give my two bob honestly, as a poster and tour thread addict.

People have to realise, IMO, that

1. No one gives a **** about your nationalistic tendencies or your agendas, take them elsewhere. It's ****ing tiresome coming back home and reading about 'LOLOLOL this just proves ________ is **** as I thought all along". No. One. Cares. On a related note, it is the height of stupidity to judge a cricketer based on a single Test match, let alone an innings, a day or, god forbid, a session.

2. Cricket is a game played for entertainment. So, y'know, people should try to act like they're at least trying to enjoy the cricket and talking about cricket in a supposedly relaxed, moderated atmosphere and stop taking themselves and everything else so seriously.

3. Tour threads are not cricinfo. What I like reading about tour threads is discussions about bowling plans, conditions, predictions, analysis and that sort of stuff - the things expert commentators should be providing but don't, so we fill the vacuum. Ideally.

My thoughts anyway.

You can have my babies.

 

[Prince EWS]

Seems like this could simply be helped corrected by using the report button. which i admit i didn't use last night when social came in intending to create a war (which, iirc, everyone ignored. yay!) but still.

People are going to use this thread as an outlet to whinge about perceived trolling and propagate long-standing feuds and that's a shame, but I don't really think the posting that's making the tour threads so much poorer is against the rules. It's not trolling or flaming or the stupid sledger/GIMH/GF v benchmark00 war that's the problem at all, as much as I'm sure they'll probably try to make this thread about them; it's just poor posting low in analysis and high in jingoism and barrow-pushing. Reporting posts won't really fix this because it's just people being being lame, over-critical flag-wavers with no sense of positive discussion rather than people breaking the rules.

 

[grecian]

There is an element of this, but I don't even really think that's quite the problem - not to me, anyway. I don't mind reading someone knowledgeable about their side pumping up their players as such as long as it's not ridiculous; I'll often disagree but it makes for a decent discussion.

What's been getting increasingly annoying in the other side of the coin - fans of one team rubbishing high quality players from the opposition as soon as they have an ordinary match or, as we've started to see, an ordinary innings or even an ordinary spell (as a bowler). The increasing trend is to find ways to call every highly rated player on every other team in the world **** in order to make your own players look better, and it completely turns me off tour threads when it happens as regularly as it has been lately, particularly when the blokes doing it start posting as if the last twenty minutes is the first time they've seen the player in question. I'm not talking about people pointing out weaknesses in the opposition (Bopara, Petersen, Tahir for example in the current series), but people deliberately trying to tear down players who are rated similar to those they support in order to indirectly push their own barrows. There's a big difference between pointing out that someone isn't looking good or is having a poor game, and extrapolating that to declare they're rubbish based on a really tiny amount of cricket as if everything that has gone before is irrelevant.

I've been a member of this forum for nearly ten years now and I've seen dozens of "this place isn't what it used to be" threads come and go; I'm usually quite critical of such posts but in this instance, the tour threads really have been on a downward spiral. I've been discussing it with a few people of late and it looks like it's a more widespread opinion than I anticipated.

and there's our problem I reckon

TBH, Cricketweb has always had ****s posting on it, don't see it much different then always.

 

[Howe_zat]

People are going to use this thread as an outlet to whinge about perceived trolling and propagate long-standing feuds and that's a shame, but I don't really think the posting that's making the tour threads so much poorer is against the rules. It's not trolling or flaming or the stupid sledger/GIMH/GF v benchmark00 war that's the problem at all, as much as I'm sure they'll probably try to make this thread about them; it's just poor posting low in analysis and high in jingoism and barrow-pushing. Reporting posts won't really fix this because it's just people being being lame, over-critical flag-wavers with no sense of positive discussion rather than people breaking the rules.

Yes, very well put.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a central tenant of CW that everyone gets their own say, isn't it? So that means that you can't tell people off for being simply an ignorant or overly negative poster. And you can't enforce people to read old threads to avoid repetition, or look up details on the game.

Perhaps there's a way to come up with some guidelines for what constitutes good posting - a sort of CW ettiquette - and then encourage the senior members to advise the newer ones. Could that work? Would you need it to have a rating system of up/down points on comments, maybe? I've never liked the "karma points" idea much, but I'm willing to weigh it up as an option.

 

[Spark]

I mean, if a post wouldn't look out of place on cricinfo comments then it's probably a **** post

 

[Spark]

Yes, very well put.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a central tenant of CW that everyone gets their own say, isn't it? So that means that you can't tell people off for being simply an ignorant or overly negative poster. And you can't enforce people to read old threads to avoid repetition, or look up details on the game.

Perhaps there's a way to come up with some guidelines for what constitutes good posting - a sort of CW ettiquette - and then encourage the senior members to advise the newer ones. Could that work? Would you need it to have a rating system of up/down points on comments, maybe? I've never liked the "karma points" idea much, but I'm willing to weigh it up as an option.

The reason I don't like a karma system isn't for the usual reasons - I actually think with careful moderation and good sense, it's pretty easy to avoid 'abuse'. The thing is, there's nothing to stop a 'old-timers' clique using the karma system to one-up each other for fairly meaningless posts in an otherwise completely legitimate manner, completely devaluing the whole system.

Also might encourage a karma-whore mentality in some newish posters, which I'd be completely against.

 

[Furball]

People are going to use this thread as an outlet to whinge about perceived trolling and propagate long-standing feuds and that's a shame, but I don't really think the posting that's making the tour threads so much poorer is against the rules. It's not trolling or flaming or the stupid sledger/GIMH/GF v benchmark00 war that's the problem at all, as much as I'm sure they'll probably try to make this thread about them; it's just poor posting low in analysis and high in jingoism and barrow-pushing. Reporting posts won't really fix this because it's just people being being lame, over-critical flag-wavers with no sense of positive discussion rather than people breaking the rules.

See I always thought flag waving was against the rules. If you take the India-Pakistan rivalry, a quick look at a YouTube comments section, or even cricinfo shows how dire that particular rivalry can get, but posters who have tried to bring that mentality to here have always been given pretty short shrift. There was a poster called Umar Akmal IIRC who got banned pretty quickly when it was clear he had no intention of being anything other than a boring anti-India troll.

 

[Spark]

There's a difference between trolling and flag-waving. A subtle difference, but one that makes it extremely hard to moderate.

 

[Dan]

Perhaps there's a way to come up with some guidelines for what constitutes good posting - a sort of CW ettiquette - and then encourage the senior members to advise the newer ones. Could that work? Would you need it to have a rating system of up/down points on comments, maybe? I've never liked the "karma points" idea much, but I'm willing to weigh it up as an option.

CricketWeb subreddit?

EDIT: Ignore me, the tab's been open too long and I'm behind the conversation.