Rezzing…
Are we getting far too heavy-handed with all the hijacking notes? Such as here:
How the blue blazes is that off-topic? Since that may very well figure into the calculus of who Harris chooses, as well as how the candidates’ choices there reflect their ambitions and thus chances of being selected, I don’t see how this is remotely off-topic, at all.
I let the posts stand, but any more on that should go to a spin-off thread. Pretty simple. It is a related but different topic. I believe I even included how to do the Reply to Topic
The central moderation principle on this message board has always been, “Don’t be a jerk.” Failure to heed a moderator’s direct instruction is being a jerk and can earn members warnings and eventually a ban. Bad actors and problem posters would often entangle themselves in this remarkably straightforward process.
Enforcing the hijack policy with warnings represents a qualitative change from this policy. Now members are suppose to distinguish between permissible tangents, overly tangential tangents, and tangents that are somewhat permissible but taken too far.
The old policy had the virtue of simplicity. The new policy of issuing warnings or penalties for excessive hijacks extends moderator actions to realms falling outside civility or liability concerns. It’s no longer so straightforwards for posters.
Honestly, that’s it: I’m just making an observation about this qualitative change. Note the lack of policy recommendation in this post. The moderators have been reasonably careful not to make any particularly sudden moves, which is good. I personally find the hijack issue to be a puzzling one: I have little idea of where I would want this board to draw the lines.
The hijack policy rarely leads to warnings unless someone plows through the moderation note. It pretty much starts with modnotes. We sometimes just take the whole off-topic mess and spin it off.
I also lean more on thread bans than warnings, I don’t like handing out warnings for a one off or rare behavior, a thread ban is usually as effective in making the point. Most warnings are either for repetitive behavior or really egregious behavior.
But the Hijack policy is not that new, it goes back to ay least January of 2020 before any of the current P&E/GD mods were moderators.
The first bullet point of the Follow moderator instructions of the new rules for P&E and GD is the Hijacks
I think I understand @Measure_for_Measure’s POV, in that while it was a rule, perhaps due to the shortage of Mods prior to our NEWGen (most gentle fun poked at you guys, you rock) team, that it wasn’t enforced strongly.
As said newer mods grow they’ve been more willing to enforce the rules, and the ease of discourse in spinning off new threads makes it easy for them to do so, and for them to expect us to do the same.
Overall, I agree with the better enforcement. Seriously, sometimes I’m re-reading an old thread, or a rezzed thread that has become relevant again, and if it’s of sufficient age, I find myself scrolling past a half dozen screens of some tangent that is getting in the way.
Sure, it’s probably less noticeable when it’s “live” as it were, but it’s painful and tedious when reviewed. And that’s leaving out posters who cannot wait to push their own hobbyhorses through a barely relevant tangent and kill the thread. Or who stick on one, tiny piece relevant piece and derail the thread by posting incessantly on that one microscopic bit.
And yes, P&E being so politically charged, often even more than GD means that it’s much more likely to be abused and need the more stringent watch.
Lastly, as I and others have pointed out in multiple threads, one of the reasons I think forcing the spin offs is good is that in a fast moving, or long running thread, posters completely ignore or forget the mod notes, to the point I’ve seen half a dozen mod notes on the same hijack. Spinning it off sometimes helps, so that all the people who want to pick nits follow the new thread.
I’ve liked the thread ban approach as well.
Also, the 2020 rule was a break from old practice, as acknowledged in the Jan 2020 post. And yes, it’s been enforced more stringently. The intrinsic ambiguity of the enforcement line was also noted in the 2020 post. (The 2020 rule change occurred during one of my periodic excursions away from this message board, which explains part of my confusion.)
I’d probably oppose current enforcement if we were still on vBulletin, as I had an easier time of skimming on that platform, and the page breaks created a natural indication of how much past discussion should be reviewed. In a 20 page wonder, you could always preface your remarks by saying you had only looked over the 3 most recent pages. That and Discourse has some intriguing features for managing tangents and offshoots. Promoting them repeatedly is good IMHO.
