Did you read my complaint, tomndebb? I don’t give a shit if you close the thread or slap some offenders, and I SAID THAT IN THE OP. I was insulted that you posted your own sanctified opinion, and then closed the thread without giving anyone a chance to respond. You found the thread interesting enough to post your own opinion of others’ ideas … but not interesting enough to allow anyone to post their opinion of your ideas.
That’s the problem. Please address that instead of explaining irrelevancies.
Tom, you persist in failing to understand the underlying issue here.
It doesn’t matter if your addition to the thread pre-closing is as innocent as the newborn child. It’s the simple appearance of the matter, and the statement it makes about your power, regardless of your intent. The fact that you get to say ANYTHING, regardless of how seemingly innoculous, to which no one else is allowed to respond, is bound to upset some people. As I said, it smacks of simple last-wordiness.
This gets to a larger issue about which I have spent some time trying to convince some of the moderators/staff here: once you become a moderator/administrator, you cannot ignore the effect of what you do on the denizens here. Thus, you should take pains not to do things which are generally frowned upon when done by those who referee. As a teacher, if I tell a student of mine that they need to stop talking about something, that’s a part of my job. If I explain to them why I want them to stop talking, and then tell them not to answer back, that MAY be acceptable, circumstances depending. But if the student and I are in a discussion, or if the student is engaging in a class discussion, and I dump out MY opinion, and then having done so, tell everyone to shut up and don’t allow anyone in the class to respond to my comment, that’s not a good thing. The students will naturally resent my use of my power in a way to have the last word, and prevent them from comment. And that will be true even if my last word is entirely benign.
A similar situation exists when I referee soccer. Other similar situations abound.
If you have reached the point that you feel a thread needs to be terminated, simply step in and terminate the thread. Resist the impulse to add your two cents first as a regular poster. Yes, that might be a bit confining, but it will avoid hard feelings. And if you really do have some important point to make to individuals posting in the thread, you can always make that by PM/email.
It really is pretty simple: A moderator should not participate in the forum he moderates. I’m not saying that tomndebb is a venal moderator (I rather doubt this); but I can say he no longer has much credibility as a moderator, since all his mod actions almost inevitably get controverted here in this forum.
Given the nature of Great Debates, it would be easy enough to get a reputation for partiality just by moderating it, quite apart from tomndebb’s obvious enthusiasm for participating in its threads. The best solution would be to reassign him to a forum where his reputation doesn’t precede him so doggedly and where his zeal for joining in the threads is much more muted (which is to say, no joining in at all). It isn’t fair to tomndebb to keep him from threads that he clearly relishes, and it isn’t fair to the SDMB to allow compromised moderating.
Who will step up and moderate Great Debates? Who will invest the time? Read all the stupid threads? Make decisions that half the board disagrees with? Close threads without comment, and then be dragged into ATMB for doing so? Who? You?
Is tomndebb perfect? Hell no. But he does a pretty damn good job, with no pay and only gets a lot of grief. I think the rest of you should cut him some slack.
I don’t care who moderates, just that they do not take advantage of their power to post uncontested opinions. I have no issue with threads being closed, for good reasons or bad, mods have to make tough calls. I also have no problem with people both moderating and participating. The moderators here, including tomndebb, are generally quite scrupulous to clearly identify when they are modding as opposed to when they are just posting. And I’m glad that the moderators have taken on a thankless job.
But for tomndebb to read a three page thread, post his own opinion on the topic under discussion, and then immediately close the thread? Sorry, that’s just plain unethical on my planet, although as always, YMMV.
I guess you have chosen to ignore my previous response, noting, (as is clear from the timing of events–and even partially admitted in your OP), that I did not do what you so desperately wish I had done to rationalize your anger.
Again, in this instance, when I posted as a poster, I had not even read the portion of the trainwreck that caused me to subsequently close the thread. In other words, I did exactly what you are asking, already, making no further comments once I had made a Mod decision to intervene.
This time, there was a period of a quarter hour, (along with an intervening post), between the point where I posted information and where I, having read more of the thread, made a decision to close it. I think that any decision to pretend that I was getting the “last word” is forced. The next time I would guess that someone will complain that I posted an hour earlier or a day earlier and only let four posts or ten posts follow me before I closed a thread.
