Comments and Behavior On This Site

posted by Ross Melnick on December 5, 2013 at 4:03 pm

To the CT Community, I feel compelled to post a notice about the recent run of behavior in the comments section. I’m not going to go on and on about it but those who frequent the site may be able to cite some of the offending examples. Instead, I’ll simply make this brief. One or both of these things will happen: 1) Violators of the user policy may be immediately suspended from the site. (No more pleasant warnings in advance.) 2) The ability to comment on theater pages may be suspended indefinitely. If you care about this site and about these theaters, please keep your comments on point and not about one another. We’ve been online for thirteen years and I’m deeply dismayed by what’s going on over the past two weeks. It ends today, one way or another.

Comments (37)

Ross Melnick
Ross Melnick on December 5, 2013 at 4:44 pm

Thank you, Ed. My nice guy routine is over. Policy violated, user suspended. From now on, that’s it.

dickneeds111
dickneeds111 on December 5, 2013 at 4:53 pm

Ross: As an avid viewer of this sight. Thank you. I am tired of rude people with bad language and non sensical replys. Dick S.

telliott
telliott on December 5, 2013 at 5:05 pm

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Hate when people used this site for name calling etc. It’s about the theatres!

Ross Melnick
Ross Melnick on December 5, 2013 at 5:41 pm

Please notify Ken Roe if you see a violation of the user policy.

James Kastner
James Kastner on December 5, 2013 at 6:13 pm

Everybody should just “Enjoy the show!”

SethLewis
SethLewis on December 5, 2013 at 6:39 pm

Thank you…the site is too precious to lovers of movies and movie theatres to be undone by a few

Ed Solero
Ed Solero on December 5, 2013 at 9:27 pm

“Boggles” my mind how some (or maybe just one) of the more serious contributors here (whether under their original member name, or a new alias) can be among those who stir up the better portion of this pointless drama!

Good call, Ross! I’d hate for these otherwise amiable, and more-or-less on target, conversations to go silent because of the rudeness, and selfishness, of a handful of participants.

MPol
MPol on December 5, 2013 at 10:20 pm

Thanks for the new rules against flaming, Ross. They’re a welcome breath of fresh air. I wish the owners/proprietors of more forums/websites and chatrooms had such rules.

GaryParks
GaryParks on December 6, 2013 at 12:25 am

Thank you, Ross. I have not run across such flamings in a very long time, but I applaud all efforts to keep this a place for civil information exchange. Thanks to Ken for keeping a vigilant eye, also.

KenLayton
KenLayton on December 6, 2013 at 1:34 am

I have not come across any flamings at all.

Trolleyguy
Trolleyguy on December 6, 2013 at 9:37 am

This is great. Perhaps now there will be an end to racist and homophobic comments.

Ross Melnick
Ross Melnick on December 6, 2013 at 10:14 am

There have been numerous antagonisms over the past few weeks. If you’ve missed them, it’s because Ken does such an amazing job of deleting them. In the future, it will be the comment and the user that is deleted. I wish it weren’t so but it’s gotten out of hand. As a volunteer website, we don’t have staff to deal with the workload that these issues create. We’ve tried very hard not to create this kind of draconian one-strike policy but there’s little choice now. It’s either this or close the comments.

MPol
MPol on December 6, 2013 at 11:27 am

I’ve admittedly never come across any “flaming” or other antagonisms on this site personally, but reading/hearing about them is sufficient enough to be grateful for the new anti-flaming/insults policy. Thanks again, Ross.

raysson
raysson on December 6, 2013 at 2:06 pm

I’m glad that this policy is enforced. It’s a long time coming. The problem I got is the insulting comments that are all over the place made by those who basically don’t even respect the site.

rsalters (Ron Salters)
rsalters (Ron Salters) on December 6, 2013 at 2:09 pm

This notice is overdue – it should remain posted for awhile. Fortunately, there are not that many antagonistic comments and some visitors to the site may never encounter any. I know that a week or so ago there was a nasty exchange which had to be deleted because of guys acting like 12-year-olds.

moviebuff82
moviebuff82 on December 6, 2013 at 3:34 pm

This comment policy issue is great. No more trolling ala Youtube

br91975
br91975 on December 6, 2013 at 4:20 pm

There are two users I can think of who violate the healthy conversational spirit of this site – the one Ed referred to above and another – U.S., west coast-based – who has, on multiple occasions, sniped at and insulted fellow commenters whose helpful posts may sometimes be slightly off in detail. Thank you, Ross, for reaffirming what Cinema Treasures represents: a healthy dialogue and a thoughtfully-composed database for theatre lovers worldwide.

JohnRice
JohnRice on December 6, 2013 at 6:26 pm

I was unaware of the recent flaming but like the great majority of us here I think fully support guidelines and civility on discussion boards. Good for you Ross for putting the violators on notice!

