I like this. The rule would be “Pit the mods all you want, but don’t expect a substantive answer unless you open an ATMB thread”.
Even if the substantive answer was nothing more than “we have thought it over, and Mod X’s behavior did not rise to any level of concern. We are therefore locking this thread - go bitch about it in the Pit.”
But I don’t think the mods want to be Pitted, mostly (to be fair) because they can’t respond to Pitters with their mod hats on, and if they respond as posters, it misses the point of Pitting moderation.
I think you’re spot on with the first half. I think she used “twat” on purpose and then later, when there were outcries, figured it would be funny to give herself the little slap.
I’m going to take it a step further and suggest that the other mods were part of the original twat conspiracy. If Internal Affairs wasn’t so corrupt, there might be some justice in this case. We need a mod like Serpico.
I don’t think the mods want to be Pitted, because I don’t think most people want to be Pitted. And I think that if we could Pit mods for moderator action, many of them wouldn’t bother to read or respond. But that doesn’t really have anything to do with the reason for the rule.
At one time, all complaints about moderation were put in the Pit. That way, there was no way to have a constructive criticism, because someone else would turn it into a slam.
But the inverse is not working, either, where no complaints about the moderation go in the Pit. It just makes the pile ons and bitch fests happen in ATMB, where people have to struggle to stay within the language constraints.
This is why I have advocated the suggestion above.
Also consider, it would be one thing if the board didn’t have the Pit at all, so that kind of conversation was just not allowed on the board. Then a rule that you can’t bitch and flame about moderation would fit within the overall board rule, no bitching and flaming. But we have a forum specifically for bitching and flaming. Yet, we by fiat exclude one topic from that forum, moderation on this board. That doesn’t make sense.
A much more sensible policy is to allow bitching and flaming about board moderation in the bitching and flaming forum, but not expect it to do anything but allow people to vent. Any topics expecting the staff to actually consider them belong in ATMB, and play by ATMB rules. Then any pile-ons or whine-fests in ATMB could be moderated as well, rather than allowed to slide on the grounds that “people just need to vent”, and thus the staff just lets threads go on and on without actually responding.
Not only that, but it’s not working because, on many occasions, the moderators and administrators don’t even make substantive responses to the ATMB threads.
Either they ignore them altogether (sometimes jumping in late to say something like, “We can’t be online 24 hours a day, you know!”), or they manage to completely miss the point of the complaint. Sure, some ATMB threads have received reasonably prompt and relevant responses, but far too many hang out in the breeze for days without being addressed in any useful way.
When Ed decided that all complaints about the board would have to go in ATMB, i think that it became incumbent upon the mods and admins to address those complaints in a reasonably prompt and professional manner. No-one expects them to respond promptly and professionally to a BBQ Pit flame-fest, but if there’s a place specifically designated for complaints, and that place requires those complaints to be couched in reasonable terms, then there should also be a commitment from the mods and admins to address them in a timely and reasonable manner.
That’s why i think that Shodan’s idea would work quite well. If you want to vent about moderators, go to the Pit and rant away, but don’t expect a timely or rational response; if you want to make a genuine complaint, do it in ATMB, but make sure you’re civil about it.
In all of this, i actually think that some of the worst moderation on this board has been right here, in ATMB. Because, as quite a few people have noted, plenty of people push things too far here without being told (on an individual basis) to pull their heads in and follow the rules. And it now appears as if this is actually a moderating strategy, whereby ATMB threads are deliberately allowed to degenerate to a point where the mods feel justified in simply closing them. If the mods and admins would actually moderate this forum like they’re supposed to, then maybe the threads dealing with moderator issues would be more productive.
In all of this, i actually think that some of the worst moderation on this board has been right here, in ATMB. Because, as quite a few people have noted, plenty of people push things too far here without being told (on an individual basis) to pull their heads in and follow the rules. And it now appears as if this is actually a moderating strategy, whereby ATMB threads are deliberately allowed to degenerate to a point where the mods feel justified in simply closing them. If the mods and admins would actually moderate this forum like they’re supposed to, and actually respond to concerns with meaningful responsesthen maybe the threads dealing with moderator issues would be more productive
I was mostly kidding, guess I should have used the appropriate smiley.
But yeah, I wasn’t suggesting it was my unique and original idea (obviously, since I linked to MsWhatsit briefly mentioning it first), just that calling it Shodan’s idea, after he was the third person to bring it up in this thread, was mildly off-putting.
Anyway, I do think this would be an excellent way to deter the frequent ATMB trainwrecks, where the purported “mod bashers” and the purported “mod brown-nosers” regularly square off, with the mods largely sitting it out and apparently hoping the flames will burn themselves out when people get bored with throwing the repetitive snark at each other. Or, if things really flame up, the thread gets locked and another related thread almost invariably gets started, leading to multiple trainwrecks sprinkled about ATMB.
Just shunt all that bullshit over to the Pit, and leave ATMB for reasonable discourse regarding the board’s administration. What would be the harm in just trying it as a provisional experiment? It would be a simple matter to declare it a failure and revert back to the current state of affairs.
I encourage the admins/mods to discuss this amongst themselves and take a vote on it. I think everybody can agree that there’s some room for improvement with how grievances are both aired and handled.
I was mod noted for expressing my displeasure at something twickster said in this post. Specifically, “Flaming someone with mental health issues isn’t exactly classy behavior, either.”
Now, I have a problem with that statement for a couple of different reasons, but let’s leave that aside. The part that is relevant to this thread is that she *wasn’t * enforcing board policy when she said that. There is clearly no rule that you can’t flame posters just because they are depressed or whatever else (you can’t do elsewhere but in the Pit, obviously). It’s also not part of her moderating job to comment on what is or is not “classy behavior”. That was her own shitty, ableist opinion but since she included it in her Mod note, suddenly it’s a moderator action and I got my knuckles rapped for criticizing it.
Miller told me to take it here but I didn’t bother, because it would clearly be pissing in the wind. We have three threads to prove that twickster doesn’t give a two fucks about what anyone thinks about her job performance, and that board management doesn’t give a fuck about making her give a fuck. And my problem, again, wasn’t with her performance per se, but her snitty little aside that was clearly an expression of her own personal opinion as a poster, not a mod.
As long as mods dance back and forth across that line, they are free from criticism of any kind. You can’t complain in the Pit, and if you complain here, nothing happens.
