Plucked from this thread and that one in the avatar affair, but this is about the place of polls.
This was another recent IMHO thread that really just wanted a poll.
In that case, I understand Czarcasm wanting to avoid a temperature rise, but “no responding…period” seemed a bit much. To my reading there, neither myself nor rachelellogram were even necessarily disagreeing with anything that had come before, let alone making a battle of it. But of course people have different sensitivities about where these boundaries are, especially in writing.
I did notice that the direction to not talk about it caused the poll to fall down the thread list faster. The avatar poll got 279 votes before it was closed. The personhood poll started a day earlier and is still open, but has received only 150 votes. As it stands, poll threads with more chatter work better as polls. If there is to be polling without posting, presumably those would have to be stickied to the top of the list. (For how long? How many at a time?)
But the first question, seems to me, is: does the SDMB want polling without commentary?
I think it’s a very good idea–we should hack the vB code so that one Moderator can have things the way he wants them. Commentary equals debate, after all.
Of course not–it was an idiotic ruling by Czarcasm and it’s not the first time he’s done it. The only “product” the SDMB has is the content users provide. Why in the world would anyone in their right mind consider a rule that limits the content being provided? If he doesn’t understand the function of a message board is to post…y’know…messages then perhaps a new moderator should be found.
In addition, I’d still like to know where he got the moronic idea that an OP can dictate the terms of a thread since the rules have always stated that an OP doesn’t control his/her thread.
Yeah, I don’t see the point of a poll without any discussion allowed. And anyone who does want just a poll is free to vote in the poll and then just ignore all the comments that get posted afterward.
Now that I’ve said that, I’ll play devil’s advocate and point out that, in the thread that started the whole controversy, the OP didn’t want people debating the issue because there was already a thread in existence for precisely that purpose. It does make sense to avoid multiple concurrent threads on the same issue, and it’s not out of line for a moderator to say, “If you want to discuss this issue further, take the discussion to that other thread that’s currently being used for that purpose.”
I thought the whole point of the SDMB’s unique forum structure was so that we could have multiple concurrent threads on a given issue:
News item: Michelle Obama brings back the “Jackie Kennedy Pillbox Hat” look.*
GD topic: Will Michelle Obama’s new look help Barak get his agenda through
CS topic: What other '60s fashions besides the pillbox hat look that good?
GQ topic: Why is it called a “pillbox” hat anyway?
IMHO topic: Poll: Michelle in a pillbox hat, hot or not?
MPSIMS topic: Squee! I love Michelle in a pillbox hat! Post pictures of kitties wearing pillbox hats!
Pit topic: Mr President: You suck and dressing Michelle as Jackie K doesn’t make me think you’re JFK.
He also has the weirdest policy that YOU MUST TALK ABOUT WHAT THE THREAD IS ABOUT: if a side discussion arises in the course of a thread, that is a hijack which needs to be stamped on. I can see that he might want to spin it off into another thread if it completely took over Worst Sincere Suggestions, but it was an interesting digression which was being handled amicably. All it needed was a civil request, not a peremptory bark, and it could have been a worthwhile thread. As it was, fuck it.
No, the moderators should never moderate discussion. In fact, there’s no need for all the separate fora, there should just be one big forum for everything. With one thread with all the posts in.
Or, we could use the structure that’s provided, and put threads where they belong. Threads about changing the nature of the board in ATMB, threads about when life/personhood begins in GD. Neither of those threads really belonged in IMHO in the first place, but if there’s a need to have a poll to go along with the main thread, then it makes sense to keep the discussion in the main thread, not a secondary one.
There’s a reason for keeping polls out of GD, as well. Any issue with any level of nuance will be reduced to black-and-white statements by a poll, and discussion of, say, abortion is better served without that.
To directly answer the OP, the two threads referenced shouldn’t have been in IMHO in the first place. There should be no need for polls without commentary if people don’t start polls on subjects where commentary is inappropriate for IMHO.
I could not disagree more. That is why there are separate forums. Further I strongly think moderators should not moderate content that is not offensive or illegal. I’ve said before - the sole purpose of this board is for members to interact via posting content. It makes no sense for mods restrict content of that interaction save for watching for personal insults and the like.
