John. You’re right. Lots of gray area. That’s part of the problem. Mods are human, making judgements. Some calls are easy, many are difficult. But, despite comments to the contrary, mods are trying, in good faith, to warn when appropriate, make mod-notes when appropriate, and keep everything flowing as best we can.
IME, that is so not true, it’s not even funny.
Why not? I don’t see it written anywhere that it cannot be done, especially when it’s warranted.
There seems to be a strong desire on your part to get the last word (or post). So please, have at it. But you are trying to explain yourself, and in the process you are making it apparent that you can’t handle a tad of criticism.
You forced me to actually look at the posts. The last post that is linked to in SoaT’s OP was, on my display, made at 7:09 pm. Yes, Saturday, but SoaT posted this OP less than 24 ***hours ***later. Not days. Hours. (psst. today is only Monday).
So, let’s look at it from SoaT’s POV. He obviously spent some time writing the OP, not to mention finding the links and the other link he thought was solidifying his point. Subtract any time he might have slept between the two days and you have even less time between the problem post, your ruling, and the OP.
I don’t think that’s a lot of time. Especially since, as you admit, you are incapable of reading every single post.
With that said, you could have easily re-evaluated and decided it was worthy of a warning, but you chose not to. That’s your right.
But don’t for a minute tell me that you cannot do it. There is no rule against it that I’ve ever seen, and there is no Mod that would come out and smack you in public for doing it. The warning would stand, and you could come into any thread that criticized your action and justify it, just as you are doing now.
That’s ambiguity. That’s what the OP was talking about. Don’t act like you don’t see it.
I’ll get over it. Can you?
Sorry for my late arrival, but a failure in my e-mail software resulted in my not seeing this thread until just before I left for work, today, and I did not want to post in haste on the topic.
The answer to the second question is that I disagree that such actually happens. If a comment is within the existing rules and Poster A makes similar comments once a month while Poster B makes similar comments daily, Poster B is certainly more irritating to read, but issuing Warnings to Poster B for actions that would not garner Poster A a Warning, simply because Poster B is a more frequent source of such comments, is not really fair to Poster B. If the comments become actually disruptive, we have, on several occasions, enforced stricter rules on Poster B based on the disruption. I strongly suspect, however, that if we extended the rules to include all similar posts rather than simply targeting irritating posters, we would be back here in ATMB fielding questions as to why we were suddenly “making up rules.”
The answer to your first question is that whether someone is deliberately being disruptive tends to be in the eye of the beholder.
In general, I would prefer to break up fights and encourage civility rather than run about issuing Warnings like an over zealous parking meter cop. On the other hand, bright line violations cannot be ignored, and when I see them I will hand out Warnings. It is interesting that you chose the recent gun thread to raise this issue, since I actually took the time to put the other poster on notice that he was going to begin attracting much closer scrutiny over his behavior, even though he had not broken, to that point, a bright line rule.
There are a number of issues that come to play in these cases.
First, aside from bright line rules, (name calling, accusations of lying or trolling), this crowd includes a number of posters who are quite capable of sliding insults home in ways that could always be defended as “misunderstandings” of their intents or of “misinterpretations” by their targets. If we expand the bright line definitions to include more comments or types of commentrs, I can guarantee that there will soon be complaints that various posters who will have avoided crossing that line, are gaming the system. Interestingly, to me, the majority of the complaints that have been lodged against GD Moderation over the last few years have been placed by posters who are routinely saved from being Warnied only because they avoid the current bright line rule violations. (I do not include this current thread, Stranger, among those lodged by the worst violators; I said majority, not all.)
I am willing to consider an expansion of the GD rules to limit further hostility. However, I would wish to see a thorough discussion by a wide range of posters before setting any of those rules in place. For one thing, GD is, obviously, the most passionate forum aside from the Pit and I am reluctant to begin using stricter rules as an excuse to hammer posters who get caught up in the emotions of their argumenrts. If the TM feel that we need to do that and they can provide concrete bright line rules to enforce, then I will enforce them, just as I have enforced the “lying” rules that were proposed and agreed upon by the TM.
Regarding the separate issue of upgrading a Mod’s comment to a Warning after the fact: it has happened on a few occasions, but we tend to treat such events like double jeopardy where we are reluctant to go back and “re-try” the same “crime” a second time. There is also a relucrtance to allow Warnings to be decided by popular appeal, where a crowd of posters might demand a harsher punishment for an unpopular poster. By declining to upgrade Warnings by popular acclaim, we avoid that possible scenario.
