See, Ed, this is a perfect example of why you still don’t get it. You continue to think of these boards as an extension of your paper, and treat it with an editor’s eye. The boards are not and never will be even close to the same environment. You can’t edit the content here. You can’t edit people’s interaction with other people. You can set up some rules, but they had damned well better be clear and obvious to the people who have to follow them, and they had damned well better be consistently enforced.
Edited to add: I’m sure you’re a fantastic editor. I just don’t think that the skills required to be a good admin for a message board are the same. What makes you a great editor will also make you a shitty admin. I think you need to either re-think your approach to adminning the boards or leave it to those who have the skills.
Isn’t it obvious? Lynne got told to fuck off. Problem was, she was posting as a poster, not a mod. In the pit. That’s perfectly within the rules. Ergo, rules must change.
Of course we can’t have Lynne the poster put in her place. Mods must be protected at all times, don’tcha know. These new rules are the lengths they’ll go to demand respect. God forbid they try to earn it, like everyone else.
You’re obviously new here. If you’d been around for a while, you’d understand that mods have had to put up with WAY more abuse than other posters, and mods are generally not allowed to punch back (as one quick f’rinstance, mods are not supposed to start Pit threads about other posters.)
Since when can’t a mod pit another poster as a poster? I can’t think of an example but I seem to recall having seen it in the past.
And if they can’t handle the abuse, maybe they shouldn’t be a mod? I mean, really, the worse abuse here doesn’t amount to more than words on a screen. Back when I used to run a retail store my staff and I had to deal with customers throwing things at us, threatening to kill/sue/hurt us either in person or on the phone, getting robbed, or (actually happened) having someone demolish half my store by driving their car through it. All that and all my staff still managed to get high marks for customer service on my mystery shops.
At least you guys can just step away from the computer if things get crazy.
The difference being, of course, that you and your staff were paid for that, whereas mods are simply volunteers, people like you and me, who step up to do a job that is needed without recompense. I, for one, having been involved in plenty of different volunteer activities in the past, don’t see any reason why volunteers should be treated poorly at all. On most message boards, abuse of the volunteer staff is grounds for instant suspension/banning, for that very reason. The fact that posters here are allowed to vent spleen at the volunteers is quite an unusual thing, and, in my opinion, not one of the better aspects of the board.
Sure, but this reasoning applies to almost any rules. It doesn’t automatically make those rules a good method of preventing jerkiness; not if the behavior they target is only to be considered jerky behavior on account of their violation of those very rules themselves.
I could make a rule that no one could use the word “waffle” in a post, and thus screen for the kind of poster who couldn’t help but use the word “waffle” in violation of the rules. In a sense, the rule would be detecting jerks (those who couldn’t be bothered to follow the rules…). But it’d still be misguided.
I never worked in retail, but this strikes me as bad, not good.
I’ve spent nearly 30 years working as a consultant in IT services and writing and selling software, both packages and custom. One thing I’ve never tolerated, and none of my bosses (when I’ve had them) have tolerated, is abuse of the staff. You can complain, that’s part of any business. But if you’re in my office, or on the phone with one of my employees, you WILL keep a civil tongue in your head or you are out, with rarely a second chance.
This isn’t because I think they’re delicate flowers who can’t handle a harsh word, but because no one deserves to be abused when they are trying to do their job, and I will not put up with it.
This bullshit about “the customer is always right” is just that, bullshit. I’ve told customers to get lost before, and if the circumstances warrant, I’ll do it again.
I’ve also had experience as an IT consultant. And my experience has told me that the less people pay for a service, the more apt they are to complain. The kind of abuse I mentioned is by no means rare in retail positions. I completely agree with you as far as IT clients go, but it’s a completely different world altogether. You simply cannot manage customer service the same way in both situations. The boards are, to my mind, much more analogous to the retail situation since anyone off the street can come in your store and speak their mind or purchase your product. IT consulting has a slightly higher bar to entry.
The point of my post was to illustrate that what Ed and CK Dex think is ‘abuse’ is really, really, weak. They don’t know abuse like they don’t know customer service.
No, the difference being that we actually knew how to provide customer service to all our customers, despite REAL abuse, without completely flipping our shit, condescending to them, or making up stupid rules that made it harder for our customers to enjoy our product. In other words, we were customer service professionals instead of a bunch of clowns making shit up as they go along.
We are not, and this was made explicit when I joined up a year ago. I doubt it was new then.
I’ve said before that I was never on the wrong end of anything too bad in the Pit. It’s reasonable to expect us to put up with some complaints and arguments; it does NOT follow that people should be able abuse mods and admins without limits.
You don’t know (and neither do I) that they’ll pay equally for all views.