In my opinion not even a note.
I will grant that, as personal insults go, it was a very mild one. But it was also very clearly an attack on the poster, and not on the post, and so it was a personal insult, and hence a violation of the rules. And it was one of the posts which contributed to that thread going so far off the rails.
The fact that the Warning came so long after the fact was due entirely to the fact that I didn’t happen to be reading that thread, and it took a long time for it to get reported. The thread might have been salvageable, if I had seen it earlier. Please, everyone, report a thread when you see trouble starting, not when there’s already a horrible mess.
In any event, this is WOOKINPANUB’s first Warning in fourteen years. This in no way puts her at any risk of suspension, banning, or any other meaningful consequence.
That’s not Wooky’s fault. I’d chalk that part up to the lax moderation you’ve already mentioned.
The thread was about whether the behavior is rude… and the poster said the equivalent “yes, if you do this, you’re being rude”. On topic, and not remotely insulting. Even if it’s their first warning, it’s still a totally ridiculous one.
Rudeness was the subject of the whole damn thread. Some discretion as to what’s personal insult versus assessment of rudeness level of stated behaviiour wouldn’t have been amiss.
But that would require actual timely modding rather than a lazy thread locking and then a belated evaluation, 4 days late.
If it took so long, it should just have been passed over as stale. It was hardly like it was hate speech or threatening harm on another poster, for crying out loud.
Perhaps something to be taken into account as to whether they were actually being a jerk there or not.
This seems unnecessarily critical of people who do a job for free.
If an SPCA volunteer did a piss-poor job of mucking out the dogshit from the kennels, I’d happily criticise them, too. Volunteering isn’t a shield from criticism.
This sort of thing is in fact one of the factors that makes it difficult for us to recruit new moderators. A significant number of posters who we invite to submit an application turn us down because they don’t want to be subject to these kinds of comments when they make a judgement call in good faith.
You might. But I wouldn’t criticize that volunteer as lazy simply because they couldn’t do it according to a time scale that I think they should because they had actual paying jobs and families and things to do.
I think you misread - I characterized just the thread locking as lazy, not the actual timing of the warnings. That part was just shit modding.
If they think they can’t handle the completely mild kind of comments I’ve made in this thread then we’re better off without them as mods. This is nothing compared to the halcyon days when we could actually Pit the mods for crappy moderation.
I’m just saying that that’s one reason limiting the recruiting of mods. Most people come here to enjoy themselves. When they consider they might be subject to the kind of comments you habitually make, they say “Who needs it?”
I am one of only three mods remaining who were subject to being Pitted before criticism was moved to ATMB. I was willing to put up with it, and give as good as I got, but I think it was seriously detrimental to the running of the board and IMO the move of criticism of modding to ATMB was the best change I have seen in the board while I’ve been a member. Seriously, what business anywhere would invite customers to publicly abuse and curse out the staff, even if they made a mistake?
A freakshow. Time for the board to own its essential nature, I say.
Actually, I think it had its roots in the fact that the SD was a column in alternative newspapers. The presumption was that any disagreement between the administration and the general public necessarily had to be hostile and antagonistic. IMO, it was highly dysfunctional and simply invited the escalation of any controversy unnecessarily.
Yes, that’s what I said: a freakshow.
I saw it as encouraging the contained de-escalation, actually. Rather than like now, where problematic posters and issues like moderation of misogyny just never go away.
Which style of dealing with moderation complaints went hand-in-hand with higher membership numbers and active participation, would you say?
Oh, it’s all unrelated, I’m sure, things are bad everywhere for messageboards, yadda yadda…
Sorry, that’s totally absurd. “Problematic posters” were always being Pitted in the past.
Do you have an example of a moderated board larger than this one that permits posters to freely curse out the administration that hasn’t declined over the past 10 years?
And mods who kept them around would also have been pitted for that, is my point.
There’s that yadda yadda…
Just because I can’t help myself when it comes to Monty Python quotes …
Klaus: It’s a fair cop, but society’s to blame.
Detective: Agreed. We’ll be charging them too.
I’m ambivalent about the Warning, but I don’t agree that is a fair characterization of the post. It is not a reply to the OP, nor is there any “if” involved. It was a reply to a particular poster, specifically saying they were the “poster child of a rude movie goer,” after several incredulous rhetorical questions.
I’d say a fairer summary is “You actually do this? You are a rude person.”
It may seem like nitpicking, but I think it completely changes the character. When I read your post at first, I was 100% agreeing it should not have gotten a Warning. But I’m more ambivalent now that I read the post.
Still hate the “it’s only a Warning” argument, though. A Warning is an official infraction. It is itself a meaningful consequence, or they wouldn’t be handed out. They say that “your behavior was so bad that we are officially reprimanding you and putting it in your file.”