Discussion for new forum policies

This has been a constructive thread, and I’d like to thank everyone who’s put time and effort into providing constructive feedback. I’d also like to thank djensen for his willingness to listen to that feedback, and to think deeply about list moderation issues.

There are several points I’d like to make.

1. People use positive or negative votes to express agreement or disagreement with a post’s content. And, perhaps less often, a positive or negative feeling about the person who wrote it. A post with a positive rating may still be in violation of one or more list policies; just as a post with a negative rating may be in compliance with those policies.

2. This list is not a democracy. A democracy is when a group of people votes on which ice cream place at which to eat. In this forum, djensen chooses the ice cream place. If he puts sufficient time and effort into researching ice cream places, there is no reason why he can’t choose a better place than the group would have chosen.

3. In the past, there has been too much tolerance for personal attacks. Not only are those attacks a violation of the terms of service, they negatively affect the quality of the forum. To give a specific example: in a different forum (unrelated to WWII history) an online bully decided to repeatedly attack me. I attempted to use reason and logic with him. That didn’t work. It didn’t improve his behavior, and it didn’t cause the crowd he’d attracted to abandon his side. I then switched tactics. Every time he attacked me, I attacked back. And I was more vicious than he. That approach worked: first, others stopped joining in his attacks on me. Shortly thereafter, his attacks on me stopped. I was then able to enjoy intelligent discussions with other members, without that particular online bully causing further problems. The lesson here is that human nature is not what it ought to be. People put too much faith in personal attacks and character assassination, and too little faith in logic and reason. More generally, people act as if a question of truth and error can be reduced to a question of social status. Whichever person asserts higher social status must necessarily be correct. At least, that is the prevailing assumption.

4. Gresham’s Law is applicable to online fora. If personal attacks are permitted, these attacks will tend to replace and drive out worthwhile content. If you know you’re more likely to win a debate with personal attacks and character assassination than you are with logic, reason, and research, and if it’s quicker to write a personal attack than a well thought-out post, a lot of people will respond by using personal attacks and character assassination.

5. In an environment in which personal attacks are never permitted, people can talk about controversial issues like responsible adults. It’s a wonderful thing to watch people of sharply divergent ideologies take time to actually listen to each other, rather than call each other names.

6. Discussions about controversial subjects tend to generate interest. I, personally, am far more interested in discussing the root causes of WWII than I am in hearing about the discovery of the wreck of some destroyer lost during WWII.

7. I agree with djensen that people are not (and should not be) okay with having their posts edited. I like the approach he suggested in post #77.

8. I have not yet formed an opinion on whether moderators should or should not be democratically elected. But at very least I would suggest using online polls as a tool with which to allow the membership to provide information about moderators. Each moderator would have his or her own poll. The poll questions are as follows, with possible answers being yes, no, undecided, not applicable.

a) Is this moderator fair and impartial?
b) Can you rely on this moderator to enforce provisions against personal attacks?
c) Is this moderator restrained in his or her use of power?
d) Does the moderator take the time to adequately explain the basis for his or her decisions?
e) Do you feel this person should be a moderator?

People’s responses to these poll questions should be hidden from everyone except djensen. This is to prevent a moderator from retaliating against those who voted against him or her.

9. Moderator discretion should be kept to a minimum. List policies should be clearly defined, written down, and accessible to everyone. Moderators should act only when someone has violated one or more of those policies. If someone uses a “report to moderator” button to report a post which does not violate any list policy, it becomes the moderator’s job to send a copy of those list policies to the person who complained. The moderator would then ask, “Which of the above policies do you feel the post in question violated?” Over time, this would increase awareness of list policies, and discourage frivolous complaints.

IL, I am not sure why you seem to have latched onto the mantra that “This site is NOT a democracy”.  If I hear you correctly, you are pretty much are saying the concerns of the citizens of this site should not be listened to.

This is what we were told by Administration:

1. “This is not a democracy”- Djensen
2. “Be Draconian in your approach”- Yanny
3. The posted rules are the only formal ideas we got for moderation. Yes it would help if we got precise examples of what to do based on each infraction. Frequently, it turns out the rules change without notice ( no more edits on posts, just remove/move the post)

With item #1 i tend to agree. You can vote up all the ideas you want, but only one person makes the decisions. I don’t understand why that is difficult or how the meaning can be twisted.

