Me being banned or not really says nothing to the substance of my post, one isn’t proof or disproof of the other. It’s entirely possible that my opinion that the moderation staff is disinterested in the future of the board and overly focused on rules that add no value to anyone’s experience here is correct; me being banned or not banned is immaterial to whether that is true or not.
I also was not being hostile or posting “Pit Style” (a forum I have perma muted and do not post in specifically due to its poor moderation.) I made no personal attacks against anyone, I did criticize the moderation itself. You can regulate my ability to do those things, but I am not required to agree with your opinions on the motivations or nature of my own words.
FWIW I don’t have a personal issue with any moderator, never have. I think this is a forum that is just very outdated in how it is ran and that has caused it to slowly atrophy away. At one time it was one of the best discussion forums on the internet. I’ve seen the moderation staff come and go over the years, and none of the current staff is really responsible for the weird out of date cultural norms that govern the silly over moderation, but I do suspect that due to groupthink and inertia you’re all functionally powerless to improve. Which is sad. I’ve been able to tell my time here likely is coming to a close for months now, and I think I’ve posted here something like 17 years. I do feel bad for the community of people who are a lot more heavily invested in this place than I am as to its future.
I don’t know, maybe do the job he volunteered for instead of deciding it’s just too hard? All the posters that participated in that thread put time and effort into it. Nice to know that matters not a bit compared to how hard something is for a mod.
Tell you what. Why don’t you give us a list of the top 10 threads that were disappeared and then successfully restarted and ran for months? Shouldn’t be too hard for you, the way you just handwaved away the problem.
I also agree with Martin_Hyde , it’s just silly the way socks are over reacted to. Just quietly ban the sock and leave the rest of the thread alone. I’m pretty sure most of us would be able to live with participating in an interesting thread started by a sock.
As far as I know, “fix problems caused by software glitches” is not actually in their job description.
As you say, they are volunteers. They choose to give up their personal free time to manage this message board. It may be a job, in a sense, but is one they get no payment or benefit from other than getting to help maintain a site they love.
It’s almost certainly a lot more work for to try and fix a thread that got nuked than it was for any individual in that thread to write their post. It almost certainly isn’t as easy as just moving the thread back from the cornfielded forum, but would require actually sorting through, finding all the posts, while leaving out the trolling stuff.
And that, BTW, is the point of the sock thing. We’re not talking someone who accidentally used a second login. We’re talking banned posters who came back to stir up trouble. The last thing we want to do is encourage them to post here.
As I said, I think deleting the thread is a bad call. But @What_Exit indicates this was unintentional, caused by a glitch. And, as @Czarcasm says, there are several other threads on the topic which contain the same information, and any of us could start a new thread if we think anything really important was lost.
All else equal, I’d prefer the thread be restored. But it’s not that important. And I don’t think telling mods they are petty, don’t care about this message board, or won’t do their jobs is a proportional response.
I’ve never before seen it stated that profanity is only used in the Pit on these forums. The Pit’s primary differentiator had always been that it allowed direct personal attacks, while the rest of the forum was intended to require “attacking the argument.”
If I said purely as a hypothetical “Mod_01 is a big dummy” that would be a personal attack. If I say that the board’s moderation is poor, that is not a personal attack. It is not a) direct address and b) it is not insulting the individual, it is criticizing their actions, words and behavior–specifically in this instance as a collective group, so it’s even further removed from anyone individually.
Certainly, my phrasing was not polite, but I’ve never known the forums to require that. Saying the staff don’t care about the future of the board, and are focused too much on petty moderation is a critique of their behavior, which is what many ATMB threads are concerned with.
I 100% agree that once lots of content was accidentally purged out due to some problem with the board software, it’s not reasonable to expect @What_Exit to do some crazy time intensive thing to try and fix it. What I’m saying is the actual behavior of trying to cornfield the sock posts in the first place is unnecessary. If an individual post is something that clearly shouldn’t be left up–say it has racial slurs or something else, delete that post, but every post by a sock being deleted isn’t a necessary thing nor does it meaningfully help anyone, and when it results in overzealous deletion of large amounts of other people’s posts it shouldn’t really be done. As I said this weird sock fanaticism has every sign of just being something someone randomly decided we needed as a community 15+ years ago, and the current mods have just continued because the community itself is so ancient and inflexible in its views no one can realize it’s entirely wasted effort that, if anything, likely is net detrimental to the board by creating threads that are sometimes hard to read and missing huge chunks of content.
How has that been working for the past twenty-odd years? Seems like a failed tactic to me. Hiding posts is just another form of attention. I’ve said before that the socks and the sock-hunters are a community unto themselves here, and I haven’t seen anything that changes my thinking on that. As long as that game continues, no other encouragement or discouragement really matters.
I’m pretty sure deleting threads that they think are too hard to deal with isn’t in their job description either.
This tired old explanation gets trotted out in a lot of threads, and it’s bogus. They know the job going in and nobody forced them into it. If they can’t put in the time maybe they shouldn’t have volunteered in the first place. From what little the mods have shared with us about their workload it doesn’t seem too onerous. I believe it was 5-10 flags a day spread out amongst all the mods. So unless they are busy banning dozens of socks, trolls and spammers every day, or doing some double-secret modding, I would think they can find the time. Also, the situation in question doesn’t seem like something that required immediate action, no reason it couldn’t have waited until someone had time.
Gotta agree with this. Stop making such a big deal about socks and trolls. Just ban them and make no announcement. If someone really needs to know anything further have then message a mod.
Also, if @What_Exit doesn’t mind elaborating on the glitch, can you tell us a bit more about what happened? Why were those particular three threads effected?
When we move posts out we have a select tool.
The options are Select, Select + Replies, and Select + Below.
For some reason the other night, in at least 3 threads, using this tool caused the entire thread to be taken for the move and the thread closed and auto-set to delete in 7 days. I don’t know why this happened. It has never happened before and I’ve done this enough times over the past year where if it was likely to happen, it should have before.
I did catch 2 of the 3 known threads where this happened. One was a small thread and easy to restore. The other was the one this OP is about and it was 200+ posts buried into the cornfield thread and would have taken a lot to undo.
When I saw it was started by a troll and revived by the sock I was eliminating I decided to leave it gone. It had had other socks in it also.
At this point if I could untangle the mess, it would take hours and I am not willing to try.
I will be a lot more careful though in the future with the select and move function, as this isn’t a feature but a bug without question.
The medium size thread I had missed (PC Games) took a fair amount of work but that was relatively simple. Almost no one had replied to the sock at all in this one. The posts were all fairly obviously for the thread in question.
Then it is really confusing with the KennyT thread (or rather post. the thread is closed so can’t reply there). If the goal of the Board is to wipe away all remnants of a sock/troll, then why did you post his troll post to be memorialized forever?
He was just banned, suspended forever technically and title changed to BANNED. Nothing else was done. Does the same thing happen with other banned posters?
Were you able to see his profile card before he was banned? Maybe he has it hidden?
Give me a minute and I’ll have a reply …
I can’t find the Email or Message, but us newer mods were told to cornfield sock posts if under a certain number. I don’t want to state the number for obvious reasons I think. We were never told to cornfield all of a troll’s posts. We don’t generally do so.
And now it’s working again. I’m guessing there’s a lag between when you set the flags for the account and when the job to implement those flags runs, and I just caught it in-between, while it was in some sort of limbo.
OK, cool. To be honest what I don’t know about Discourse has to be significantly more than what I do know. Especially when we throw in the updates that happen and occasionally change how things work.
I knew vB a lot better having done admin work on a vB board.
I realize that since you were on the inside of this, what happened was perfectly clear to you, but reading this thread was pretty confusing for some of us on the outside. I’m still not 100% clear on what happened.
I think what you’re saying happened is that you Banned a user as a sock, then followed SOP to delete their posts. Due to a software glitch, that accidentally resulted in three entire threads being deleted. You realized that had happened. One thread was short and without significant content, so you didn’t try to do anything about that. One thread was moderately long and had significant non-sock content, so you put in the effort to recover and restore it. The “Is there…” thread was long, and would have required a lot of work to recover and restore, which you didn’t do.
Is that all right?
If so…honestly, I’m a bit concerned by that. I get that Mod is a volunteer position, and if it would really have taken hours to recover and restore the “Is there…” thread, I can understand letting it go. But, frankly, you seem to be pretty cavalier in this thread about it. It was a pretty lengthy thread, and I made a number of posts in it, which admittedly makes this kind of personal to me. Again, I get it that it might well be more work than it’s worth to recover and restore the thread. But your comments to the effect that it was started by a sock and bumped by a sock, so it’s no loss, is disconcerting to me. It feels like my contributions are being waved off as worthless. I realize that’s not what you’re actually saying, but it’s the impression I’m getting.
It’d be one thing to make an announcement, “There was a software glitch, the entire thread was accidentally deleted, and it would take unreasonable amount of work to recover and restore it, and it might not even be possible. Sorry to everyone involved who’s comments were made in good faith and accidentally deleted”. It’s quite another to read in this thread that you don’t even seem to be concerned that anyone else was accidentally caught in the crossfire.