Moderator Note
Let’s not get into personal bickering in this forum. No warnings issued, but drop it or this thread will be closed.
Colibri
The real world doesn’t work this way, and you can’t really expect a message board to work in some kind of ideal fashion that isn’t achieved anywhere else. Moderators, like cops, are more interested in keeping the peace than in perfect justice. If a lot of people are speeding, not everyone may get a ticket. This doesn’t make it unfair if in other circumstances some other people do.
Believe it or not, we don’t really enjoy handing out warnings. Once a thread has become a trainwreck, I really don’t want to go wading in with a truncheon and handing out warnings wholesale. (For one thing, that’s likely to spawn an ATMB thread questioning why “Well he didn’t get a warning, why did I?”) Once a thread is a mess, it may be better just to close it down or move it to the Pit.
I apologize, Colibri. I was in the wrong and deserved to be admonished. I’ll say no more.
No big deal. I just want to keep things from escalating since I’d prefer not to hand out warnings.
So there was a routine application of a longstanding practice but you disagree with that longstanding practice. That’s not unreasonable.
I’d say that the policy is good and reasonable. Moving a borderline rant to rant-land in order to head off further forum-inappropriate behaviour seems wise and no big deal. It’s not like the pit is stocked with Kryptonite. You are free to pontificate on science and reason even there. In fact I did.
I see little or nothing wrong here.
And I had wanted to avoid jumping in on this issue again, but this is getting silly.
No one thinks you like giving out Warnings, but they exist for a purpose, to provide consequences to unwanted actions. The problem with closing or moving threads provides is that they provide no actual consequences to the offenders. Why not go ahead and pile on the insults when you know it won’t affect you in any way?
No one expects you to hand out Warnings because you like it, but because they want there to be consequences for bad actions. I would bet money that pile ons would be less common if the fifth person in the thread thought they could just as easily be Warned.
Now, I don’t know how onerous it is to hand out Warnings, so I’ll leave that alone. It shouldn’t be more time consuming that opening each Warning link in a new tab, pasting in a boilerplate response and clicking submit, and then adding a more personal response as a post. But, with vBulletin defaults, who knows how backwards it is. But I don’t think people are expecting perfection here, just asking for consequences in places they think are warranted.
mhendo is a college teacher, if I remember correctly, so he has at least an idea of how discipline works. He knows you can’t catch everything. But I don’t think he’s asking for perfection.
Heck, I think randomly Warning a few would be better. You’d never know if you were going to be the one warned.
(All this said, I didn’t find the thread mentioned by the OP to be all that bad, really. Only a couple posts were bad enough to warrant a moderating decision. It’s the general principle I’m talking about here.)
And yet, if a cop is right there on the freeway, and a bunch of people are speeding, at least one or two of them are likely to get pulled over.
You know what the hilarious thing is? That despite twickster’s desire to move the thread, it was not a trainwreck at all. She entered the thread at post #38 to move it to the Pit. I just went through and read all of the first 37 posts, and there are maybe three or four, at most, that deserve a mod note or a warning. And i’m being particularly strict in making that evaluation; it might only be a couple deserving of intervention.
Basically, the thread was not a mess at all, and could have been controlled quite easily with admonitions to a few individuals. By moving it, she virtually guaranteed that it would become a mess.
And here’s a suggestion for threads that turn into trainwrecks with multiple rule-breakers: Instead of just throwing your hands up and letting everyone off, why not look for the first person to break the rules, and crack down on that person? Sort of like the cop who pulls over one speeder, but whose presence causes everyone else on the road to ease up on the gas.
This would have the salutary effect of both enforcing the rules, and putting in place a mechanism for discouraging people from being the first to break them. And if no-one breaks them first, then everything is more harmonious, right?
You say that attempting to hand out warnings in a trainwreck might lead to ATMB threads complaining about inconsistent moderation, but that’s exactly what you’re likely to get when you refuse to enforce the rules at all in such a thread. I present this very thread as Exhibit A.
I would argue the opposite point. While I’m not speaking for this case specifically, I wouldn’t like to see people starting inflammatory OPs or rants in MPSIMS, knowing that people can’t respond in kind. That could start a bad precedent, IMO.
It* was* random. They all got away without warnings this time. Next time, it might be some or all.
Agreed, in principle. But in this case, at least, I wouldn’t call it an inflammatory OP. Or it didn’t have to be. People’s reactions were emotional, but that wasn’t required or inevitable. There was certainly no need for it to be in the Pit for people to “respond in kind” as no one here was directly insulted, and we certainly don’t require any criticism of any group to be in the Pit. If people felt they needed the Pit rules to respond properly to that OP, they should have rethought their feelings, and probably had nothing useful to say anyway. I don’t think it’s wrong to post opinions the majority might not agree with, and I don’t think it’s necessary to insult people just because you don’t agree; we have enough of an echo chamber here already, and dissenting opinions enrich the boards. And it was about dogs, for God’s sake. It’s not like it was a rant about a religion or something.
Conceptually, fine. On these Boards, however, that would generate an immediate ATMB thread about “Why did I get one and they didn’t?” and the answer “Because you were the first” doesn’t fly. We’ve said, time and again, DON’T RESPOND IN KIND, but instead REPORT the infraction (click on the little ! in red triangle in upper right corner of post.) It would be a major policy reversal to decide to only Warn the first offender, and it would be an invitation to everyone else (“Wow! He threw the first insult, so I’ve got a free pass to insult back!”)
Then I would suggest sticking to a policy wherein everyone who breaks the rules gets warned or mod-noted.
If the purpose of mod notes and/or warnings is to deter future rule-breaking, I don’t see the advantage of throwing up your hands and saying “five or six people broke the rules rather than one or two, so there is no point in trying to prevent future pile-ons”.
[QUOTE=BigT]
What thread are you reading? He had insulted multiple people in the thread even before my comment this morning.
[/quote]
A thread in which he insulted or was insulted directly by other Dopers. twickster has mentioned already that he did not break any rules in his OP, and direct insults against another Doper are against the rules (outside the Pit).
I don’t know that, nor do you.
As you mention, he had received direct personal insults outside the Pit. I do not believe it would be a good or workable policy to say “we won’t moderate insults unless it bothers you, especially since (as samclem says) we aren’t online 24/7 so if you report an insult and we don’t get to it for a few hours, we won’t do anything about it if the insults are numerous enough”.
Regards,
Shodan
The First Law of Moderation: Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
In that thread, the first person to break the rules was clear cut, since it happened in the first post. But in other cases it isn’t. It’s easy enough to second-guess any moderation decision after the fact. I’m not sure how you can imagine your suggestion to warn the first rule breaker and no others isn’t even more likely to engender complaints about unfairness than not warning anybody.
The person who has to clean up the mess probably has a better idea of what qualifies as a mess than one who doesn’t.
In the event, handsomeharry doesn’t seem to have been bothered in the slightest by the move to the Pit, and as far as I can tell seems to be enjoying it.
Did you mean in the first reply to the OP? I thought twickster was clear in saying that the OP did not break the rule against trolling, and insulting people who are not on the boards is not against the rules AFAIK.
Regards,
Shodan
It did?
I was under the impression that we had already been told that the OP didn’t break any rules in his post.
Maybe, but not warning anyone might engender (very reasonable) complaints about fairness from people who have been warned in the past for similar behavior, and who now get to watch three or four others slide simply because they broke the rules en masse.
Given that the accumulation of warnings is one of the ways that suspensions and bannings are decided around here, it seems to me that a bit of consistency on this issue really isn’t too much to ask.
You understand, i assume, that we can go and read the actual thread in question, and see exactly how many people violated the rules? This isn’t rocket surgery here. Cleaning up that thread would have taken far less moderator time than the amount of time devoted to defending the decision in this one.
I’m sure you’re right, but again miss the point.
The point, for me, was not necessarily that it shouldn’t have been moved. I made that clear in an earlier post. The point was that people broke the rules and a moderator decided to essentially give them a pass, in part by making a post hoc decision to move the thread to the Pit. This was not helped by the fact that, in the thread itself, the reason given for the move was “so y’all can just let loose,” rather than actually explaining that the OP seemed like more of a rant than a MPSIMS post.
Also, as far as i understand the rules, the fact that the recipient of an insult might not mind it very much does not excuse throwing insults in forums where it’s not allowed. If someone calls me a name in GD, i don’t care very much. They’re only words, and i’ve got a pretty thick skin for internet flaming. But it’s still the moderators’ job to police the rule violation, whether or not i’m hurt by it.
That’s what I meant.
I beg to differ. There’s no evidence at all that the move was motivated by Twickster’s personal feelings. In fact to the contrary she stated upthread that she didn’t particularly like dogs and I see no reason to doubt her. I’m sure she was aware though that many on this board are dog-lovers and that the OP would provoke some heated replies. Hence the decision to move the thread, an eminently sensible decision in my opinion.
Tell me why someone who’s been on this board since at least 2001 would post an anti-dog thread while innocently claiming “not to be mean.” Not insulting? “Goobers”? Come on. I can’t think Twickster’s feelings had anything to do with it.
I read the discussion as getting pretty testy. It was a bad fit for MPSIMS. I suppose it could have gone to GD or IMHO. But I repeat: insults are permitted in the pit. They are not mandatory. Furthermore, a discussion of whether the OP was trolling is only permitted in the pit, and methinks that’s relevant here. (FTR, I have no opinion on that at present.)
Finally I think the thread was, at bottom, a rant. Does it fit the Pit perfectly? No. But close enough I say.
Should threads on other topics bound to produce heated debate, like Israel and Palestine, or gun control, go straight to the Pit? If not, what’s special about this thread?
If the OPs of such threads identified people who supported Isreal or Palestine as “goobers,” they probably should be.
That was not an OP designed to produce reasoned debate, even if heated, but to ridicule and denigrate people he disagreed with.