Neither construction is permitted in Great Debates, based on the consensus of the TM when the issue arose a few years ago.
Since accusations of lying are always considered insults, the TM deemed that they were always to be prohibited. You can accuse another poster’s source of lying, but not the poster himself or herself. (IF Poster A quotes Senator Gargle, one may accuse Gargle of lying or one may note that what Gargle said was a lie, but one my not attribute the act of lying to the poster.)
This is a conflation of two separate situations.
All Reports are treated as separate events and are judged on their own merits, regardless who has submitted the Report or who has been Reported.
Over the course of time, it has become clear that some posters will Report posts that do not violate the rules, simply because that poster wishes to express his or her partisan displeasure or personal hostility regarding one poster or position or another. This does not have an effect on the analysis of any individual Report.
Of course, when a poster with a long history of false reports makes misleading or false accuastions against the staff in the BBQ Pit or ATMB, that poster’s long history of misrepresentation and dishonesty certainly affects the manner in which his or her public comments are treated in open discussions.
I am unaware of any occasion when a Mod has noted that any specific poster has reported any specific post.
It’s not written anywhere, and I didn’t say it was written anywhere. I said it isn’t a good idea in general and that I’m not going there. I’m saying that in one of the cases mentioned in this thread, I might have made a different decision if I’d seen some other posts. Since another mod already handled the decision, I’m not going to override my decision and his decision.
That’s not the post you and I have talked about: I said I might have changed my actions on Sunday if I’d seen a post that was made Saturday afternoon. And you seem to be implying that I’m criticizing Stranger On A Train, or suggesting that I think he waited too long to start this thread. I’m doing neither. I’m not faulting his questions, I’m just saying I’m not going to go back and revise a decision that was already made.
I didn’t say I can’t do it. I said I won’t do it here. And I explained why I think it’s a bad idea. tomndebb sums it up here:
[quote]
Once a moderator has responded to a report, particularly if a warning hasn’t been issued, I think posters deserve to know that the situation is resolved.
I guess the answer to the question of whether or not you can get over it is “no”.
I think I understand the problem here. You are having trouble communicating your point. That’s ok. Perhaps I am too. So I’ll type more slowly to get what I’ve been trying to convey to you without you changing your words to fit the situation. If you didn’t type properly, no biggie. But don’t spend time requoting my posts to defend yourself.
To wit:
See, this is your first post in this thread. What does it communicate? To me, who didn’t bother to go back and read all of the linked postings in the OP (because as I’ve said, it would be a waste of time), you said that YOU opted to make a note to Diogenes the Cynic for comments made later in that thread. YOU decided to go the lighter route. And if post #198 was reported YOU might have gone the other way. (please correct me where I’m wrong.)
Now, in this paragraph, you state that “another mod already handled the decision”. That’s not what you said in your first post. I read the first post as YOU were the one that made the call.
This next post doesn’t exactly clear up the confusion.
I interpreted the “we” in your statement to refer to mods in general. No where is it clearly stated that mod notes in this instance issued to **Dio **were issued by more than one mod.
You are not focusing. Please re-read this thread.
As far as what you are suggesting, I’ve done no such thing. I’m not implying anything about your feelings toward Stranger. I don’t sense that you are criticizing Stranger, and I’ve not stated that anywhere. I also did not come up with the scenario that the thread was started too late. You gave that impression by stating:
What does this say to you?
Notice, this statement also implies that once a decision has been made, we (meaning mods) are not going back to give warnings. How am I misreading your own words? *“The thread’s already been moderated and I think people have a right to expect we’re not going to go back and give them warnings that way. That decision’s already been made.” *That is a quote from your postings, not mine.
You are correct in saying that you never said it. You strongly implied it (see above). But **tomndebb **actually tells us that yes, it **has **happened on a few occasions.
tomndebb explained his position on the situation and that’s fine. You not giving a warning is fine too. I disagree with it, but it’s your call. All I’m saying is that when you have these types of inconsistencies, people can see it, interpret it as bias (correct or not), and get frustrated. **Stranger **called attention to it. Other people see it. That’s where the problem begins and ends with me.
I feel like I’m listening to Clinton trying to weasel his way out of perjury charges by trying to tell the grand jury “it depends on what the definition of the word “is” is.”