Factual Question’s policy on hijacks is fantastic: posters are encouraged to defer jokes and tangents until the central question has been sufficiently addressed. It works really well there, but GD and Politics mods face a more demanding environment. In those ecosystems, it takes pages and pages just to cover the main lines of argument.
I’m glad you appreciate this crucial difference.
In FQ, a question is definitively answered, and going on to goofing is no big deal.
In GD/P&E, and particularly in P&E, questions or events span not just days, but weeks, months and sometimes years. Trying to keep those threads clean and on track can pose real challenges.
I tend to ignore a hijack for a few posts in the hope the thread will right itself and sometimes it does. But when the hijacks carry on for more than 10 posts, I’m more apt to step in.
I will always step in if a hijack is blatant (posting about Trump in a Harris thread, e.g.) or occurs right after a mod note has been written and is ignored or overlooked.
We do expect posters to scroll back at least a few posts to see if there is mod guidance. I’m more understanding if the mod note is 50 posts back, but we still expect posters to review threads to determine if mod notes have issued in a thread.
It’s why we include the word, “moderating,” in those posts. Makes it easy to search the thread for this term.
Hope this helps.
I much prefer this style. I’ve liked how you mod hijacks. You’re less aggressive about it.
I very much didn’t like my post being edited because something I mentioned (that was entirely relevant to my post) could have become a hijack.
I get that sometimes you see something and want to head off a potential hijack, but I much prefer those little notes telling people not to let it become a hijack.
I’m not talking about someone who just brings up something unrelated or makes it about them. I’m talking about natural conversational shifts, that happen because people brought up something related. The former have always been moderated–the latter is the change.
And, to be fair, most of the time, this is how it is handled. But I do sometimes see the stricter no-hijack enforcement in other forums. I don’t want us moving that direction.
GD, FQ, P&E, breaking news threads–all of them need tighter hijack moderation. CS, TGR, TG, most IMHO, MPSIMS generally are much more casual, and I think benefit from letting the conversation go where it naturally goes—unless it become contentious or hateful.
Most agreement, slight disagreement IMHO. There is a point where a conversation going where it naturally goes is a few select members of the thread going back and forth in disagreement with the rest of the thread waiting it out, even in those more relaxed forum. See the concurrent ATMB thread:
The title, being overgeneralized IMHO because the dispute was two posters in this case going back and forth about whether or not they considered a particular band classic rock (names of all removed AND the band to not start refighting it all).
When a couple of posters start taking over a thread (and again, I can think of a couple within the last week) I do think it’s helpful for the mods to consider a note for a time out, even in the less rigorous fora.
My forums are GD, P&E, IMHO, MPSIMS and QZ.
My policy is to only moderate hijacks in GD and P&E, absent some extraordinary action on the part of a poster in one of the other forums. I may have moderated one in QZ, but even that I’m not sure if I did and would have to search (would rather not do unless someone has some compelling reason I should).
I feel my responsibilities are to keep GD/P&E threads on track as the OP wished them to be. Also, to the greatest extent possible, not stifle discussion.
I would mention that mods are not robots and we all have different tolerances for what constitutes a hijack. We try to be consistent but it’s not always possible.
Firstly I’ll say that I’m generally in full agreement with the policy on hijacks, and I also agree that hijacks should be moderated more strictly in P&E. That said, while I’m hesitant to criticize the excellent job our mods are doing, yes, it nevertheless is possible to be too heavy-handed and there are instances of that, such as in the Harris VP thread.
In my view, the hijack policy should be to stop hijacks if and when they happen, nothing more. How many posts going off-topic constitutes an actual hijack is a matter of judgment, but surely it has to be more than one slightly tangential post. But in the Harris thread, we see lots of posts that are pretty much related to the topic being flagged as “don’t discuss this further”, and when one poster made a tangential post and another poster replied to it, the reply was hidden and both posters were thread-banned! The thread bans were subsequently rescinded, but to me that is also indicative of overreaction. IMHO, except in the most egregious situation, no poster should be thread-banned for just one post.
