puzzlegal and I are discussing other message boards and whether they delete posts and allow you to question moderation.
puzzlegal says that most message boards she has posted on deletes posts and doesn’t allow for questioning of moderation. My experience is the opposite.
Two public polls. One for deleting posts. One for questioning moderation.
Do most message boards you’ve posted on allow the mods to delete posts routinely?.
Yes, deleting posts was routine where I’ve been posting
No, posts are considered sacrosanct and only deleted in rare circumstances.
0voters
Do other message boards you’ve posted on allow you to comment on moderation?
I only post on one other message board. They routinely delete posts, threads etc and public questioning of moderator actions is not encouraged. I don’t like it. I think this board should remain as it is.
This (and Giraffe, so boards spawned from this one) is the only board I’ve ever been on that allowed any kind of discussion about mod action whatsoever.
In other forums I post in, if you break a rule - say, a political potshots - your post will be replaced with red text that said, “Scrubbed”. If someone quoted you, their quote (and potentially response if it also crossed the line) would also be wiped and replaced with red text that says “Scrubbed the post, scrubbed the quote”.
There is nowhere to dispute moderator action on any other forum I’ve been on. You can PM the mods but that’s about it.
@Babale, I suspect that you’re thinking of the same board I am, which is currently the only other board that I have any significant presence on. They’re also a lot stricter about what constitutes “political discussion”, and it’s not allowed at all anywhere on the board.
The main other place I post is Reddit, and I don’t know any of the subreddits I use (many of which are top subreddits) that have any rule about discussing the moderation. Sure, generally making a top-level post specifically about the moderation would be off topic, but nothing prevents you from replying to moderation decisions (as long as they aren’t in a locked thread) and thus people do it all the time.
I also know a few have separate subreddits where you can discuss how the subreddit is run, sorta like our ATMB. Those are the few that specifically say such comments should be made there.
That said, all subreddits do delete posts and comments. It does not seem to help much, though. They still wind up having to delete things in every thread, as people don’t learn what not to do. And the top level posts often get locked because ne’er-do-wells come in. Trolls overwhelming the mods in this way is quite common.
Though not mentioned here, they are also quick to ban, with the idea that bans are not permanent. But you have to PM the moderators (or the admins if it’s a sitewide ban) to get the ban lifted. There are no “suspensions,” but most bans are not permabans. Not at first, anyways.
I have availed myself of this. I once referred to the word “cunt” in a thread that was about an article involving said word, and got banned from one subreddit, but was reinstated on appeal. I suspect the banning was an automated thing.
Facebook deletes posts. If you are on someone’s home page, they may or may not allow you to complain about your post having been deleted. fwiw, my friends who have taken to deleting posts rarely don’t generally tolerate any complaints. If it’s done by Facebook, it’s sort of allowed to gripe, because Facebook’s largely-automatic moderation rarely notices that sort of thing.
Reddit mods delete posts, but at least in many subreddits, they allow people to bitch about moderation.
Sadly, that’s probably more than half of all on-line discussion right there. I guess the next one to ask about is maybe Twitter?
While Reddit is great for many things, and their Ask Science/Ask History/etc boards are very strictly moderated and thus very handy, it also doesn’t have the same kind of communities or ongoing discussions that we do, so I didn’t consider it when discussing the moderation on “forums”, like this one. ymmv.
I used to moderate a D&D messageboard, and when people broke the rules, I would replace the text of their post with some surreal silliness. A post arguing about politics would instead say, “So I’ve been thinking about ocelots a lot, and whether they would be good at playing Parcheesi. What do you think?” I’d add a note at the bottom explaining it was edited to remove political content. Folks could email us to argue, but arguing in public was a bannin’.
How many boards, other than this one and its derivatives, have you posted on? I’m not asking to be snarky, I’m asking because THIS BOARD has a tradition of rarely deleting posts, and boards like Giraffe have inherited that. But boards that aren’t descended from the SDMB very rarely allow discussions of moderation, and are much more strict up to and including immediately deleting any offending posts.
Every other message board I currently read, maybe 5-7 or so, deletes offensive posts and does not allow commenting on moderation. I have only ever seen that here (and Giraffe but that’s from here). Where have you seen differently? And I am talking about actual moderated message boards with threads, not Facebook or Reddit.
The only other board I post on is about fly fishing. If you try to post about bait fishing, or anything else other than fly fishing it gets deleted. I think that if you tried to complain about the moderation, people would be more confused than anything else.
I’m going to estimate at least a couple dozen. There was another large board and its spinoffs. I’m fairly certain those didn’t delete posts. There were a few that were special interest so I’m less sure about the moderation. There were a couple that I picked because of the moderation that said they were hands off.
Still, I didn’t think that type of moderation was so rare.
AIUI, several gaming boards dedicated to a specific game will disappear posts which disparage that game as well disappear posts which complain about posts disappearing. I’ve been on one.
I was temporarily banned and had my posts removed from another board because the admins there thought I was a spammer. Ironically, that board got invaded by actual spammers then shut down.
I voted ‘yes’ on deleting and ‘no’ on challenging mod decisions, but wanted to add in the POV as it applies to this message board. I do not post on, but do/did lurk on several firearms message boards which still had a traditional (non-social media style) sequential history posting. And heck yes they delete posts, most often for politics, and if conservatives think they get unfair moderation here, they have no idea of what it looks like if even a moderate posts on a gun forum, much less a liberal.