This comment from August of last year doesn’t quite seem to fit either description:
This comment was made to someone that I disagree with politically, so that is not the issue. I think it serves as an example of how you do let personalities affect your moderation. His reports should never have been exposed.
Your comments should be read in the complete context of the thread in order to be fair to both of you.
I don’t have anything further to say to you on this subject.
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get over. I think I’ve been reasonable in answering your questions.
That’s my fault: I hadn’t seen post #198 prior to this thread, so I also didn’t know tomndebb had written a note of his own around one page later which specifically addressed the tenor of Diogenes the Cynic’s comments. I saw that mod note earlier tonight and mentioned it in my latest post.
The sequence was this:
Diogenes the Cynic made some insulting comments in post #198 of that thread, and tomndebb responded with a mod note. Diogenes the Cynic made some borderline comments later in the thread and I responded with a mod note. Mods responded to both situations. I’m not going to issue a warning for a post tomndebb had already answered. Acknowledging I could have given a warning for the other post we talked about - ‘you’re off your meds’ is rude - I don’t see a reason to revise the decision now.
And I didn’t say it hadn’t happened, but I haven’t seen it. tomndebb has been moderating here for almost five years, so if it’s happened on a few occasions, it’s very rare. The initial call could have gone either way, but I don’t see a compelling reason to change it. Could I have responded differently? Yes, it could have gone either way. Do I need to go back and change it? I don’t see a reason.
If you’re going to accuse people of weaseling and lying in response to your questions, you’re not going to get answers to your questions.
c’mon. I didn’t call anyone a liar, and I only accused Clinton of weaseling.
I think I laid out my frustration in my last post. I think you understood (finally) where I was coming from.
I’m done here.
It fits it exactly. In a Pit thread on a different topic, a poster attacked the staff on the grounds that they reported posts for which we took no action. This was in a public discussion in the Pit where I had made a completely different observation, prompting the attack. I was wrong to respond as I did, but the case remains that individual Reports are judged on their own merits and I was explicitly commenting on the value of his Pit comments in light of the cumulative effect of his reporting behavior and his personal attacks in the Pit.
And yet, I was not acting in my Moderator capacity in that exchange and I revealed no specific Report that he has ever submitted, while you continue to pretend that it is a demonstration of my actions as a Mod. I have repeatedly asked for actual citations for where personal views have interfered with my Modding and have repeatedly been taken to task for posts I made as a poster in fora I do not Moderate.
I agree. Do so.
How about Dio’s weasel-wording which (in essence) said:
“People who believe XYZ are a pile of rubbish. O golly! People in this thread believe that? Jeepers!”
Stranger’s right. There are posters who get more breaks than others, and posters who get fewer. Dio is one of them. Der Trihs is another. Some people say that I’m one, but the fact that I was suspended over the piddliest of shit is some evidence to the contrary.
In any case, I do agree with Stink Fish Pot about one point especially (and I also agree with him generally), and that is that there are times — really, too many times — when warnings or cautions or mod intervention of some kind examine only the contextual material. To take a familiar example (me), my suspension occured when TubaDiva got wind of a pile-on in progress in aisle 9 (of the Pit).
(I know there is at least one user guest who doesn’t like me talking about this story, but I don’t care. So…)
She did not bother to check my actual post, but instead took her reports and her cursory look at a few posts that themselves mistrepresented my own, and then sent me an e-mail. Keep in mind, here, that Tuba has before pardoned herself from her duties by saying that she was away or just didn’t check her email when it involved people emailing her to get things done. So, with that in mind, she sent me an email. I use my Yahoo address here. I check it once in a blue moon. In fact, I think the only reason I got the account was to register here.
So she sent me an email to this address, and it just so happened to be right around one of those times that I checked Yahoo. Her email to me was not even quite one day old. It was an email spelling out that there were mods (or admins or whatever) reviewing my membership status, and that I needed to respond “quickly”. I responded to her within 24 hours — a far superior response time than she herself has admitted to having. And yet. Get this. She told me that because I did not respond soon enough, she had no choice but to suspend me.
A Southern Gentleman of less grace than I would have wanted to smack some “Hello!” into her. She never even read my post. She only read ABOUT my post. It was the famous one about an off-hand, practically parenthetical implication that the doctor who was my nut-case GP at the time told me that he thought it would be a miracle if I made it past two years. She enforced an ad hoc rule formulated by an ad hoc committee. There had never before (or since) been a rule against mentioning facts about one’s health or medical prognosis. Lynn Bodoni has recently done it, in fact.
