After three pages of somewhat interesting stuff interspersed with the usual nonsense, tomndebb chimes in with his latest version of his generic “nobody’s really at fault, there’s no difference between religions, and besides, religions are not the problem” post, viz:
After that, the thread had a very short life:
Next Post:
Final post:
Look, tomndebb, I always enjoy reading your posts, they are almost always caricatures of your point of view, and good for a laugh. And as a moderator, you have the right to post, and the right to close a thread.
But posting, and then immediately closing the thread so no one has a chance to reply to you is … well … let me call it “unethical” in lieu of a harsher judgement. If you want to post, post. If you want to close the thread, close it.
But don’t post and then immediately close the thread before anyone can call you on your nonsense. That’s not right.
Tomndebb does that a lot. It drives me nuts when he tells you to stop a line of discussion but then pontificates from the bench about his opinion of what you said. Either you’re trying to stop hostility or you’re joining in the argument. It can’t be both.
He needs to learn to separate his moderation from his identity as a poster a little bit better. I do not notice any of the other mods having this problem.
I like him most times, but he straddles the fence too much. Instead of saying that a certain poster or group of posters are getting carried away, he tends to scold everyone, like everyone is equally getting carried away. It’s his way of being fair but it actually isn’t.
Nonsense, he makes no attempt to be fair at all. He comes in and clearly stakes some ground and then tells everyone who disagrees with his take to shutup. He’s the least fair moderator on this message board.
Modding is hard work–you gotta read a lotta stupid posts, make a bunch of judgment calls, remember what the rules are de facto and de jure, make yourself available to consult on all sorts of modding issues. Takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of thought.
Modding is unpaid. Monetarily.
But 3) Ed is able to offer non-monetary incentives. I think Tom agreed to mod GD if and only if he was permitted to do this quick-change act, the “now I’m a Mod/ now I’m a poster/ now I’m a dessert topping/ and ta-da! now I’m the all-powerful Mod again” routine.
Which is to say that complaining about this marked tendency of Tom’s is like–ah, well, you might as well try and catch the wind.
This is what I was going to say. Why can’t he just warn the people who are breaking the rules and leave the thread open? Why kill the whole discussion because a few people are being assholes? Unilaterally closing a thread with a blanket but non-specific smackdown teaches no one anything, just ends a conversation that might interest people if the signal-to-noise ratio were improved by a little judicious moderation.
Every time that someone complains that Tom has shut down a thread after giving himself the final say I check out the thread. Every time I find that Tom wasn’t advancing any argument of his own at all and his final post was as a moderator, giving reasons for closing the thread.
It’s pointless to say that somehow one has been denied the right of reply. Such a reply would clearly involve questioning Tom’s action as a moderator and thus by the rules would have to be dealt with in ATMB anyway.
Possibly because coming in to a lengthy train wreck thread to figure out who did what to whom first is a pain in the ass. You warn one guy, and he waves the “I wasn’t as bad as the other guy” flag. You parse the thread and warn half the participants and you spend way too much time on bullshit. Easiest and most efficient thing to do is just lock the thread.
I think you parse the thread BEFORE you comment on anything, first of all. You can warn half a dozen people in one post if you need to (though I doubt you’d need to), and have done with it. I’m not sure why that’s so onerous a task. They want people to report threads where rules are being broken, but if that means an otherwise interesting thread is going to be locked, that’s a disincentive to reporting the offending behavior until it’s a complete disaster, no? I think tomndebb is a smart guy and can easily figure out who is screwing up a thread, and handle it. Sure, it’s easier to close the thread, but is it really that much harder to read carefully and compose one post to remedy the situation?
From a mod point of view, the issue is not so much difficulty as it is time. Mods are not full time board employees with nothing better to do. They are volunteers, and may well be modding between calls at work, or otherwise in a situation where they can’t spend 30 minutes reading a thread, and another 30 minutes passing out warnings. You stamp out the flames and move on.
And therein lies the problem. He participates in the debate from the shield of moderation as though being a moderator somehow makes his opinion loftier than it is. For me personally I just think he shouldn’t offer an opinion on ANYTHING but civility when he has his moderator hat on. How hard is it to make two posts?
He had time to read, compose a post containing his opinion on the subject, then read some more, and shut the thread down. Why not just read the whole thread, write your post wherein you dole out your modding, and have done with it? I’m not getting what’s so incredibly time consuming about that. It does deny you that opportunity to vent your own spleen in the thread, but that’s the downside of being a mod in the thread that requires moderation.
The point of closing the thread is not to punish anyone, but to simply break the cycle of anger so that any further discussion can take place without current posters repeatedly chimimg in with angry references to ancient posts, (or the ever popular, “the Mod told me I can’t talk about this topic”), or new posters to the thread taking sides in an earlier spat and re-opening wounds. In the thread in question, there were three separate feuds fgetting personal and I saw no reason to let that turn into a general conflagration. I suspect that most posters in those threads are quite confident that they are inocent of all error and that the Warnings I would be handing out would fall only on their opponents. I suspect that that would not really be the case.
I find it intersting, and a bit amusing, that several posters saying I should just slap “offenders” and leave the thread alone have been reported in this or similar instances in other threads.
I am operating on the assumption that people get emotional and occasionally let their tempers carry them a bit too far. I see no reason to hand out Warnings for mistakes, as opposed to flagrant rules violations. My intention is to keep the discussions sufficiently civil that they do not erupt into major flame wars that carry on from one thread to another.
Nothing prevents anyone from opening a new thread on the same topic with a link to the old thread.
That’s the thing. That’s why this thread is so weird. You actually invited people to restart the topic, but without the Pit-like ad hominem and assumptions about motive and that kind of crap. That’s not what Great Debates is even for. Looking over that trainwreck of a thread, it wasn’t, as some claim, a “heated” discussion. It was one insulting post after another, and pulling off in three separate directions. It needed to be closed because the behavior (I honestly can’t think of a more appropriate word) needed to be stopped.
This is the second time within a few months that this exact same behavior has come up for discussion here.
I have opined before that it is a bad idea for a moderator to close a thread or shut off a topic AFTER taking the time to offer his/her own personal opinion into the mix as a regular poster. It gives off the impression of last-wordism. In almost no such case is the contribution of the moderator-cum-poster of vital, earth-shaking importance on the topic, so it could just as easily be left unsaid.
I repeat that I think this should be the way things are handled. The fact that the issue has come up twice in recent memory supports my assertion that it does not help matters to take such an action.
OTOH, having posted in response to a series of posts part way into the thread, (posts submitted before the nasty personal shots really got under way), your solution offers me only the options of failing to deal with the trainwreck or going back and erasing my last post.
I suppose I could delete my post, but I see no reason to do so.
In the last instance, I made a totally neutral GQ/Straight Dope observation that did not bear on any of the anger in the thread. In this case, I posted another GQ/Straight Dope observation, although one closer to the actual core of the topic, at the time I encountered the posts that prompted my remarks, then, a quarter hour later, after finishing reading the thread, (indeed, after at least one other post had been submitted), I made a Mod call. To describe either situation as one in which I was having the “last word” and then slamming shut the thread is odd. To describe this thread in that way, when I was not even the penultimate poster, is beyond odd.