’ Cause it’s fun.
= = =
And the board is for people, not electronic spam efforts.
I understand the arguments against mods judging the quality of threads and shutting them down on the basis of arbitrary subjective judgments of content quality. I can’t comment on the Silver Lining thread that BPC cites because I haven’t seen it and don’t propose to waste time on it, but I just want to say that in general BPC does have a point with regard to the quoted comment from Jonathan Chance, who also said “Just because you don’t like their style doesn’t mean they should be shut down. If we were to sanction people based on style each of the three of us would issue 20 warnings or more per day and Great Debates would be a ghost town.” That remark was made in the context of the moon landing hoax thread which is now vanished into the cornfield and is no longer here to serve as an example, but the subject matter should suffice to indicate the quality level.
The salient point here is that posting idiocy is not a matter of “style”. At some point an attempt to start a debate is so obviously stupid that intervention is clearly required if GD is not to turn into a garbage dump resembling the sorts of places that people come to the SDMB to get away from, not to wallow in. Threads have been closed here many times as simply not legitimate debates, or simply because the poster never brought a real argument to bear on the topic. This one combined both of those deficiencies, yet it was not only allowed to continue, we were all cautioned like six-year-old first-graders to be “on our best behavior”. That’s not only an inappropriate attitude to members of this community who are mostly mature adults, it’s like being asked to please wear white-tie formal dress when attending a dumpster fire.
JC has previously jumped in early in similar nonsense threads to rule that they are “witnessing” and therefore allowable, and none of those threads in my experience has ever ended well. I’ve never understood why “witnessing” gets a special dispensation here. AFAIK every one of the threads that JC has allowed as “witnessing” recently was of such outstanding quality that it quickly turned into a train wreck or a dumpster fire – chose your metaphor – and was closed sooner or later, usually sooner. The moon landing hoax one was disappeared entirely.
I think this should be looked at in the context of the question that TubaDiva raised regarding the future of this board. If we want it to be a more welcoming place for the kinds of intelligent discussions that most of us want to have, we should be encouraging that kind of environment and that kind of poster and actively discouraging the opposite. It’s fine to have controversial ideas and strong disagreements. It’s even fine to advance fringe ideas for debate in good faith. It’s not fine to have garbage and trolling, and allowing the latter when it’s sufficiently extreme is neither open-minded or tolerant, nor is it a matter of “style”. Moderators should be able to tell the difference between a legitimate discussion and a dumpster fire and they should act on it.
I agree it’s not fine to have garbage and trolling. We kill that with impunity.
Oh, does that mean things are changing? Because that would be nice. 
At the moment, you react to “trolling” the way I reacted to the first person to post “Goatse” on a forum I ran - “Huh, what’s this weird picture? Hey, sorry dude, we don’t allow porn here.” Ah, to not understand that some people are just awful (and to be 12).
You guys are kind of notoriously bad at detecting trolling. Clothahump was here for 18 years - his membership was old enough to vote (presumably for a racist). I’m not gonna name any current names, but… You guys could afford to get better at spotting that.
Yeah. It’s very simple: if you think the sea lion in this comic is being “civil and respectful”, then there is nothing more that we can say to the mods here. [Yes, it’s just one of several common troll behaviors which appear to be reasonable on the surface of things, until you deign to take a closer look.]
True, but there’s still some evidence that it happened. There’ll be police reports, witnesses, and bruises on the victim. The community can look at that evidence and decide if justice was served, and modify their own behavior to not exceed what’s allowed. But if someone’s arrested and there’s no report, no victim, no witnesses, and just a jailer saying “he was naughty”, that’s a bit different.
Touché.
I don’t think we are bad at detecting trolling. I think we are reluctant to act on it. There’s lots of regular posters who I believe do this. From newbies it’s easy to see, but I’m not sure you or I want to go down the path where the moderation is much more heavy handed. Because that’s what it would take - we’d need to intercede more often, in more edge cases, and we’d get some wrong too.
The positive impact of interceding more are a board with less crap to deal with. The negative impact is that posters that may add value will get caught in that net and we’d lose them.
I don’t want to lose people and ignoring crap is trivially easy. As a result it seems the optimal choice is to err on the side of caution and exercise forbearance. The ones who have no redeeming value too the board make themselves apparent in time.
Yeah, we call those “warnings” around here. I’m not sure why you think we should destroy our record of someone’s rule breaking if the rule breaking isn’t publicly visible. We still need to keep track of who around here can’t follow the rules.
Yes, but we users need to keep track of what behavior can be tolerated and whether we think the board is being fairly moderated. If you sweep all evidence of the crime under the rug, but leave the punishment, we can’t do that.
And suppose I insult another poster in a thread, but the thread is deleted before that other poster reads what I wrote. I don’t see what harm I’ve caused. All we have here are words. Deleting a thread so that no trace remains is rather like having a time machine would be in the real world. If you could go back in time and prevent a crime from happening, would you still punish the person who would have committed it in the alternate timeline?
And I’m not saying you should destroy the records or warnings, I just don’t think it’s cut-and-dried that you shouldn’t.
Are there “admin files” here as well? … I’ve seen those used on other boards with very beneficial results … this helps focus on the folks who constantly test the limits … they don’t always get notes or warnings, the admin file keeps track of the near misses and allows moderators to pounce even if the breach wasn’t deserving a note …
IIRC those posts are in the mod-only cornfield subforum. Tho they often delete entire threads completely too.
When we announce a suspension or a banning, we generally link to the warnings that prompted the action. While a warning in a deleted thread would not be visible to a regular poster, I can’t recall any case in which such a warning was the deciding factor in a suspension or a banning.
It doesn’t matter if the other poster has seen it; if anybody else has seen it, they know you’ve insulted him. So unless we had a way to erase the memory of everyone who has seen it harm has been done to the insulted poster.
One of the purposes of a record of warnings is to identify patterns of behavior by a poster. If a poster is prone to insulting others, the fact that he did so in a deleted thread is still relevant.
Actually, we can’t delete the record of a warning. We can reverse warnings, but the record of the original warning still remains. This includes those in deleted threads (which, except in exceptional cases, are not actually deleted from the board, just moved out of view.)
We maintain a record of official warnings. Moderator notes are not tracked in any formal way. However, I won’t say that they have no effect. For example, I will generally issue mod notes for the first few infractions by a newbie and tell them to cut it out. However, if they ignore those and keep it up I will escalate to a warning.
We are well aware of posters who habitually go right up to the line without crossing it. However, disciplinary actions are taken on the basis of actual warnings, not "pouncing if the breach wasn’t deserving a note.::dubious:
There’s a really excellent candidate of exactly what I’m talking about in this thread going on in Great Debates right now, in case anyone is wondering.
Maybe we can get a Vulcan on the staff so he divine who is a real troll and who is just asking questions…