Shacknews LoL

This is not a great idea.

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May was the first month in 5 years that Shacknews had shown year over year growth in monthly unique visitors. We believe that June is on track to continue that trend. Shack is back, and I am really proud of the team. The conference was a success for us, and we look forward to the future. We just hit our millionth view on our Twitch channel and both the Gamerhub.TV and Shacknews YouTube Channels are rocking. Very exciting times. Thank you Shackers for sticking with us during the transition. I am really excited about the future of Shacknews!

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she's not wrong

The [lol] script is five years old today!

I didn't think it would last a week. lol

In every one of these threads, your primary refrain seems to be "I use guns responsibly." I want to very plainly say that no one cares. Even if you are the fabled "good guy with a gun" that we've been hearing rhetoric about for 25+ years, it. doesn't. matter. The majority of gun owners don't kill people, nobody's saying that. You aren't special for not killing people with your guns.

Not just that, but you yourself frequently tout how many more restrictions there are on your gun ownership than on the average American's. Ongoing background checks. Classes and testing. Direct oversight and unscheduled inspections. If everyone's gun ownership experience was more like yours, we might not have to have these conversations weekly.

The fact is that guns don't serve a positive role anywhere. So why do we need them? Vehicles transport goods and people and are important socially and economically. Alcohol serves an important social role for many people. Cigarettes, well, kinda suck and are being combated in the public arena as well, but are also widely used off-label to self-medicate for a wide variety of mental health issues. (The research on that is fascinating btw, people with undiagnosed mental health disorders are much more likely to be lifelong smokers.) Guns... kill. That's what they do. That's what they're designed and marketed to do. If you don't believe me, try to talk to a gun enthusiast about their favorite gun without the phrase "stopping power" coming up. That's a code word for "effectiveness at killing."

"But guns do serve a positive role! A rancher's gotta protect his herd." - His profit margins, you mean. I doubt many career ranchers get as attached to their animals as parents do to their kids. The herd is bred to die.
"But hunters..." - Cool, give them some sort of single-shot contraption that takes 20 seconds to reload. An animal isn't going to stick around if you miss the first shot anyway. Also, we've got grocery stores and refrigerators these days, so not a lot of people really HAVE to hunt to survive. So it's largely about recreation, and sometimes about saving some cash.
"But shooting is fun!" - Yeah, it is! Nailing a tight grouping at range is crazy fun and satisfying. But not nearly as satisfying as watching your children grow up.

None of my hobbies, possessions, or even potential career paths are worth rows of tiny coffins. Stop being selfish for 5 minutes and really think about the cost to society of having guns so readily available. Maybe you don't misuse them, but others do. That means we've got to significantly tighten controls on everyone because it's not exactly easy to tell who's a lifetime responsible gun owner and who's stocking up to do something awful.

Yes, we're asking you to consider accepting some inconvenient limitations on something really cool that could potentially be part of your livelihood. No, it's not fair that a handful of jerks ruin it for everyone. Yes, we ALSO need to work on mental healthcare (and healthcare in general) in this country.

Even if all of our collective gun control dreams come true, kids will still die sometimes. People will still hurt each other. Other plagues on society will still plague us. Just because other bad stuff also happens doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to stop bad stuff from happening. This is something we can fix. I know because most of the rest of the world already has.

Dear Shack members,
I do not know where to begin......my name is Tracy and I am BlockheadBrown's wife.
I thank all of you so much for your concern. And I'm truly amazed by how so many dug for information to find where he had disappeared to. Unfortunately, his sudden and unexpected passing has left us all with so many unanswered questions.
The generosity shown by this community in raising money for our son was beyond belief. It warms my heart, and gives me hope that we can get through this.

Hey Portax, love the site and have been here for over a decade!

I didn't post in the big thread about point 1, so I'll let that be. The past two days, I've noticed a lot of similarities between what happened on Something Awful years ago and here. SA's traffic has gone steadily downhill and a lot of the old posters no longer go there. I was active in their NFL subforum but the moderation started to not like our posting style and started banning what they felt weren't "Quality Posts." We had regular topics about each division and the moderator banned anyone who did "division talk" and said only serious articles about the sport and issues affecting the sport would be permitted. When the community banter grinded to a halt in favor of discussions over health/race/sex in the NFL, many users migrated over to /r/nfl. The moderation there prevented hate speech, but without trying to inject their personal aesthetics and ideologies into the community. We were talked down to a lot less than on SA. What I noticed was:

1) Moderators mentioning how they do it for free, and nebulous replies of "You don't want to know what we put up with"
* This happened nearly verbatim on SA. Granted the moderators here are better people and have been convicted of far less felonies. It's just an unfair position to take where the community is damned if they don't acknowledge the self-sacrifice of the volunteer moderator. It's a thread terminated reply and shouldn't be used in public. I appreciate what you guys do but it's difficult to respond to a topic when it swerves in that direction.

2) Mentioning "private complaints" but not giving details.
* This again feels like an attack on the community. On SA's NFL, we were told numerous complaints were received by the moderation staff but were never given the details. They said we had to curb derailing conversation and low quality posts. A huge amount of users spoke up saying that's why we liked the site but were replied to that they've received "numerous complaints" and disacknowledged anyone who spoke up in contrast to the moderators.

3) Mentioning that the internet has grown and we need to as well.
* We enjoyed that subforum for years because it was fun and a place to talk about specific topics without getting bogged down with other things. If you want to grow the site's community I don't think you'll hear many complaints. But being told that we need to change our ways because it's juvenile or that another community has taken the great leap forward and we should to is patronizing. I for one enjoy Dadshack where we complain about our lives, post funny crap, and have a very casual conversation about games without being too hardcore. None of this should be viewed as hostile to new audiences or specific demographics just because of it's inclusiveness. If you want to bring in other communities that's cool, but it's off-putting when we're told that we're the problem. I'm not pointing out a specific moderator or poster who said those verbatim, it's just the vibe that I've gotten lately.

Anyway I hope you are able to resolve the issue regarding point 1 without too much backlash. I enjoy the community too much for it to be splintered over one issue. Thanks!

Listen sugarbitch. If you're going to walk around with your panties showing people are going to a) look, and b) say things about it. The same is true of your tits and if you're going to pull some bullshit "what a pig this person is! It's none of their business how I dress!" well you'll be right but it also means you're dumber than the last sorority cunt who showed up to class without a bra and complained about the old guys looking at her nips poking trough the shirt. So just buy some goddamn clothes that fit well enough to cover your panties and you won't have to listen to judgmental pricks and we won't have to listen to whiny vaginas. Everybody wins.