The problem with overreaction to potential hijacks that haven’t even occurred yet is that, while the intention is good, it discourages participation in the thread. If you have to scour your post for anything that might even remotely be considered to be not 100% on topic, it’s probably easier not to post at all.
I appreciate this gentler, more tolerant style of moderation.
And that’s fair.
That’s my worry, and I have indeed found myself doing exactly that lately; but in a lot of these cases instead of going to the trouble to split off the discussion to another thread, perhaps even a brand new one of my own making, I’ll instead just drop the entire tangent in question, having decided that my little thought there wasn’t really worth going to the trouble of splitting it off in the first place.
This will tend to impoverish any discussion if everyone is excessively self-policing themselves like that.
There was a mod note but it came hours after the supposed digression had ended completely. More, I am not sure it was a digression. It was a thread about what is classic rock and the debate was entirely on point even if only using the one example.
Strong disagree. A quick count in that exact thread shows 17 (!) hits for “moderating” in a (granted, fast moving) but very young thread. And MOST of those are for hijacks, and many of them are repeats of the same hijack conversations.
Yes, the threads over 1k posts now, but people in that thread kept going off on (interesting) sidetracks that seriously belonged in other threads, most commonly, the ones regarding Vance or Biden dropping out.
We of course will see it differently, but I was deterred from continuing the topic after a full page of you and @MrDibble going back and forth, even when the OP really didn’t have any strong criteria for the definition.
Most everyone else just gave their opinions and moved on, or offered pretty mild counterpoints and moved on, but you two were not willing to let it go.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it was helpful to me to get that sidetrack stopped, but like a lot of things, YMMV.
It was ended before it was officially stopped.
You know, you already have your own thread for this issue, please take it back there. Don’t do this to this thread.
To all: On the VP thread, I’ll go easier on it, it has slowed down now, at least until the announcement. But a Gaza debate will not be allowed in a thread on VP picks. There are plenty of threads for the very in-depth issue.
Vance talk goes elsewhere unless it is direct comparison to the VP candidate.
Rehashing Hillary doesn’t belong in the thread.
I’ve been riding close herd on 4 of the kamala-harris threads. I’ve had the lightest touch on the President Biden Dropping Out of Race thread and that has gone inert on its own.
Unexpected Enthusiasm for Harris? & Kamala Harris and the runup to the 2024 Presidential Election have for whatever reason stayed largely on topic. The VP one has veered off the post.
If you are responding to something in a thread that is basically off-topic or likely to lead to a hijack, try this:
How to Reply as a linked Topic:
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
From the Dem Veep thread this morning:
Oh for crying out loud.
This one post did NOT lead to a huge digression and wasn’t likely to, at all, moderation or not, esp. given the momentum of the actual big news this morning. Given all of the huge changes in the political landscape in those fateful 18 days it was as innocuous as could be, and I myself after reading it chuckled at what has indeed happened in that time (until I saw in my peripheral vision the inevitable and dreaded yellow tinge in the very next post). It was PERFECTLY on topic, if in a meta sense. How the HEY is it remotely worth any sort of mod note?!
This is a PERFECT example of how this new zero-drift-tolerance policy will and has already impacted spontaneity, wit, color, and just any sort of harmless meta-perspectives of any sort here, with Dopers now constantly checking their replies for even the tiniest bit of drift, lest they get the wet noodle up their back.
The other thing is that the mods are simply making a TON more unnecessary work for themselves policing all these tiny deviations (if that is what they are), on top of the actual ones of course, which note I am not arguing for. That’s a recipe for burnout, so I don’t know why you would put all of that unnecessary weight on your shoulders.
I agree.
This keeps popping into my head when I read these threads:
