I can’t think of any major complaints about trends in moderation.
You can also search for “group:moderators”
~Max
Personally, I’m in the ‘moderation is just fine, thank you!’ camp.
What I feel we’re seeing is the mods (in multiple forums, but especially GD and P&E) see a hijack starting and try to note it early, rather than some older threads where the hijack has gone on for 20+ posts and the thread has lost any relevance. So yeah, it looks more aggressive because they’re heading off the problem rather than closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.
This has been especially important in the forums noted, and to only a slightly lesser extent in the MPSIMS breaking news threads.
So here’s 
to the mods trying to keep it in check. Especially when in a large number of the recent moderation, one poster or another has already posted “I know this is probably a hijack” and then gone ahead and continued it. IF you have recently typed this or a related phrase out, probably better to reconsider the post. Not that I haven’t been guilty at least once, so take it as constructive criticism, not a complaint, please and thank you.
Yep, I’ve seen that one in addition to the several-sentence intentional hijack, followed by a “but that’s probably a hijack that’s better discussed in its own thread” comment as a close. It’s like, how blatant can you be?
Better than fine. Current moderation is a vast improvement over moderation in the past in many forums, like GD, FQ and even this forum. And it’s not just the work of the current mods, but efforts started before them, like JC’s reforms in GD.
Why is that?
Do you really need someone to explain that?
The casual misogyny of the past alone would be a good example where we needed to clean things up. Otherwise this board becomes the embarrassing uncle at Thanksgiving.
I’ve been protecting the Ukraine Invasion thread from Hijacks. That is a Breaking News thread in MPSIMS. I read that one at least daily and generally more often. I’ve had to stop hijacks about Musk 2 or 3 times already. Also other issues have popped up. I don’t normally Mod MPSIMS, this is kind of the exception as I’m very active reading it and occasionally posting to it as a poster.
I don’t recall stopping hijacks in IMHO very often, it is a much looser forum than P&E and GD. The Café can get some major hijacks but once a thread is largely played out, we generally allow hijacks there. So there is a timing issue in that forum that is honestly very subjective and I just try to use my best judgement.
For the same reason that Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today. The standards of acceptability are vastly different.
If Blazing Saddles didn’t already exist, it could be made in 2022 verbatim no problems
I agree. The fact that posters are allowed to bring up these decisions and freely discuss them in threads is a good indication to me that this is a very fair discussion site.
Here’s a thread (warning: the prurient cringe levels are off the charts) that recently floated up, no doubt by a cornfielded zombie. It was thankfully locked.
Thank god this isn’t us anymore.
Amen.
There have been some cases of modding that I’ve felt have been a little bit off the mark, but overall new rules and the more proactive modding are a net positive for the board. We went for a long time with under-modding IMHO, letting toxic posters scare off quality posters. If we swing back a little bit too far in the opposite direction before finding an equilibrium, I’m OK with that.
Because things like misogyny, homophobia and transphobia (as an example) are rightly considered to be disgusting and have no place in society. There are plenty of other places for people to be pigs if they so wish. The staff here are to be applauded for cracking down on that.
They are also to be applauded for things like quickly tamping down on hijacks in breaking news threads. Nearly always the hijacks are innocently started but have the potential to spin out of control and ruin the thread. Those topics can be spun off elsewhere. The current thread on the US midterm election and the ongoing Ukraine invasion thread are great sources of information that haven’t gotten bogged down.
Some really cringey replies in there. I’m pretty happy with the strong stances on unnecessary references to personal kinks or language that objectifies or demeans any specific individual or class of persons (sexually or otherwise).
But I have noticed the much more active moderation of tangents. That is definitely a noticeable change in moderation.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I am a believer in free speech. I am also a believer in Mel Brooks. The would would be a worse place without Blazing Saddles.
I would hope that if some of those posts were made today, they’d be very heavily modded.
That’s great. Do you think that I should be moderated if I were to insult you here?
If so, then you believe that there should be limits to free speech, we are just debating where those limits are. If not, then that’s not a board I would be willing to participate in, and there are plenty of places that do not have moderation that you could.
No, not really. “Free speech is my right to say what you don’t want to hear.” -Eric Blair.
Mel was disgusted by bigotry in all forms. That movie pointed out, via parody, that bigots have no place in this world. He knew, as all intelligent people do, that using “free speech” as an excuse to spew foul views is cowardly at best.
And yet, if the posts upstream are to be believed, in this modern era we would not allow him to make Blazing Saddles.
That’s (sort of) a quote by Orwell in his original introduction to Animal Farm. The actual quote is: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
From the same essay:
Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organized societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxemburg said, is “freedom for the other fellow.” The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: “I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.” If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of Western civilization means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakeable way.
Bolding mine.