Isn’t enforcing the correct use of those separate forums also a job in itself that has to fall on the mods? As in, stopping a flow of random opinions and one-liners in a GQ thread, or moving a request for a recipe from ATMB to CS, closing down a zombie that serves no purpose anymore, etc. Those are all mod actions that don’t involve profanity or insults and the like but are very necessary to try to keep the board semi-coherent.
I’m not saying that a IMHO poll isn’t normally a place where commentary is expected and appropriate, or if I believe the board wants commentary free polls in general, but in fairness there wasn’t a rule of “no comments”, the original mod instruction was “no politicking” which seemed reasonable to me at the time because there was already a politics-filled thread raging on about it in ATMB and people were starting to just duplicate their arguments from that thread into the poll thread.
You know, bucketybuck just asked the wrong fucking question in that avatar poll. It was a bit loaded and unclear about what the responses meant. Every attempt to clarify was met with hostility. One year ago, Griaffe posted the same poll, on the same subject, with a better question and better answer choices, and it generated helpful information about avatars and the members’ concearn for them.
I think Girraffe’s thread demonstrates that discussion is helpful to a poll. Bucketybuck’s poll on the same subject demonstrates that banning commentary leads to confusion, anger and frustration.
No, it doesn’t seem reasonable. I don’t believe a mod should issue a “no politicking” rule in a poll thread. It has never been the policy of this board to let posters dictate the course of a thread they start. And could someone please explain to me why it is such a BFD that two threads might be discussing the same issue in different forums at the same time? It happens all the time around here. If both threads are floating doesn’t that show that there is enough interest from members and guests to let them both exist?
I don’t necessarily disagree with all of that. Just commenting on the part about mods serving no purpose except to prevent rules violations, etc. Directing the flow of traffic, topics, etc. is a part of it too whether this particular case of it was warranted or not.
A board-wide poll was opened but it was used as a sort of a side bet in a bigger thread about avatars that was already going on. I can’t speak for the OP or the Mod, or the wisdom of having a poll to settle an existing thread in the first place, but for those who had already been following the flow of the Avatar thread up to the point that the poll was opened I think it was easier to see and understand why the ‘no politicking’ rule got tacked on (right or wrong). The discussion that spawned the poll thread was in a large part centered around “It won’t affect anyone who doesn’t want it, so they shouldn’t really get to vote against it” but then it got opened as a poll anyway. Forcing the hands on both sides of the already heated debate to rush over to the poll thread and start lobbying for support there. Anyone who made a point in the poll supporting their position might have already had that point soundly countered in the original discussion. So then their opponents would feel compelled to go counter that argument in the poll thread, too. Without having followed the original thread it might not have been as easy to see that train wreck coming.
And then proceeded to warn not only people who “violated” the rule, but those who didn’t (me). Clarifications are only “debates” in a sense so loose, you’re now defining a different word.
Fucking ridiculous that the moderator-clan spent 24-hours deliberating (aka circle-jerking) to arrive at, what is basically, the worst possible conclusion possible. It’s especially hilarious whenever someone calls **Czarcasm ** and is unable to defend himself, one of his cronies steps up to his defense.
Well we disagree then. If this board was modded by its owner (like the Girafffe boards, for instance) I would be more willing to concede the point. IMO, “directing topics” is way out of the scope of board moderation here. I understand stepping on hijacks and such but what happened in the poll thread wasn’t that.
Again, so what? Ostensively, the thread was to poll posters on their preference regarding avatars. It was accomplished. All you had to do was open the thread and view the results at the top of the page. Any commentary that followed was irrelevant to that end. Nitpicking, grammar-naziing, and debating topics to death is a hallmark of this board. It’s what we do.
We’ve debated the avatar issue many times in the past in many threads. Why start modding content now? A question: do you think the posters in that thread deserve an official warning on their record?
I’ve already said in the threads about that particular prong of this issue that I think some of them got completely blindsided, and all of them were probably a little harsh under the circumstances. But I didn’t come into this thread to go back over those threads.
The question of the mod action in that situation also has a more appropriate, and dedicated, thread for that discussion, and trying to carry it on here would either prevent interested parties over there from seeing the comments, or cause them to have to come over here to re-comment on what they have already said there. It isn’t always a problem or even necessarily undesirable but in some cases I think having duplicate debates on an issue is very distracting and tedious, especially a thread where posters feel they have something at stake like appealing a mod decision or petitioning for a new board feature.
