I think the back and forth about whether something is junior modding in that thread has about zilch to do with maintaining the integrity and order of the forum, and one hundred percent to do with the political opinions of the various participants on the topic. Since this junior modding controversy is just a facade for a political disagreement, I think Miller is doing the right thing by just letting it play out.
I haven’t had someone scrutinize something I’ve written this closely since I retired from grant writing. Thanks for letting an old lady know that you’re paying attention.
Didn’t mean to piss y’all off, but I’m a little bit flattered.
I agree with Miller here. My longest Pit thread, I think, is one I use specifically to tell another poster to hush up, and I’ve bumped it over the years to repeat the instruction to that poster. I do it in the pit because it’s not allowed elsewhere. That’s what the pit is for.
I’m going out on a limb and say that the OP of a thread should be able to junior mod to keep the thread on the intended track. If I start a thread of which marsupial would make the best pet and someone talks about manatees in their bathtub, I should be able to remind the poster to limit themselves to marsupials.
“Manatees are awesome, but I’d really love to stay focused on marsupials in this thread, and unless you know something about manatees that I don’t, they’re not marsupials.” Good form.
“No. Do not post about manatees in this thread. This is only for marsupials.” Bad form.
“What kind of inbred unibrow halfwit are you, anyway, posting about manatees in this thread? Do you not know what a marsupial is, you cretinous circus reject? Shut the fuck up with your shitty natterings about fucking manatees!” Good form in the pit, bad form elsewhere.
That’s not really junior modding. I don’t consider that an OP reminding posters of the kind of information wanted is junior modding, as long as it is done politely. Where it becomes a problem is when someone starts giving other posters orders or accusing them of violating the rules.
There’s a hard line here … if Junior Modding crosses this line then it become impersonating a mod … and that’s really bad. Even in the Pit, we can’t tell other posters what they can or cannot post. If there’s a problem, then report it to a real mod and let them take care of it. We are always out-of-line telling other posters what to do.
However, we can call other posters dirty names in the Pit … we just can’t pretend to be mods in the Pit
In my comments that pissed everyone off, I told people what to post or not post on my thread, but even while doing it I knew, and everyone else knew, that I had absolutely NO WAY of enforcing it. No matter how strongly worded, if you’re not a mod, it’s only a request with no teeth in it. So I don’t see what the big deal is. The people reading the thread are free to agree to the request or completely ignore it, and I’m fine with that. Why? Because that is reality.
OTOH, when a mod says post/don’t post or “this is unacceptable,” a mod can warn you and eventually ban you. A mod is all-powerful in the SDMB world, and that is as it should be, as I said in this post. A board like this needs to be moderated or it deteriorates into chaos and 10,000 post threads that no one can navigate.
So, in practice, the difference between so-called “junior modding” and real modding is infinite, like the difference between 0 and 1.
No. What you did in the Pit would and should be moderated as Jr Mod’ing had you done the same in GD. You were Jr Mod’ing, it’s just that we’ve decide that’s OK in the Pit.
It depends on what you’re counting. The difference between zero universes and one universe is almost infinite.
The difference between zero bananas and one banana? Not so much.
Everyone can have some.