We may have already lost ggoreo. Zikzak quit being an admin but thankfully held on long enough for a replacement to be found in jmakin. Goofy, skydiver, micro and I are all on the verge of quitting, and only micro because he really wants to. We are sick and tired of the forum feuds that have led to an increase in moderation, and we’re sick and tired of how that has led to second guessing every single mod decision, and we’re sick and tired of the increasing demands for mods to justify every single action they take, and we’re sick and tired of how that increasing transparency is followed by the weaponization of that transparency against us, and we’re sick and tired of how we’re subject to deeply personal attacks against us because of all this. Furthermore, we can hardly even envision being replaced, not because we think we’re doing anything particularly special but because we can hardly envision anyone volunteering for this ever again.
We are at the point where one of the mods gets called an eager participant in murder and the mods aren’t sure either if they’re allowed to take action on the post or if they’re willing to subject themselves to the ensuing accusations of bias by taking action on it. It’s disgusting and impossible, and while I don’t think even someone paid to do this should have to put up with stuff like that, it’s completely unthinkable that anyone who’d follow me after I quit would or should.
Worst of all, we’re not even sure what to do about it other than quit so as to stop being a target of both escalating demands and escalating personal attacks and thus leaving the community without any sort of garbage collector. The best I can think of is codifying some standards for moderator and admin protection to better establish a more reasonable standard of documentation for the next people and a better system to field criticism than a barrage of public and personal attacks. We’re certainly open to other ideas, particularly from any poor schmucks who would think about signing up for this thankless drudgery.
I agree with this. I don’t understand why a handful of repeat offenders are able to make your lives hell and the forum worse.
The main problem is the few ban poster xyz threads are voted on by people who never see the drama and have no intention of spending time finding out what is going on and so have no chance of ever being passed.
Several good posters have been run off, several of us (myself included) are posting less, the mods are pissed. It’s beyond time that the bad apples were expelled.
Any one ban seems to bring in 5 more complaints about the ban, each of which demands a personal essay and follow up dialogue justifying it. With any mod action, you get backlash from two groups: one, the allies of the person who ate the ban or had other mod action taken against them, and two, the small cadre of folks who oppose basically all moderation.
And I’m being unbiased because I’m not in those threads and aren’t sure exactly who you are talking about. But if you/zikzak/skydiver/ggoreo/micro/goofy all have problems with the same character(s), I trust the collective judgment of all of you.
What I’ve been saying all along is it would be nice to have some rules. I know the response is we already tried this, but at least some standards on what constitutes an actionable poll and some rules surrounding that might make everyone’s job a lot easier.
Like look at this C-word thing. As admin I just want to be told what to do and do it, I don’t wanna have to make judgment calls on like “do we have enough mod and community support to do this?”
But in the end I still kinda had to make a judgment call, and people got pissy still. No matter what people are gonna get pissy and not be in agreement about things, but maybe if we had some more clear cut terminology and procedures then it would lessen the confusion, frustration, and anger.
Maybe I’m wrong and we’re just hopeless, but I don’t think we are. Part of the problem for moderators is they are given a lot of responsibility and no real mandate on what they’re supposed to be doing, part of the problem for posters is they’re not really sure what rules they may or may not be violating (although some are way more obvious than others, to be sure).
We may be too fractured to reach any kind of consensus on these things. But a very set of rules around community polls that I would suggest, and anyone can feel free to spitball or make modifications here:
polls should exist in their own topic, and discussion around the topic should be poll-related only, no infighting or bickering
The poll remains up for 1 week
Limit the polls to simple yes/no questions if possible, and do not “front load” the poll options with your opinion or try to bake in a certain response. E.g., don’t make a poll option like “Do you want to censor the c-word and not be a massive piece of shit?” (no one did this, and I don’t endorse this, I’m just giving an example of a biased poll option). You can present an argument for either option, but do not include your argument in the poll options themselves.
51% majority is enough for action, some x% majority is “filibuster proof” - which means it’s not up for debate again for some period of time
Limit the number of polls that can be made to a particular issue to some time period, e.g. no more than once a month
Just a few simple ones to get started. This, at the least, I think we can do. If we want to be community governed and do stuff through polling, I think it should be fairly transparent what this process is and how it works.
I don’t ever read the forum drama threads so I’m largely unaware of it. I think this place is great and so that means I think anyone volunteering time here as a mod or admin are great too!
If there is a way to set something up that the forum can give a small token of appreciation to these people every so often, I would be in favor of that too.
Of course the worst offenders who get banned, and their enablers, are going to also be the loudest complainers. I feel like if a council of mods want to temp-ban or ban someone that should be good enough. If someone doesn’t like it - volunteer to become a mod yourself, otherwise don’t complain.
Just ignore them. If you need me to go tell someone to calm down because you’re doing an awesome job as a mod, let me know who to talk to.
Don’t suck as a poster and just be nice to people and there’s a 99.999% chance you’ll never need any moderation. If a post gets deleted or flagged, it probably should have been and who cares anyway. I’m here to have fun and because I find the people here to be smart and interesting.
Mods are supposed to rotate, so replace all the current mods with the people who are waiting to become mods (there are three of them).
Maybe then the standard of modding will be less obviously skewed against certain people. Plenty of respected posters have noticed this now and no, they are not all of the invented/contrived “Brit clique” I keep reading about - Jbro for instance - so the horrible gaslighting argument that it’s in people’s imagination advanced by mods should stop now.
and I realize part of the problem is that mods feel like they need to make polls for everything, which is annoying and I’m not trying to say we need to be doing more of that. I’m just saying for major decisions. Mod decisions should just be more or less final, and if the community has an issue, they can create a poll to remove a mod.
I actually find the ‘brits’ aspect of it more compelling that there’s something wrong here.
I have a very hard time believing everyone from the British isles are all of a sudden best of friends. If they all ‘grouped together’ it probably means that there is something off in the communication that caused them to feel targeted.
Addressing it might be more helpful to the community than the constant blaming.
If goofy and wookie really want to step down and are worried no one would volunteer, I’d certainly be willing to volunteer. I’m sure others would as well.
I think mods should serve one year terms then take at least a year off. Roman consuls served for a year and it seemed to work fine.
There are like 4 posters who happen to be British who are part of this group. It is in no way all British posters, there are plenty of others who have nothing to do with this group that just goes after the mods incessantly. The fact that this troll group is all British is just coincidence.