That was about five or seven years ago. My new team of physicians (put together, incidentally, by my wife) is each an outstanding member of his peer group. My psychiatrist has written several peer review articles, and is currently seeking a private grant to pursue his hypothesis that a vitiman B6 deficiency can cause mild depression. These are doctorates from Duke University, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard. It’s an absolutely crack team.
So, I know what is (and was) wrong with me. I’m becoming much healthier now. I’ve lost 80 pounds, and still losing. (No fancy diet. I just eat what I like, except less of it. And I just do chores around the house and yard for “exercise”.)
What was wrong with me (among other things) was anxiety. (Yes, it is a *medical *condition.) My anxiety, combined with my pariticular kind of OCD, led me to take matters far too seriously and try to fight my way out of every pile-on. It was this constant fighting, even against people who were trying to help me, that left me with reputations like “martyr”, or “drama queen”, and so on.
So anyway, the point is that what Tuba et al judged was not what I actually did — which was nothing different from the same philosophical principle I have espoused since my arrival here ten years ago. And that is that the universe is not real, and therefore nothing to fret about existentially. If one’s body is dying, then it does not mean that his essence is dying as well.
I tried to reason with her, but she was Bush-esque with her stuck-in-the-mud mode, standing firm and unbendable, unwilling to change her mind once a decision was made.
Despite the fact that I had a good time during my suspension, and now with my meds I won’t draw pile-ons, and therefore won’t create the situation Stink Fish Pot is describing right now ever again, in all likelihood. So I have a very different perspective now on a lot of things than I had then. But that perspective remains: warnings, cautions, suspensions, and maybe even bans are sometimes the result of seeing a few posts in a shitstorm, rather than the whole backstory of the thread.
You can’t read all the threads, you say? Well, I recommend that you read at least the ones containing posts that are brought to your attention that happen also to be ones in which you are going to issue cautions and warnings. And if you can’t do that, then either you shouldn’t have volunteered to moderate or else you need more moderators. Stink Fish Pot is right. You shouldn’t apply your demerit scheme, whatever it may be, to posts about posts or to rumors or PMs or reported posts. Don’t suspend Mr. Smith just because there are people coming toward the mission waving torches and shouting things.
When warnings and suspension are involved, you should exmaine the facts, not the rumors. You should read the goddam thread, and that’s all I have to say about that.
Moderation around here is totally fucking capricious. Some poor downtrodden mod has a bad day and next thing you know they’re pissing in someone’s cornflakes.
Or you could just put it like that.
The last 3 posts were fantastic 
One of the posters in question is at it again. In [post=11830612]this post[/post], Diogenes the Cynic makes a statement that is so far beyond the pale, so intentionally, determinedly incendiary that it can only be interpreted as a blatant act of trolling for reactions. And yet, despite active participation in the thread by one moderator, not a single admonishment has been made regarding this statement or the poster who delivered it. Not a single word toward, “Hey, might not be appropriate, maybe you shouldn’t say things like, ‘The cops just had it coming,’ just f.y.i. Thanks, Mngmnt.” Seriously? And it isn’t as if behaving like this in a consistent, goading, and yes trolling manner isn’t a bannable offense, as stated [post=7697084]here[/post].
There is really no reason that this sort of behavior should be tolerated and continue unabated. If the moderation doesn’t make some serious effort to control, constrain, or waving hands and making ominous sounds as dire and problematic as it may be, suspend the individual in question until he can behave in polite society and not crap his way through every thread, I’m just going to start responding in complementary manner.
Stranger
If you want to teach your dog to stop shitting on the carpet, you’re supposed to rub his nose in it immediately. If you do it afterwards he doesn’t learn anything, and he’ll still rub shit on your new jeans.
I was on board with the rest of your rant but… that’s in the Pit. In any case, you are misquoting him.
It started in MPSIMS, migrated over to Great Debates, and then was relegated to The Pit without a single moderator popping up and making even the briefest note other than to pass off this skid-marked thread like a veritable hot potato.
Stranger
I agree, I think the thread should have been moderated like a normal thread in Great Debates. It should not have just been tossed into the trash, where it could turn into a free-for-all. I think there was a legitimate topic to be discussed there, even if emotion was running high (including my own.)