Now, as I’m sure you’ve notice, I’ve just stickied new rules for both Great Debates and Politics and Elections.
Tubadiva and I have been working on these rules for a month or so as we took to heart the posts made in the ‘How Do We Make It Work’ threads in both fora.
I realize there is no way the rules will make everyone happy. No way at all. But I do think they’ll move things in Great Debates and Politics and Elections in a significantly better way.
While a lot of the rules remain the same or very similar I do want to point out a few things I think are important changes.
Hijacks will now be more broadly defined. We want to see more and more specific threads. That means attempts to redirect them or to derail them are now potentially sanctionable.
No more omnibus threads. In our experience, the large ongoing omnibus threads are the most contentious and lead to the most trouble for posters. Please keep your threads very specific moving forward. We’d rather have four topics about various aspects of tax policy than one overarching one covering all four.
Forum Banning. A new sanction that’s available to moderation staff is the banning of a poster from Great Debates and/of Politics and Elections. Since these are the two most contentious fora, we’re electing to give people a ‘time out’ from here as a means of preserving valuable posters who may become temporarily overwrought.
I’ll respond to questions here as I can over the day.
So moderation will become even more arbitrary and capricious than it already was? :rolleyes:
Broadly defined hijack? Some of the best thread have been those which veer into the related topics.
So, let’s say a thread on the Medicis, will have to remain about them only. No discussion on banking, architecture, politics, and diplomacy allowed.
I hope that’s not what ends up happening. If you delete the word “only” from what I quoted, you might be more on-target. As I see it, the key sentence is this:
The problem IMHO isn’t when posters bring in other, related issues. It’s when posters—or, worse, an individual poster unilaterally—tries to divert the thread away from what it was originally about, often to that poster’s own pet issue or to something that’s already been discussed to death elsewhere.
Of course the proof of the pudding is in the eating. It looks good and we’ll see how it tastes!
You’ve created a fantastic rubric. Implementation is unavoidably “arbitrary and capricious” and will always make some unhappy that what they thought was benign was labelled as hateful or what they thought was hateful was left stand. In advance please accept thanks for your work on that thankless task!
AK84, there is a difference between conversations evolving and relevant tangents being shared, and preventing discussion of the op subject with a hijack. Even a very interesting hijack may be better served by opening a separate thread for it.
Bravo. It’s great to see clamping down on the hijacks. Too many times we would have threads that only went for about 10-15 posts on the focused OP topic, and then the remaining 200 posts would be unrelated hijacking.
The rules are pretty common sense. I have a slight issue with following upthread instructions. Say you participate in several of the first 10 pages of a thread. You step back from it for a week or so. Meantime, it is now a 25 page thread with a mod note on the 11th page warning people not to accuse others of smelling of elderberries. You come back on the 25th page and accuse someone of smelling of elderberries. Is it really reasonable to expect everyone to pore over every page of a very long thread before posting?
Suggestion (not sure it’s feasible)- could there be an icon for each thread containing mod notes and/or warnings? Say it’s a exclamation point. So you come to this 25th page and see the exclamation point and say “Golly neds, there are instructions or notes or warnings here”. You click on the exclamation point and all of the mod notes and warnings in that thread are displayed automatically. Again, I don’t know about the software’s capabilities but if it can be done I think it should be.
In general, pretty good, and most of the verboten topics are pretty good, I see a couple odd things about the forbidding of things that “encourage discrimination against any minority group”:
– It isn’t in the form of “threads about…” like the others but seems to be a blanket topic ban. Which isn’t to say this makes it wrong, I’m just wondering what the intent was.
– “Minority group” is not well-defined. Is this like the second amendment, in that the beginning is merely explication for the rest, and the ban should be understood to include any “race, gender, sexual orientation or any other group into which a person might belong”? If so, I am fine with it. Otherwise, it would seem to allow the advocacy for some discrimination as long as the target is not in whatever is a “minority group”.
I’m having trouble thinking of any omnibus threads in either forum, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered one, or else I don’t know what you mean. Is an omnibus thread functionally different from one with a very broad topic? Are there any relatively recent examples of an omnibus thread you can point to?
How do the no-hijack rules apply to existing threads that have already drifted into new territory? Can we continue to discuss the points that have been brought up, or do any new posts need to be on the original topic?
I can’t recall seeing a lot of contentious threads about the politics of Renaissance Italy in Great Debates.:dubious:
These rules apply to Great Debates and Elections. Free ranging discussions are still permissible in other forums like Cafe Society, The Game Room, IMHO, and MPSIMS.
Re Roderick’s question about omnibus threads: The one about police violence comes to mind. I stopped even opening it years ago because at that time it seemed to be the same posters nattering at each other all the time, rather than talking about the particular examples which were ostensibly the purpose of the thread. Far as I’m concerned, omnibus threads shut down discussion, the very opposite of the goal of GD. Glad to see them go.
First, I’m fairly certain that exceeds the capability of the software.
Second, I hope to see many fewer 25 page threads. Posters are required to read threads and be aware of instructions. More and shorter threads should make that easier.
I am defining ‘Omnibus’ threads as ones with very wide topics.
An example of one would be the overarching 2020 Democratic Primary thread in Politics and Elections. Threads should, going forward, be specific in their topics.