I know what you’re doing and think it’s much needed, but I was just saying that if you think people are ignoring you or something, they probably just can’t tell if you’re being serious or not. Everyone is very srs business in the thread. Lol. Like I couldn’t really tell for a few posts if you were or not, but I am a little dense and not so good at reading.
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My suggestion would be to have Judges make the poles based on some clear rules that people agree to. This way the people enforcing the day to day rules are separated from this task which is going to have a lot of emotions attached to.
Right. I couldn’t believe that people ignored that thread or voted so heavily against the idea. Judge Dredd mod is inflammatory language, don’t you know. Non serious! It’s possible I’m just bitter because my incredibly good Julius Ceasar pontifex maximus post only got seven likes. Seven fuckin likes.
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It’s not your imagination jmakin, it’s like supreme court pretend time up in here.
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Like, we don’t need more damn polls. Who are the gatekeepers you’re proposing? How are they chosen? How do you want them to function?
I think it would be good to have an account used just for posting official polls. It would be similar to the UP Admin account, but not associated with a particular user. Whoever ends up being allowed to post these polls (judges, mods, whatever) can have access to this. I think that would make polls a little more neutral because votes are less likely to be colored by how posters feel about the OP’s forum persona.
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Indeed. I think the last week clearly show that either the mod or the person they are arguing with shouldn’t be creating these.
you expressed a desire not long ago for additional admins. i immediately considered contacting you and volunteering, but i didn’t have an agenda in mind. another person expressed desire for an independent judiciary, which was seconded. someone else proposed i be an arbiter, and i started a thread.
this is like, already conforming to the most stringent proposed rules itt except for the part where existing mods are the gatekeepers of their own autonomy
and btw, do you want an independent judiciary to be boring? who would even want to read the judiciary forum without me running the show? not me, that’s for sure.
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What I was envisioning was a system where anyone can start an RFC for any new rule proposal and solicit feedback from interested community members. They hash something out and vote on the final text among themselves. One or more mods may sign off on the rule proposal or at least that the process was followed, and then it goes before the whole community as a binding rule proposal vote. Thus, the gatekeeper is more the process than any particular person.
Some people seem to have some interest in instead having Rule Makers, who are separate from mods. I am skeptical of this, as in the early days of the new forum we tried this and accomplished nothing. That’s not to say it’s unworkable if we have both volunteers and broad community support.
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To elaborate on this idea somewhat, I agree that anyone should be able to start an RFC process. There might need to be some limitation on the scope of rules that can be implemented through RFCs. Or maybe everything could be started through the RFC process, but votes on certain types of proposals would require higher thresholds to succeed (e.g., supermajority for Constitutional amendments).
I think the RFC process should be something like this:
- User begins an RFC by starting a thread describing the proposal
- Formal RFC process begins if there is some minimum level of support (e.g., 10 users); think of this as a petition
- The wording of the proposal is debated in the thread
- If a consensus is achieved on the wording of the proposal through a supermajority vote on the wording the proposal goes on to a binding vote
- If a majority but not a consensus approves the wording of the proposal, the forum arbiters can decide whether the proposal goes forward as is or can modify it at their discretion; in either case it proceeds to a vote
- If the wording fails to achieve majority approval, it fails to proceed to a binding vote; debate on the proposal, however, can continue until such time as the wording is approved by a majority or consensus
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we could probably have a separate discussion on admin stuff. I want more admins if ggoreo steps down.
The reason is a fewfold: I (perhaps a little selfishly) do not really want to be the one holding the nuclear football, to use a shitty metaphor.
One of my main goals is to secure us from attacks. Most very serious attacks come from inside an organization. If there is some way someone could come in and take over the website, I don’t want that to even be possible. In my hands right now I know this won’t happen. At this point I don’t know if it would be possible for a malicious admin to wreak total havoc, and I need to test some things before I am certain. So before I can really weigh in heavily on that discussion I need to figure out what’s possible from a malicious user’s perspective. Admin is an ENORMOUS privilege, more than I even realized at first. You can do whatever you want to the site. I think we should treat it very carefully and hold admins to a very very high standard (including me obviously).
I am trying my very best but it is certainly not easy. I hope everyone does understand that my posting in these threads are just me mostly just chiming in as a poster who uses this site and not as an administrator, because as an admin, I personally think this is none of my business really. In my ideal world I just implement what the mods tell me to implement (with community support of course). But in practice it hasn’t really been that simple, so I am still figuring it out.
I basically just am trying to treat this like a production-grade website. I think, if this were my job, what would I want to see?
There really only needs to be 2 or at most 3 very, very trusted admins. I am really privileged that the community has placed this trust in me. But it’s a much bigger deal, in my opinion, than just modding someone.
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What do you see as the informal process preceding the point of formally starting an RFC?
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NBZ 4 Judge 2021
Endless voting, rules committees, it’s not going to work. Vote participation is low and dropping with every one of these threads. Your mod term thread has 45 votes. The only thing that has a chance of working is just ad hoc rules that are just heuristically agreed on through mod action, transparency and feedback. We’re just not going to sit down and hash out a forum constitution or whatever. It’s never happening.
And you can actually end all this. Just take meb’s proposal, pin it to the top of this forum, and say this is how we’re running the forum now. Appoint @beetlejuice as head arbiter. Let him pick two more. We don’t need a vote, you can just do it. Then, as per meb’s proposal, you can take a while off and be mod again after six months or a year if you want to return. Skydiver can be mod for six more months if she wants. Microbet, nine months if he wants. PocketChads can try his approach for a while, and if I can get 2/3rds of people to support me, I can try mine too. With transparency there isn’t much a mod can really do without the support of the forum. Being a mod only has to be as big a deal as you and the rest of the community makes it.
People will see you do all of this and be all, OK. Fine. Looks good. You alone can do this because you’ve been mod for so long that people trust you and respect whatever you decide. And the ones who have bad feelings towards you will have those vanish with this gesture of respect for those in the minority and being open to change. That’s what I was getting at when I said that just you have to agree to the custom of rotating mods. You’re respected enough that that custom would stick, just by you doing it. Just like George Washington could have made himself king, you can probably make yourself perpetual moderator. But you shouldn’t.
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As of right now, nothing. I don’t see to much issue with anyone starting anything they want to try to gin up enough community support for a proper vote on the subject. I’d be open if you had ideas, though.
And the only thing I would add to meb’s proposal would be that any moderator, arbiter, or admin can be removed at any time with a simple majority vote, brought forth by any poster. Then it’s perfect and will work forever. Maybe also that mods or arbiters need to be elected by 2/3rds.
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There is a real issue with the polls. In that most people dont care enough.
The longer the process the harder it is. Policy change will then be driven by small groups that care enough to navigate the system. Its one reason why lobbyists have more power than we do.
If we go down this route, we need something to drive minimum participation, either formally with a rule, or via having a formal election week every month or something.
The more i think about this, we just need to trust mods to make the rules and work backwards from that to ensure checks and balances.
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The problem is we already have endless voting without any rules right now. For instance, you started a poll, then Wookie started a poll on the same topic, then JMan started his own poll. Which of those three polls was controlling, because there definitely was conflict between them. We need some process for deciding what we’re actually going to vote on.
While I support meb’s proposal, the idea that the mods should just change the rules without a vote is terrible.
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Theres also the question of coherency and interpretation. We could end up in a situation with two completely contradictory rules that some poor soul needs to try and impliment.