What does National Public Radio have to do with anything?
Huh. Don’t remember being called “paranoid” here before. Wow.
So he was being civil in that post, but you could tell that he was about to become uncivil, so you reminded him to be civil?
I’ll have to remember those. I honestly didn’t know that. They pass for swearing where I’m from.
So when a thread gets too hot for a mod, they cool it down a bit. The problem is that some mods think tomatoes are spicy.
If all the mods could keep their personal opinions and ideals out of their professional moderator actions, we wouldn’t need admins to pull ridiculously pointless rules out of their ass.
I got an idea. Why not form a committee of posters to “Officially” police moderator actions. Too many official warnings from the committee and that moderator is stripped of his position.
If the offending person is an administrator, then after too many official committe warnings, then that person should be forced to stop worrying about who said what to whom and get back to doing something important like finding out how to keep the board in existance. Personally, I don’t think admins should be handing out warnings and suspensions anyway. Checks and balances! They can make the stupid rules, and the moderators can enforce them. And the committee can make sure the moderators stay in check. There you go. Problems solved.
Fine tuning stupid ass rules right now while CL is in it’s current state of affairs is like pruning a dead tree.
Meta-moderating has been done on other message boards. I haven’t seen a great improvement in quality of moderation. In general the mods here get feedback on if their decision was fair or not pretty thoroughly. It’s worked pretty well. Instances of unfair moderation tend to be few and far between. I’m not sure we need to make the volunteer mods jobs any harder. They’re already subject to appeal to admin or the community at large, and a number have been overturned in the past. Something more formal would just weigh the place down and add a new level of quasi-moderation to bitch about. “Why didn’t the meta-moderators side with me against Lynn, it’s obvious she was being a touchy bitch with that warning! WHAAAAAHHHAAA”
No thanks.
Enjoy,
Steven
I don’t care. I trust both Giraffe and FluidDruid.
Yea, they get feedback. They just don’t give a shit.
And actually, it’s not so much the mods anyway. I think if we left the modding to the moderators and the admining to the admins, it would all be a lot better. What business do admins have enforcing rules and handing out suspensions. Shouldn’t they be doing more important shit? No wonder the board is in the situation its in.
Instead of worrying about ad sales, server issues, or enabling some simple vb code that might make the board more fun to visit and attracked more users, they’re too worried about who insulted their particular nonprofit of choice.
Instead of setting firm rules governing moderator behavior, they took a week to come up with some ambiguous “no rules until we pull them out of our ass without notice” rules governing poster behavior.
But I’m glad the admins are still thinking we’re their “guests” and we are only here because they let us and we should all thank them for that. No wonder the board is a financial failure.
I have a news flash, Ed. The board exists BECAUSE WE POST HERE! We are not your guests anymore than you are ours. If you chase everyone away, you will no longer have a board, and no longer have a job. Your life is more dependant on keeping us happy than ours is dependant on obeying your rules. You can’t make up rules that everyone hates and expect them all to thank you for mercifully letting them visit your wonderful message board.
I want to be clear about this: Your revanue is dependant on site traffic which is a direct correlation to the quantity of posters and posts. You are making money off us being here. Maybe you should start acting like it. You guys are not running this board as a favor to us. You are running the board because it’s the last thread of hope in your otherwise failed media enterprise.
You established what used to be common sense rules. I don’t know what to call this, though. It’s funny that you “expect people to abide by them”, and never considered that there will eventually be a ‘last straw’ that drives everyone away. People don’t have to abide by rules if they just up and leave.
And what is the purpose of the rule, anyway? A tran wrecked thread can easily be avoided by those who wish to not click on it. But for those who do, it keeps the traffic up on your site. So who gives a shit what people are arguing about or who said what to whom. That’s the point of the pit. Keep all the arguing and petty bullshit out of the other forums. If people dont want to see it, they can easily avoid it. And for those who thrive on it, they keep clicking and keep posting. Why make rules to decrease traffic?
Want to attracked more unique visitors to increase revenue? Stop chasing people away. Stop acting like we should thank you and kiss your feet for “allowing” us to post. Treat us like valuable, necessary, free content providing assets that your business depends on.
Maybe, just maybe, business would pick up.
Ever consider that maybe their business model tells them that us deadwood charter subscribers, the ones who get to post for life at less than ten bucks a year while seeing no ads, are a mistake, and this is just an attempt to induce us to go “I’m paying good money for this? No way,” and stop subscribing? I mean, I don’t how else to express my displeasure at this open contempt Ed is expressing here, and I’m wondering if maybe my one way way of protesting it is exactly what’s Ed is shooting for.
I think the bigger issue is: Is this even up for discussion, or is it an Imperial Decree and that’s the end of it?
Personally, I think it’s an incredibly bad idea- if a thread gets out of line, move it or shut it down. But changing the rules halfway through? Not the way it should be done. There’s nothing wrong with the system we have now and it’s not in need of adjustment, IMHO.
No, totally not in need of any adjustment, **Martini **. None at all. This seems like an alternative–a very bad alternative–to figuring out exactly what **Lynn **did wrong in derailing the thread in question and making sure that Mods off their meds in the future won’t do it again. Rather than accept any part of the responsibility for screwing the pooch, they’ve decided to take one of our toys away, and see if that teaches us to play nicer.
