Not to put too fine a point on it, but how do you know this? When I was a mod here, there we held many discussions amongst ourselves, the nature, and participants, of which was totally unknown to the general membership. I think you’re making the— faulty—assumption that everything you see on the boards is everything there might be to know.
In evidence of my claim, I have here almost 200 e-mails from Ed in 2003 (my last full year of moderating) alone. This is a pretty significant percentage of the total number of posts he’s made over the entire history of the boards. And checking the rest of my e-mail archives, that 200 number looks pretty typical of all the other years of my service. So, there is quite a bit that happens—of which Ed is an active participant—out of sight of the general membership.
There was also a time when Ed was copied on every single piece of e-mail between the admin/mod staff. More recently, he was only copied on messages critical in nature. Ed has always, in my experience, been a quite active participant of the management of this site and holds a fairly intimate knowledge of all of the happenings and personalities here.
As he said earlier, management of the staff is his problem and there’s no reason for the membership to made cognizant of that activity. Also as he noted, customers aren’t generally kept apprised of the internal workings of the businesses they frequent. Everything here operates much as one would expect in the normal customer/business relationship.
I think we’re all in agreement on that. The question then becomes what constitutes removing one’s own anonymity. I accept the possibility that readers of this board might, if they were so inclined, deduce my real name, or I wouldn’t have made it so easy to find. Some other members, though, might choose to use a free web-based e-mail with no connection to their name, or to not make their e-mail address publicly viewable at all. If they do that, then they’re choosing to maintain their anonymity, but then, if they do that, then the mods don’t have access to their real names, either. The only situation I can see which would make any distinction between administrators and anyone else is if a person had an e-mail address linkable to their real name, but did not make that address publicly viewable (administrators (but not moderators) can view anyone’s e-mail address, publicly viewable or not). In that case, the person’s e-mail address could (and would, under Ed’s currently-proposed privacy policy) be considered confidential information, and subject to protection.
While I may be way off, your claim doesn’t despute (and in fact, the last bit supports) my claim, that Ed generally gets involved when it’s escalated to him. How many of those 200 emails were of the form “Hey, UncleBeer, I noticed something in your forum the other day” verses the form “Here’s my take on the situation you pointed me at”?
I think this is a fair description of what we’re trying to do. I drafted up a couple additions to the privacy policy intended to clarify matters and have sent them around for internal review. Once that’s done I’ll post them here.
Ed, stop knocking yourself out and trying to reinvent the wheel here. Just cruise some big-media websites and, uh, be inspired (yeah, that’s the ticket, inspired) by them.
That sounds to me like pretty much where you want to go here. If so, tweak it as necessary, run it by the Reader lawyer’s and go with it. Chuck their IP language since they don’t use the addies for troll-killing and swipe, uh, be inspired by someone else’s.
I’m sure most were of the latter variety. The people on the front lines alert you to issues; in consultation with the staff you then try to figure out a policy. I’m not sure why you find this objectionable; it’s how management works. Your earlier point seemed to be that issues don’t get on my radar until the USERS make a big stink. I assure you that’s not the case. The staff actively discusses what’s happening on the boards via e-mail; I’m CC’d on all major matters. If there’s a lag in my response usually it’s because I’m tied up with other things, not because I don’t know about it. Your impression to the contrary no doubt arises from the fact that when some major controversy arises, I’m the guy who steps in with the official response. From this you deduce: Ed only stirs himself when everybody yells and screams. Not at all; it’s just that most of what I do is behind the scenes, and doesn’t get on YOUR radar.
Ed, it’s all fair enough. My initial objection, which you had figured out right after I made it, was that the users couldn’t place their faith in a mysterious staff agreement between them and the Reader. Part of the reason why was because you’re the only one enforcing that agreement. And you don’t specifically go searching for violations. So you depend on your staff to report violations of the staff policy to you. Your staff that, publically at least, strongly supports any action taken by any administrator. So I think it was a fair conclusion to make that QED: It’s up to the users to ensure that staff misconduct gets escalated to you, just like it’s up to the customer to report a rude salesclerk to the store manager.
I’m actually glad you’re more involved than you’ve been letting on, and more involved than what I previously believed.