Scott Neff
Scott Neff on December 6, 2013 at 8:22 pm

While I agree the name-calling and nit-picking can get out of hand, I’m going to throw my two cents into the ring and leave it there. (I know what it’s like to deal with this stuff over at Cinematour)

But at what point does it become a detriment to THIS site to have people regularly posting inaccurate information as fact? I agree that sometimes those taking issue with the inaccuracy could mellow out, but I can see how disheartening it can be to repeatedly see people come in and start posting inaccuracies about their pet theatres.

It’s such a tough line to walk since we rely upon others with our cinema fascination to continue filling in the blanks – but I find it most frustrating to think that some blanks are repeatedly filled in wrong. If anything, I feel sorriest for Ken who has to sort out and continually update based on good and bad information alike.

My major concern about inaccuracies is that between this site, Cinematour, Mike Rivest’s lists, and some of the other places with similar information; if enough of us pickup on one piece of information we can MAKE it fact. All of our geeky cinema sources have their strengths and weaknesses (which is why I enjoy visiting them) But if we’re not careful we can end up changing history because we’re the only people keeping track of it.

So back to my two cents — while it’s easy to do something about the mean people. What can we do about the stupid people? Myself included… I’m sure I’ve caused an entire theatre to be operated by General Cinema by mistake. :)

Scott Neff
Scott Neff on December 6, 2013 at 8:36 pm

And while I’m at it — what can we do about people uploading thumbnails as photos? Don’t they get that it’s going to pixelate and look awful? And dare I mention people who are clearly taking pics from Cinematour and posting them here? (I don’t care if they’re mine, but if you’re gonna post them, give the same people credit for them).

Ross Melnick
Ross Melnick on December 6, 2013 at 9:35 pm

Thanks so much for your thoughtful comments, Scott. I agree with you that it’s frustrating to see obvious inaccuracies, but we’re grateful to have everyone’s input. Crowd-sourced information can be (often) unreliable but valuable just the same. I have seen numerous instances in which people have not posted anything about a theater but good information is suddenly added when correcting previous inaccuracies.

We definitely should correct previous errors. After all, sites like Cinema Treasures and CinemaTour are used for research and we should and do take that responsibility seriously. This notice and Ken’s new monitoring is an effort, though, to end the bickering and the nastiness. I agree that 99% of the time everyone here is respectful and courteous and that I’m focusing this week on the 1%. For 13 years we’ve let most of the pettiness go because we can’t patrol behavior. The past two weeks, though, a few arguments escalated out of control.

It’s sad to think of all of the times people have walked away from sites like this one because they don’t want to be attacked for being accidentally inaccurate or because they can’t spell, etc. All I’m looking for is a little patience and courtesy.

The Internet masks identity and I can almost guarantee that many of the arguments on this site and others wouldn’t happen if people were face to face. So, my fellow CT users, if you wouldn’t say it in person, don’t say it in a post.

As for all of the comments on this thread — after 13 years, it really means a lot to all of us that you still care about the mission and the site. I sincerely thank you Scott and everyone else on this thread for all of your support. It means a lot — especially this week.

Ross Melnick
Ross Melnick on December 6, 2013 at 9:36 pm

P.S. Please don’t upload lo-res illegible thumbnails, per Scott’s request, and DO NOT COPY IMAGES FROM CINEMA TOUR OR ANYWHERE ELSE. Always good to remind people. Thanks again. :)

Chris Utley
Chris Utley on December 6, 2013 at 10:16 pm

Addressing Scott’s point: There is a fine line between correcting inaccuracies & insulting someone. Many times that line is crossed. There IS a way to be corrective, but in a non-insulting tone.

Thanks Ross for putting your foot down. The vitrol reached horrifying levels as of late. Here’s to days of peace & movie memories!

Roger Katz
Roger Katz on December 6, 2013 at 11:17 pm

What about adding some kind of link on each theatre’s page that says something like “Make Corrections” which people would be able to click and send corrections (or what they think is a correction) to a Cinema Treasures staff member for review? Then people do not need to make a post about it publicly at all. Also, it streamlines the corrections process. There are theaters I have commented on as being closed or open, for example, that have the incorrect status on here and years later nothing on the page has changed to reflect updated information because no staff member ran across my comment. Adding a corrections link would help in that way as well.

ChasSmith
ChasSmith on December 7, 2013 at 12:49 am

Just a quick note of thanks for everything you guys do. I should take the time to keep with my own personal research and post more than I do, as this is an extremely valuable site to me, personally. Please do whatever you think best to keep it great.

Ross Melnick
Ross Melnick on December 7, 2013 at 12:52 pm

Great idea, Roger. We’ll add this to our list of potential upgrades to the site.

moviebuff82
moviebuff82 on December 7, 2013 at 2:48 pm

also i have trouble clicking on the link to the theater from the theater search page, i use google chrome and use adblocker.

Ross Melnick
Ross Melnick on December 7, 2013 at 5:44 pm

I’ll make a note of it for the future, but it may be the adblocker which we could not fix unfortunately.

ChasSmith
ChasSmith on December 7, 2013 at 11:37 pm

I use adblocker, too, but disabled it and those links just don’t work. (I’m on Chrome and Win7.) I don’t search from there, so had never noticed.

RickB
RickB on December 8, 2013 at 10:15 am

On the search pages, when you click a link from the list of theaters a pop-up for the theater that was clicked opens on the map, and that pop-up contains a link to the theater page. If the link you click isn’t close to the top of the list, the map is scrolled off of your screen and it looks like nothing happened. My brain tells me that those links used to go directly to the theater pages, but it’s been wrong before.

Ian
Ian on December 9, 2013 at 7:16 am

There seems to be a small problem at present clicking on a link. I was a little wary of mentioning it over the weekend as I have just installed a new security suite and thought that might be responsible, but I am pretty sure now that it is just the CT site. On the new theatres page for example clicking on the name used to take to that theatres details, now I have to use an easy workaround of clicking the link that appears on the map (as mentioned by RickB).

Also on the home page there are new theatres listed from 8th but on the new theatre page the newest entry is currently 5th Dec.

Back on-topic, banning members who violate the courtesy rules or post spam is the only way to go.

Patrick Crowley
Patrick Crowley on December 9, 2013 at 9:20 am

Hey, folks.

FYI… the issue with clicking links on theater pages has been fixed.

So, as before, when you now click on a theater link in a list of theaters, you will be taken directly to the theater page for that theater. Also, when you hover over a theater link, the related map marker and info window will be displayed on the map.

We’ve also made two other changes to improve theater browsing:

THEATER LISTS WILL SHOW OPEN THEATERS FIRST

When browsing and searching theaters, theater lists will now show ‘Open’ movie theaters at first. If you’d like to see all theaters in a list, just click on the ‘All’ button on the bottom right of the map.

By making this change, we can do a better job showing off movie theaters which are still open and operating — which should come first over other priorities.

TOP 5 CITIES ADDED TO DROP DOWN MENUS

When browsing theaters by city, it can be very tedious to find the city you wish to view — especially in large American states, like Texas or California, which have hundreds of cities — because scrolling up and down the long drop down menus takes forever.

So, to address this issue, we’ve added a list of the top five cities in a given state or country to many drop down menus, so that you can quickly jump to well-known cities in a selected region.

When you get a chance, try browsing theaters by region now. Just select a country, and then (optionally) a state, and then one of the top five cities in the drop down menu. And, because we now show you ‘Open’ theaters first, you can easily see all of the active movie theaters in the city you selected. It’s pretty cool.

Cheers,
Patrick

Ret. AKC (NAC) CCC Bob Jensen, Manteno, Illinois
Ret. AKC (NAC) CCC Bob Jensen, Manteno, Illinois on December 10, 2013 at 9:32 am

Patrick,

I don’t think just showing ‘open’ theaters is a good idea. New folks just going to CT will see that, not know that they can navigate to the closed or demolished sites, think that’s not very interesting and leave the site and you lost them for good. Better to put it back like it was, so they have the FUN of seeing all the theaters in their town and you have them HOOKED. Have those other options for those of us who want to use them.

V.R.
Chief Bob Jensen

dallasmovietheaters
dallasmovietheaters on December 12, 2013 at 11:06 am

While I love the site and agree with everything said on behavior, the usability needs addressing. The notion that you can put in the name of a theater that you’re presumably doing research on (e.g, Dal-Sec) and the site’s search engine returns “no movie theaters found”, that’s not too user friendly… especially when the theater is actually in the database. A response of “no open theaters found; one closed theater found” or similar might be more approachable for users. But when the database consists of 80% closed items, to default to “open” seems counter to first-time or even veteran users. Few newbie users would venture to the tiny bar and know to hit the greyed-out “closed” if the theater was in that space. Again, love the site and appreciate the contributions of all.

Ed Solero
Ed Solero on December 15, 2013 at 9:20 pm

I agree with dallasmovietheaters. It’s confusing that the results return with a definitive sounding “No theaters found,” under the new default parameters, when searching for a specific theater that may be closed. Just earlier today, I searched Jackson Heights, NY, looking for the Eagle Theatre listing, and found myself wondering if I entered the wrong spelling, before I remembered that the results were only giving me the 3 open theaters in that area, and not indicating any of the closed, or even demolished, theaters that used to be included in results.

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