One thing I see happening is that, like prisoners in some uncommunicative system of isolated cells, we will have to begin tapping out meta-threads to figure out what vile names you may call Mods and still avoid banning, becuse one thing i get from this is that any attempts to clarify what is acceptable is now “rules-lawyering.” IOW, we’ll need threads that go, "Poster X called Mod A a dipshit, and remains unbanned. Poster B called Mod C an officious moron and got banned but preceded the name with a capital-lettered ‘FUCK YOU!!!’ so now we need someone to try using an ‘officious moron’ but without preceding it with an upper-case expletive. Any volunteers for a lower case “fuck you!!!’ followed by an ‘officious moron’?”
Would it be too “uncivil” for an NPR thread if I commented that I find Bear_Nenno’s sense of entitlement to be incredibly annoying? Plus, what he’s saying is a bunch of nonsense.
So long as the content is good (smart, knowledgeable people having interesting conversations on a wide variety of topics) there isn’t going to be some mass exodus of posters just because a few moderators occasionally rub people the wrong way.
Nor is there going to be some mass influx of new posters if the moderation “improves”. Believe it or not, people aren’t coming here just to admire the moderation.
Nobody is asking you to “kiss their feet” for allowing you to post. What they are saying is that if you want to post on their board you have to follow their rules. That’s basically the way the whole world works.
Honestly, my satisfaction with the board would go up if they managed to drive away everyone who has a problem with statements like “We expect you to abide by our rules if you want to post here.”
In short:
Re-reading the comments of Bear_Nenno and Ed, only one sounds like he expects to have his “feet kissed”. And that one isn’t Ed.
We were. It is comments like this that got the whole Lynn-Euth thing going. Calling people names out of the blue to prod them into snapping back is not good moderation.
I want to be clear about this: You need us a whole lot more than we need you. If you like getting paychecks, you better perk up and listen before you are the undisputed divine ruler of nothing.
I seriously wonder if your CL overlords have ever read this kind of posts from you. If I were and I did, you would be out faster than fast.
So you are modding on guessed intentions but you don’t want people to get paranoid. I don’t see how this is going to work.
Saying “please be civil” is hardly “calling people names”.
To reiterate my comments above: No, they really don’t need the few people who can’t handle being told to follow the rules. The vast majority of posters aren’t going to quit the board because they occasionally don’t agree with an administrative decision, and they really aren’t going to mind just being told “It’s our board and you have to follow our rules to participate.” Guess what, it is their board, and you do have to follow their rules to participate.
If you can’t handle that, why don’t you test your hypothesis: Leave, and then see if the board crumbles without you.
I don’t think Sapo is claiming that the board’s existence depends on him personally continuing to post, and I don’t think you think that’s his hypothesis either. What he doing, and what I hope every disgusted Doper will do, is finding out what the New Rules actually are, now that we’ve been informed that the bannings will commence any time some mod decides that you or I or Sapo has crossed the line into “incivility,” by testing out what gets you banned.
For example, **Sapo **has rather dismissively told **Ed **he would fire him if he were in any position to do so, in a NPR thread. We will be able to see if this is now a bannable offense, but only if he indeed gets banned and it is explained that this was the cause.
That’s much nobler IMO than just ceasing to post at a messageboard that has adopted new restrictive but unexplained rules, though it has the same results: **Sapo **will no longer be posting here after he gets banned, or after he quits, but we’re all a little more informed if he leaves because of a banning.
You’re right, but I was hoping he’d take the bait and leave so I wouldn’t have to listen to any more of this “we pay your salary” nonsense.
Getting banned would work too, though.
I think we should have a “Spent Acts Conviction” rule- if something happened years ago why the hell is it continually raised and flagged?
Hope this doesn’t get lost in the shuffle–if it does I might PM Ed:
What about creating a subforum? (one of those mysterious “child” forums?)
Say that the insults are flying, I take a break and then come back eager to roast someone’s ass, and then I see–whoops–it’s been moved to the “Chill Out” sub-Pit. Whoah, no further explanation needed. And then when things do chill out, move back to the regular Pit. Minimal mod interaction, just when it’s moved, it’s moved.
I don’t get it. What is the goal here? To cut down on long threads? I mean, nobody enters a train wreck unless they want to see a trainwreck. As long as those trainwrecks are contained, who are they hurting?
The pit seems to work pretty well at keeping the rest of the board civil. I don’t see why anyone would want to mess with that.
It’s those Seven Words you can’t say over the airwaves. 
And the ignore button got broken, when?
Seems to me this place had a decent set-up that is now being turned into “rules-lawyering heaven,” Ed’s expressed wishes aside. (I guess it’s safe to call him “Ed” instead of “Mr. Zotti,” though I do get a small frisson of danger just in referring to him at all now.) It’s only natural for people to test out acceptable and unacceptable behaviors, now that we’re in this strange new “crackdown on incivility” period, and TPTB (that feels safer and less potentially incivil than referring to him at all, now that I think on it) will be dealing with more rules-lawyering, and more requests for clarity in the rules being enforced, and issuing more statements clarifying why THIS is ok but THAT is not, than they ever thought possible.
Of course, if you mostly post mild questions about TV trivia in Cafe Society, or post pics of your kitty in MPSIMS, then this won’t affect you, but somehow I think that isn’t the mission statement of this place, and you’ll certainly see less ignornace fought if this place turns a messageboard where strong opinions on Planned Parenthood, to take a convenient example (that I fully and wholeheartedly support, btw, probably much more so than Lynn) get self-censored for fear of losing one’s membership for expressing too strong an opinion, to the wrong person, at the wrong time.