The forum can be more democratic, but the foundation is not built on a real democracy. It is not a question of which system is better anyway. Obviously, each system works best depending on the circumstances. (consider the military example produced earlier)

The forum rules just need to be tweaked for both members and moderation.

This is what we were told by Administration:

IL, I think maybe in this thread you should stop acting as a moderator.

You asked me where i got this “we are not democracy” thing. I explained that.

Yes, I asked and you explained and  I appreciated that.  But to me it seems a bit more than merely re-iterating what David historically had asked you to act, it feels like you are trying to act like a moderator here as well.  Hopefully I am wrong.

But now David has said something new.

“This is not a democracy,” just sounds too harsh now. This is a community and we need to listen and respect each other, is  much better mantra

.

All that is fine, change is fine.

But to bring up that moderation went into something different than what was told to do, is simply not true.

I hate to say “we were following orders”, but we were following what training we did get. Again it is not a blame thing and hopefully the changes will benefit the forums.

@djensen:

A better way to look at it is that this site is a business and the people who visit are customers. If you treat customers badly, they go away. If one customer becomes too unruly, other customers around the unruly one might go away.

If gangs of thugs visit your place of business, your customers go away too. � Flamers are thugs. � To be able to remove the weapons of thugs, makes the thugs go away. � Editting posts was a prime example of minimalistic intervention to protect the good of all. � Moving posts in their entirity was a prime example of kicking the thugs in the teeth and prying the weapons from their hands. �

Edit: Missed a paragraph on my copy/paste.

In my vision of moderator-hood, a moderator should police with a minimal impact.  For instance:

Original Post: Billy is a fckwd and I hope he dies, so we can pee on his grave!  Oh, and you should always use two infantry on your transports, tanks and artillery don’t help as much.
Editted Post: …you should always use two infantry on your transports, tanks and artillery don’t help as much.

The moderator left the meat of the post, but removed the flames and thus kept the discussion clean.  Billy might never know he was flamed, if he didnt see the post before the edit.  Further, the poster might never have been educated that there are times when artillery and armor might be a good piece of cargo for a transport, if the entire post is moved to the moderator forums.

At one point we had a forum at our LGS and a nasty troll arrived who had serious social problems and at least one mental disorder. He baited, flamed and generally tried to cause chaos on the forums. He had puppet accounts and etc. Eventually I got tired of editing his posts daily so I decided to start replacing his flames with compliments to moderators and the members he was flaming. He would write that someone was a fool and I would replace it with great phrase for that member and apologies for his own rudeness.  I also disabled his edit abilities so when I edited a post it could never be deleted or changed. Within 10 days he gave up and moved on. It worked like a charm. :wink: Hint-Hint

Regarding customers: “A customer may not always be right, but the customer is still the customer.”

At one point we had a forum at our LGS and a nasty troll arrived who had serious social problems and at least one mental disorder. He baited, flamed and generally tried to cause chaos on the forums. He had puppet accounts and etc. Eventually I got tired of editing his posts daily so I decided to start replacing his flames with compliments to moderators and the members he was flaming. He would write that someone was a fool and I would replace it with great phrase for that member and apologies for his own rudeness.  I also disabled his edit abilities so when I edited a post it could never be deleted or changed. Within 10 days he gave up and moved on. It worked like a charm. wink Hint-Hint

Yea i did that in the past, but it didn’t work. The Troll just complained that we edited his posts and removed the flames so we could not do that anymore.

@Imperious:

At one point we had a forum at our LGS and a nasty troll arrived who had serious social problems and at least one mental disorder. He baited, flamed and generally tried to cause chaos on the forums. He had puppet accounts and etc. Eventually I got tired of editing his posts daily so I decided to start replacing his flames with compliments to moderators and the members he was flaming. He would write that someone was a fool and I would replace it with great phrase for that member and apologies for his own rudeness.  I also disabled his edit abilities so when I edited a post it could never be deleted or changed. Within 10 days he gave up and moved on. It worked like a charm. wink Hint-Hint

Yea i did that in the past, but it didn’t work. The Troll just complained that we edited his posts and removed the flames so we could not do that anymore.

I hear that.  Most of the moderators try to just remove the infracting text, but then the complaints start.  They’ll say they didnt say anything bad, and then it’s their word against ours.  Puts us in a position of proving a negative, which I am sure we’d be willing to deal with.  After all, MOST of the time it’s a specific in-DUH-vidual (copywrite: Scott Adams) and the long track record, coupled with 3 harried moderators trying to stay on top of it, is enough to perma-ban their account.

@Cmdr:

@djensen:

A better way to look at it is that this site is a business and the people who visit are customers. If you treat customers badly, they go away. If one customer becomes too unruly, other customers around the unruly one might go away.

If gangs of thugs visit your place of business, your customers go away too. Flamers are thugs. To be able to remove the weapons of thugs, makes the thugs go away. Editting posts was a prime example of minimalistic intervention to protect the good of all. Moving posts in their entirity was a prime example of kicking the thugs in the teeth and prying the weapons from their hands.

Edit: Missed a paragraph on my copy/paste.

In my vision of moderator-hood, a moderator should police with a minimal impact. For instance:

Original Post: Billy is a fckwd and I hope he dies, so we can pee on his grave!  Oh, and you should always use two infantry on your transports, tanks and artillery don’t help as much.
Editted Post: …you should always use two infantry on your transports, tanks and artillery don’t help as much.

The moderator left the meat of the post, but removed the flames and thus kept the discussion clean. Billy might never know he was flamed, if he didnt see the post before the edit. Further, the poster might never have been educated that there are times when artillery and armor might be a good piece of cargo for a transport, if the entire post is moved to the moderator forums.

I agree with your metaphor of disarming flamers like one would disarm a thug. I also agree with the overall direction of your post, and would take things one step further.

In the best-run forum of which I’m a member, personal attacks or other flames are never allowed. If anyone even starts heading in that direction, a moderator will post a polite but firm warning. Normally that will cause a person to back off. In the one case where that did not happen, the offending poster was given a temporary ban.

I’d seen these same people repeatedly attack each other in other fora. But (with a few rare exceptions) that did not happen in this forum. The moderators had drawn a very clear line, and never tolerated anyone’s crossing that line.

For whatever reason that hasn’t happened in this forum. Instead, moderators have sometimes allowed personal attacks, as long as they didn’t go too far, or as long as the person being attacked had expressed a view with which a moderator disagrees, or sometimes for other reasons. This creates a gray area. Once you create a gray area, you give people permission to push things, to see how far they can go before you push back.

Neither you nor any other moderator should have to take time out of your day to edit anyone’s posts, or move them to some black hole of “moderated post” status, or even to add messages about list moderation to the bottom of someone’s post. Or at least, you shouldn’t have to do that more than once or twice per poster. Anyone who crosses the line should be given one warning. And should be temporarily banned if that one warning is ignored.

This may seem harsh, but it’s the opposite. Once people realize the moderators are serious about enforcing civility standards, they’ll adapt. They’ll “get” that uncivil conduct isn’t the way things are done around here, and they’ll be okay with that. (The few that aren’t okay with that are probably not people you want in these fora anyway.)

Personal attacks are like weeds. Unless you take decisive action immediately, they will quickly spread.

Instead, moderators have sometimes allowed personal attacks, as long as they didn’t go too far, or as long as the person being attacked had expressed a view with which a moderator disagrees, or sometimes for other reasons.

Where is this thread Kurt? Would that be one of the five that were closed in Military History?

Was even the start of these attacks AFTER the thread got hijacked with off topic commentary?

Would these “attacks” that were “allowed” might be just that we didn’t get a “report to moderator” notice till AFTER some of these posts were made, then we went to work and closed the thread?

Could you be mistaken regarding the chain of events/facts?

Well here’s a thread you started,

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=24768.30

which if we could read, encouraged, and allowed personal attacks for some time.

