Yes. I don’t even know why we have any forums besides the Pit. If you don’t like insults just go to your fainting couch, wimps.
Why don’t you just move it to the Pit? lol.
It would have been easy to keep the discussion civil, maintain thread in the original forum. If posters acted out of line in the thread they should have been dealt with.
Moving the thread to another forum on behalf of abusive posters and those that want to pile on, is ridiculous - a snooty power-play, misuse of administrative controls.
Is this really the way you think this should have been handled, Marley? Please say it isn’t so.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that we (the members) are fully capable of following rules and expressing ourselves, and our feelings, without resorting to 4 letter words and personal insults. Even in “Ask your City Bureaucrat” type threads. (and they score higher than Congressmen in pit worthiness)
I’m not criticizing the move other than to point out that the OP probably would not have posted the thread if he thought it was headed for the pit.
I think the OP posted that thread to get exactly the responses he was(and is) getting.
The OP of that thread doesn’t sound like an awesome guy, but I don’t believe he was trolling as you suggest.
I think there were multiple ways to handle this. The move wasn’t inappropriate, but it could’ve waited.
Dressing up a minor complaint in business-speak and speculation about someone’s attitude doesn’t make the complaint more substantive, nor does it address the issue. The issue here is whether the thread was headed for the Pit because of the subject, the commentary about what the OP does for a living, and the OP’s attitude toward people who objected to phone surveys. It’s not unreasonable to think the thread was going in that direction and was going to be moved to the Pit anyway, but it hadn’t fully gone there yet and probably could’ve been moderated for a while longer in MPSIMS first.
I don’t think I made anything up. I inferred her actual intentions, which I believe to be different from those she stated having observed her behavior over the last few years.
I’m not going to lose sleep over it, I just think it’s incredibly silly.
No one is making up reasons why Lynn Bodoni moved the thread as she was among the frontrunners of those who did not wish to be restrained by, or heed rules of the particular forum - the original forum the OP intended the topic to be posted in. Lynn Bodoni moved the thread so that the OP could be attacked on a personal basis, rather than the thread content - and as she was one of the attackers, a genuine meow move, an abuse of control, and a jerkish thing to do.
Since the topic was appropriate for its original forum and since the op chose that forum for their topic especially makes this a bad call. Because the poster is new or unpopular should not have any bearing.
I agree with all of this.
At the very least, a moderator (even a semi-retired one like Lynn) should be required to request the thread be moved like any other poster, if they are personally involved in the conversation as a poster.
Is it extra work to achieve the same result? Yes. But it would at least make everything seem above board.
Moving a thread to the pit changes it fundamentally. Whether or not he was doing a good job of it, the OP may have started the thread to challenge people’s misconceptions about telemarketing. By moving it, that becomes much harder, if not impossible. Not only is that insulting to the OP it’s totally against the spirit of “fighting ignorance”. Completely out of order.
I think we should split the difference again.
Saying Lynn Bodoni moved the thread because she doesn’t like people who called her unsolicited seems like a reasonable assumption to make. She has made her distaste for telemarketers known, even going to far as to say she had hate for the OP (cite here.) She clearly did not feel any need to caution other posters to reign in their criticism, as is typically the case when a thread starts to get out of hand. I’ll agree with you, Marley23, that saying she wanted to prove she still has her mod powers is, indeed, a bit less reasonable.
They are, and it’s a distraction and a waste of time. But if you’re agreeing to talk about the actual thread move and moderation then we can put that in the rear view mirror.
The only post she made before moving the thread was MPSIMS-appropriate, but I agree that this didn’t look right given her participation in the thread. Leaving it for someone else to move (or not) would have prevented that problem.
I think this is the essence of why the move was justified. It wasn’t just the subject of the ask the thread. It was the inflammatory attitude of the OP. In a relatively few number of posts, several things came out–the “you have to ask exactly right or we won’t take you off,” the quasi-flame of “people don’t listen to my questions!” and the arrogant “we’re justified in calling people back even though they said not to (based on the mere fact that someone has a phone.” These were the attitudes and subjects that got people riled up, not the ins and outs of being a survey-caller. That could have been an interesting thread, but the OP’s attitude set its tone down a different path, one that (IMHO) led to the Pit.
Yes, Flyer was plenty confrontational about the subject. And that’s an issue of the content of the thread, not the “popularity” of the poster.
Replace “calls” with “moderating,” and it also speaks to the state of the SDMB moderation.
Incidentally, “arbitrary bullshit” works too.
Because threatening that has helped so much before. :rolleyes:
Yeah but czarcasm really really really wanted to call that guy an asshole.
So you’re saying that the thread was heading for the pit and you mods have no means to keep that from happening? So you mods no longer have the means to warn people to keep it civil or you’ll start handing out warnings? Or to tell people who want to bash the OP to start a pit thread?
I moved the thread to the Pit because I have awesome precog powers. I could foresee that if I left the thread in MPSIMS, that someone (and it wasn’t gonna be me) would have to start issuing Notes and/or Warnings to a bunch of posters. Then either the thread would have been closed and a new thread started in the Pit, or the original thread would have been moved into the Pit. The only difference would be how many posters got noted or warned.
I can get my admin fix by zapping spammers. That’s actually more fun, really. I LOVE it when I see a spammer, check it out, see that it’s creating a new thread, and I zap it before it’s completed the new thread. Moving the telemarketing thread was more of a little bit of housekeeping, like picking up a scrap of paper that’s fallen to the floor.
Okay, you had me totally convinced until I went back to actually look at the thread. Many of those quotes were taken out of context.
The full quote says
He is attributing this attitude to all survey companies, rather than personally espousing it.
This is in response to a person asking him how his job is not against Colorado state law regarding harassment. It’s not confrontational, it’s an explanation of the technicalities of law.
This was not posted until after the thread was moved to the pit.
All that being said … I think my question has been answered and we’ve come to an agreement. You agree that in the future, it would be better for this to be reported to a moderator not participating in the exchange to have moved the thread, and some cautionary notes prior to moving the thread might have been appropriate. The reasoning behind moving this is because if a thread gets out of control and the original poster is not shying away from the criticism, reporting it, or otherwise requesting that the thread be closed or posters back off, the Pit is the appropriate forum for them to hash it out. Thank you for explaining this to me.
Why not automatically move all threads to the pit? Think of all the work it would save for the moderators!
This is another one of those phrases…
We do have means to try and keep threads from going off the rails or prevent people from breaking the rules, and as I said, it would’ve been better to give this one some more time in MPSIMS. But yes, there are also some topics you can’t do very much with, and those tend to get closed or wind up in the Pit.