The only option that you would leave me is to go back and delete all my posts to any threads I subsequently close. I take your point about appearances, but there is no defense against people who go looking to be offended, even if they have to ignore the realities of time and third party actions.
Maybe I should just submit Moderating posts using the sig: Honi soit qui mal y pense
In fairness, another option would be to refrain from commenting as a poster until you’ve read the entire thread. That way, you’d know you were going to moderate something, and could do it, without participating as a poster.
I’m not sure that all forums need to follow this rule, but for something like GD, I think tomndebb is the most active moderator and enjoys posting in the forum. When he makes these types of moves, he seems to put into question his moderation vs. poster activity. And when you have the ability to have the last word and close a thread, it can annoy.
tomndebb is called out more than any other mod that I can think of on this board, but I don’t think that necessarily reflects on the quality of his moderation. It’s the blending of his moderating with his opinions, often in the same posts that cause problems.
Is this necessary in MPSIMS? Perhaps not. But I think tomndebb would be a much better mod if he were in a different forum and allowed to post away in a forum like GD in which he obviously enjoys participating in. Take away his moderating status in GD, and let another moderator decide when he crosses any line.
I think if this were the case, most would find tomndebb a rational mod on this board.
tomndebb, you should stop for just a moment and consider why people are upset at your behaviour. You keep just blowing it off with excuses and cute latin phrases. I’m not the only one saying the exact same thing.
The fact is, you posted and then closed the thread. You uncapped your electronic pen before reading the thread. You didn’t have the courtesy to take fifteen freakin’ minutes to finish the thread first to see if it should be closed. You were in a hurry to post your opinion, too much of a hurry to do your day job.
Nor was your post in any sense uncontroversial. You said:
So you think it’s fine to accuse unspecified people of “serious abuse”, to tell everyone what we need to “keep in mind”, and then not let anyone answer? You post an uncited belief, that honor killings have more to do with culture than religion (as if they can be separated in many parts of the world). An interesting thought, but totally unsupported, and quite controversial.
Now, that’s fine, you’re free to put in your two cents worth … but at least you should have the balls to let people respond before slamming the door in their faces. However, it seems you are in too much of a hurry to spend fifteen minutes finishing the thread, you have to rush to give your opinion first.
And when I protest, rather than just saying “Hey, I moved too fast, my bad”, you want to convince us how rational your position is … yeah, that’s the ticket. Claim it’s all perfectly reasonable, tell everyone in Latin that they should be ashamed to think evil of the way you moderate. Preemptive strike, good plan.
One of the reasons my post count is so low is that I try never to post until I have read everything already posted in a thread that interests me. I usually discover that anything I had thought of posting has already been said and possibly refuted. I don’t have a dog in this fight, but it seems that a moderator would be especially well advised to read to the end of the thread before chiming in.
I’m glad DSYoungEsq is here to tell Tomndebb exactly what I’ve been telling him for a while. As he told me explicitly he only listens to criticism from those he respects. As he does not respect me, it’s good that someone here that he does respect is saying the same thing.
Now for an apologia for Tomndebb.
While kimmy_gibbler’s view on it is logically sound I think it’s pretty unreasonable. There simply is nothing in it for a moderator to moderate a forum that doesn’t interest them. Online forums are not that serious. I think we take it a bit too seriously every day. This isn’t some high minded academic institution inviting scholars from around the world to come debate with our home team. This is an internet message board. Such miscarriages of justice are to be expected simply because they are kind of trivial.
I don’t even think that what this thread is complaining about are the worst of it. It’s far less obnoxious to post and then decide to close a thread than it is to make a post on the topic in direct response to someone and then moderate them in the same post. That’s dirty pool right there. Because we’re not allowed to question a moderator’s decisions, we’re also not allowed to respond to his rebuttal of our opinion.
In my view he needs to either moderate or rebut, but not both. I’m not saying he can’t do both in the same thread, or even to the same person, but don’t make it seem like you are using your moderator hat to stifle debate. Maintain civility in post 43 and make your point in post 44. How hard is that?
No one is saying Tom didn’t read the whole thread:rolleyes:, clearly he did. However, some of us read a bit, think of a good reply to a post that stands out, post- then finish reading- and maybe even post again.