Surely there was no point in hitting “report to moderator”, as it was mostly a discussion between moderators and a specific user.

I’m also certain, that if we were allowed to peruse the plethera of threads in the quarantine section, we’d find MANY suitable examples of this behaviour.

Thus, no one is mistaken.

Actually,

Here’s a really good example, and total failure to moderate effectively.

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=27224.15

Kurt Godel gets called,

• one eyed
• a nazi apologist
• pathetic

Amongst a few other things…

Said same user (Lazarus), then uses the same berating tactics, in multipe threads. (Whether the rest of his content was right or wrong is irrelevant)

The Thread was closed, because Kurt tried to defense himself. He was accused of “going off topic” for that, And NO MENTION, whatsoever, was made, about the fact that the personal attacks, which were spread out over several threads at the time, were inappropriate/unwelcome.

It’s crap like that, that’s resulted in the community rejecting “charged” moderation, and wanting this discussion, so as to lead to positive, and permanent changes here at AA.org.

That said, Everyone should make themselves immediately aware, that if the “powers” held on this forum today, were the same as when that event occurred, this post in it’s entirety would be deleted. Hence, the difficulty people have faced in expressing truth, being heard, or even being able to defend themselves with fair arguement - such as in Kurt’s case.

It’s why Moderators should be chosen by thier peers then appointed per Djensens discretion.

I just love how after all the snide comments, and shots that are given, the closing remarks were:

And yet again Kurt turned another thread into book reports dealing with German policies of killing opposition/ Holocaust/ Extermination program.

Another thread closed because it now has nothing to do with the French holding out in 1940.

Garbage.

Actually,

---

Here’s a really good example, and total failure to moderate effectively.

---

http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/index.php?topic=27224.15

Kurt Godel gets called,

• one eyed
• a nazi apologist
• pathetic

Amongst a few other things…

And nobody paid attention to that thread until somebody hit the “report to moderator”. Once that happened the thread was closed, so nobody “let” anybody say anything what ACTUALLY happened is nobody knew anything till we got word.

And yes he did turn that thread away from “French holding out” What was not clear about that?

Funny thing is after reading more closely that link i see YOU were also involved in going off topic and arguing with other posters. Why didn’t you hit “report to moderator”?
Now you comment on what happened but you didn’t attempt to do anything at the time?

Right. Blame others not yourself.

My last comment should actually read:

And yet again Kurt, Gargantua, and Lazarus involved in another off topic commentary where flames were posted.

Thread closed because it now has nothing to do with the French holding out in 1940.

The Thread was closed, because Kurt tried to defense himself. He was accused of “going off topic” for that, And NO MENTION, whatsoever, was made, about the fact that the personal attacks, which were spread out over several threads at the time, were inappropriate/unwelcome.

No wrong again. It was closed when we found out that it got off topic. Because a thread exists does not mean we are monitoring it, you don’t see any posts from me in those threads except at the end, when i was informed that it went off topic.

Yea and Lazarus was out of line too, but the person who derailed the discussion was Kurt, not Lazarus.

You probably need to get the facts straight.

The facts are right, And the moderation was wrong.

If anybody derailed the discussion, it was Lazarus, worse with his comments breaking the existing “rules/policy”, which drew no comment from you. (Unless you are suggesting you don’t even bother to read threads or portions of them before you arbitrarily close them) But the judgement was handed down on Kurt specifically.

Kurt did not attack those who’d attacked him. His defense was to point out what he saw as the flaws in their logic, while adhering to the list’s prohibition against personal attacks. Lazarus repeatedly violated the terms of service, while Kurt complied with them.

Ironically, the thread was off topic BEFORE Kurt had contributed his first post. It seems clear, that if anything, a snap judgement was made.; Again validating that community moderation is needed.

Case in point, the moderation served only to ADD to the harassment and beratement of a user.

…

More to the point it seems, that everytime the words “Kurt Godel” are seen in the thread, it is assumed by moderation that he is the culprit of all wrong doing.

The preconception has resulted in personal targetting.

That said, does anyone really care if/when a thread goes off topic?  With the odd exception, of when the thread maker requests a return to the original discussion?