Poor quality thread splitting and confusing moderation

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1

This thread:
I use Roundup - In My Humble Opinion (IMHO) - Straight Dope Message Board

created as a split from this:

Is fairly poor / terrible moderation. OP (who is a mod), asks about how to weed eat some patio pavers, fair enough. Nothing in OP indicates he is interested in a non-herbicide solution. He later comes back after some people mention glyphosate and says he considers it borderline threadshitting to mention glyphosate because it was “obvious” he was avoiding using weed killer from OP (it was not until he edited it.) He basically says at that point no more talk of glyphosate in the thread, and then adds in a dig where he adds his own editorial opinions on glyphosate (while then closing it to further discussion in that thread.)

Zero issue with him, as OP of his own thread, saying “I meant for this to be herbicide free, I’m clarifying that, and don’t want further herbicide discussion.” I do take issue with him getting his own opinion-laden dig in about glyphosate in the process, that’s poor form for a moderator. Even that is mostly a “whatever” thing. Certainly not the first time or the last time a moderator will do that on these forums (where, as we are frequently reminded–we have no say in anything.)

I do take issue with the fact he just split off all the herbicide comments in a weird / confusing way, into a new thread, with a weird / stupid OP now. I’m not even sure the forum was that interested in a debate about glyphosate, but if they were a more elegant solution would have been to embargo further glyphosate discussion in that thread, and invite anyone who wanted to discuss it to go create their own thread. That way an OP could take time to craft an actual appropriate thread title and opening post about glyphosate, instead of what looks like a thread title from a fourth grader “I use Roundup” and a post that makes no sense as an OP (because it wasn’t one originally.) The “retconning” of the thread now creates two confusing and bad threads, and frankly seems like the actions of a mod that got annoyed at his own mistakes in creating an OP incorrectly worded and annoyed by poster comments, and did some hasty and poor quality thread manipulation. There isn’t really anything to rectify, but I think you can do better, and should, in the future.

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You are correct and I should have wrote my OP better.

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I think there is one thing that could be done to make things better.

Edit the new thread’s title to mention it’s a spinoff thread, and add one of those nifty mod comments to explain context, including a link to the original thread.

It still has the issue that people seem to be replying to posts that aren’t there, but at least people will know where to check.

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The link is there of course, it is an actual split-off. But I added a staff-note and updated the title.

5

I feel it’s bad form to use moderator powers when posting as a regular user. That includes editing a post after the regular timer expires (no idea if that happened here, since I can’t see the times). And also includes moderating one’s own posts or threads. The potential for conflict of interest is the problem, even if the moderator is being fair.

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I’m overall satisfied with @What_Exit’s response to this situation. I don’t really mind them editing a post after the normal edit window expires, that seems like a fairly innocuous minor perk of being a moderator not something abusive. I also don’t think it’s untenable for them to moderate their own threads as long as they follow the norms of moderating when they do so.

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Not my best moment. But hopefully resolved now.
The post I cleared out, was within 12 minutes of making it, so something any user could do.

Changing the title is something I do for other posters all the time. I think that is quite reasonable to do for myself.

8

I will say that the criticism in the OP is warranted. And I’m also glad this was just an honest mistake from a mod, one that was corrected.

Great advice, and it will probably help avoid a similar problem in the future.

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Will sand do the job, is there something better to use?

Yeah, obvious you’re excluding herbicides.

And I concur that a mod should not use mod powers over their own post/thread.