I’ve been a moderator (again, not here) and for a mod these things suck. You’d rather take the time to get it right, than to hurry up to quickly take action before it’s too late and then wait for people to quibble with you.
Exactly this. You do need to have a thick skin and take actions that you believe are right (especially if they are clearly enforcing community standards as written) even if they’re unpopular, but the last thing you want to do is do the wrong thing and get crapped on for it because you didn’t think it through beforehand.
Being second-guessed and criticized is not fun, especially when you’re just a volunteer doing it as a hobby, for fun, because you like to help people. I can’t fault anyone for wanting to avoid that.
See, information like that is useful, it definitely makes me inclined to be less hyped about this. Not not hyped, mind you, just less.
Defensiveness is fine, as long as it’s in the open - or PMs work too, but some sort of transparency is appreciated.
Appeal to consequences is a logical fallacy I have no time for. What about my posting history makes you think I’m going to be less uppity if I thought the mods were being more opaque?
Good to know this now.
I still fail to see why you couldn’t just warn him right then-and-there.
I don’t see how, for a warning. Sure, topic and thread bans, but warnings?
Like I’ve said elsewhere I am entirely used to unreasonable moderation here. This isn’t a patch on real unreasonableness (see: tomndebb and hate speech)
Doesn’t mean I’m not going to call it out when I see it, though.
To quote a wise person: “well, tough.” As evidenced by this thread and others, not taking quick action against trolls and bigots isn’t going to stop quibble threads, it’ll just be a different set of people posting them.
I sort of agree with MrDibble here. @Aspenglow, if you were unsure as to the appropriate sanction I think you should have held off on post #8 until you received feedback from the other mods. I don’t think it is appropriate for a moderator to opine (in official colors) that a post constitutes hate speech and simultaneously that no warning will be issued, it sends the wrong message.
SDMB has no bright line rules. There is nothing that mandates a particular moderation action. Not that I know of. So there isn’t such thing as an automated warning for bigotry or anything else, unlike what is implied here.
The closest I can think of is spamming and socking, and even there I’m not 100% sure.
I for one think that Mr. Dibble’s attitude and approach regarding expectations of moderators in this thread is entirely unreasonable. I would never want to hold our volunteer moderators to this standard.
Some degree of transparency is desirable, but I would never want to discourage a moderator from consulting with colleagues before taking action, even if in my view the matter was an obvious one.
A brand new poster joins and spams, they’re gone and deleted. But sometimes a poster just has a spammy link and we’ll remove the link and add a modnote or staff note.
As to socking, quite frankly if someone came back and didn’t stir up shit and contributed to the board, we would never think about going after them. So that is one exception in theory that I’m pretty sure happens.
The other is technically we have some posters that ended up with a new user profile after the move to Discourse. At worst, we combine the accounts. I should say ECG, combines the accounts. But mostly we leave them be.
I’ve never tested it, or seen it done, but I believe it to be the case. I’m not saying it’s a rule or anything, just that there’s no way a mod would let that stand and still be able to mod here. If I said something like “You’re wrong, faggot” to a known gay poster (hell, any poster), or "“That <known Jewish Poster> is just a greedy kike”, I would expect to have 5 seconds left on this board.
And if I got away with just a warning, and the rest of the board didn’t raise a stink about it, I would be very disappointed in all of you.
You have to admit that speech that subjectively may or may not be labeled as hate speech falls on a spectrum of obviousness or offensiveness and that where on that spectrum a particular post may fall is subjective and seeking confirmation or even a loose consensus before an official sanction about the seriousness of said offense is not problematic.
The examples you listed are obviously against board policy and wouldn’t require any mod who knows the rules to hesitate or confer with others in order to quickly and firmly adjudicate. Not every case will be so simple to categorize.