Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations
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@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@jinpa said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Good to hear from you, Alex. I would like to nominate @Mason_Wheeler. He's probably the most consistently civilized person here (you're civilized as well, but you're not a regular on your forums ) , which would be a nice balance. In addition, he's a Windows guy. Politically, I would describe him as a centrist.
Oh, fuck no. Just no. He is precisely none of those things.
I most definitely am a Windows guy!
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@jinpa said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Good to hear from you, Alex. I would like to nominate @Mason_Wheeler. He's probably the most consistently civilized person here (you're civilized as well, but you're not a regular on your forums ) , which would be a nice balance. In addition, he's a Windows guy. Politically, I would describe him as a centrist.
Oh, fuck no. Just no. He is precisely none of those things.
I most definitely am a Windows guy!
Yeah, fair enough.
He is one of those things and none of the others. Not even a little bit.
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@abarker said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I just had a thought. Should the overall number of people actively moderating be odd? That would prevent stalemates on internal moderation decisions. Or should the number be even to encourage the possibility of stalemates?
If inaction is the default, you could well require 3 out of 4 or 4 out of 5 moderators to agree before action is taken.
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@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@jinpa said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Good to hear from you, Alex. I would like to nominate @Mason_Wheeler. He's probably the most consistently civilized person here (you're civilized as well, but you're not a regular on your forums ) , which would be a nice balance. In addition, he's a Windows guy. Politically, I would describe him as a centrist.
Oh, fuck no. Just no. He is precisely none of those things.
Yeah, I think mason would get overly involved and quite edit/censor heavy. Consider that he's been explicitly mentioned in one of these threads as a regular flagger
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@PleegWat the future mod team is already thin enough, especially if you consider timezones. No sense in making their job even harder.
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@jinpa said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
He is precisely none of those things.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to slight you. I don't know how you slipped my mind. You (along with the "late" @blakeyrat) are well-known for your almost excessive civility.
Hey, at least you know where I stand on things. I'm an open book. But I'm not unfair.
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@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@PleegWat the future mod team is already thin enough, especially if you consider timezones. No sense in making their job even harder.
I was considering mentioning that. There's also to consider: Do we want mods spread over timezones, to keep from having a several-hour gap each day with no moderation, or keep them in the same timezone so they can discuss things with each other?
I could do without large amounts of intra-moderator-team discussion.
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@PleegWat said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@abarker said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I just had a thought. Should the overall number of people actively moderating be odd? That would prevent stalemates on internal moderation decisions. Or should the number be even to encourage the possibility of stalemates?
If inaction is the default, you could well require 3 out of 4 or 4 out of 5 moderators to agree before action is taken.
I think this sort of vote should only happen when we start talking about bans, which should happen very infrequently, and it probably means that there's a growing consensus about it, as well.
In the past, we've had discussions in the Staff category about different things. "Hey, this topic seems pretty aggressive. Should we move it? Delete it? Warn the poster?"
If the mods don't see an obvious approach (and issuing a warning shouldn't be a big deal) then it might be time to open up a meta thread and discuss with the wider community, who actually often do their own brand of enforcement by talking about what's going on right where something happens.
I'd also say that I'd be against a formal Code of Conduct. That sort of thing always seems to lead to rules lawyering and bad decisions.
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@PleegWat said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@PleegWat the future mod team is already thin enough, especially if you consider timezones. No sense in making their job even harder.
I was considering mentioning that. There's also to consider: Do we want mods spread over timezones, to keep from having a several-hour gap each day with no moderation, or keep them in the same timezone so they can discuss things with each other?
My opinion is that we should start worrying about these things once we have enough mod application that we actually can become choosy.
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@Polygeekery As @jinpa just pointed out, you're hardly in a position to comment objectively on this.
@everyone-else: I'd be willing to help out if needed. I've been a mod on Christianity StackExchange since the beginning, so I'm well versed in the art of
and acting with tolerance and... well... moderation. Politically, I'm a centrist, (the ranting of extremists with personal grudges notwithstanding,) and I would do my best to act with balance and impartiality, helping to keep things running smoothly and only wielding the more destructive of my powers against those who threaten or disrupt our community.
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@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
We should get rid of Salon entirely as it's a failed experiment. Or seriously rethink how it works.
Also this. The very first Salon thread ended with the Salon's creator reading bad faith into someone else's post and huffing off calling that person a bigot. I was lurking at the time, but I felt awful about how the other poster was treated. If we got rid of the Salon, I wouldn't be sorry to see it go.
In a Salon-less world, I'd like to see all the categories on the board except the Garage have the rule that there's no "heavy" personal attacks. Light joking, ideally accompanied by an emoji, should be fine. (We have more emojis for trolling than Eskimos have words for snow.)
Other people are going to want the new rule to come with a quicker trigger finger on the Jeff button, and I wouldn't be opposed to that.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear Since the problem is not the Salon not being civil (although that is what sparked the current crisis, but I don't think it's the key issue of that forum), but the Garage leaking out to other parts (including the Salon, but not only there), I think marking out the Salon wouldn't really accomplish much.
(edit: the Salon is actually also a problem, but not quite the same as the Garage. I wouldn't be opposed to it being nuked as a failed experiment, although it did contain a couple of interesting threads...)
IMO it's the Garage that needs marking out -- not to censor it in any way (or at least not significantly more than now), but so that people are clearly aware that they're in it or not.
I'm basing this suggestion on the Lounge, where it seems to work fairly well. With a couple of minor slip ups, Lounge stuff stays in the Lounge, people almost never bring in Lounge stuff in non-Lounge threads (and the few exceptions are usually for minor things that could have been outside the Lounge (there is one exception to that that comes to my mind, but that's still a single one and related to... many other things)). So I don't see what would be lost by trying that out in the Garage as well?
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@Jaloopa said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@jinpa said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Good to hear from you, Alex. I would like to nominate @Mason_Wheeler. He's probably the most consistently civilized person here (you're civilized as well, but you're not a regular on your forums ) , which would be a nice balance. In addition, he's a Windows guy. Politically, I would describe him as a centrist.
Oh, fuck no. Just no. He is precisely none of those things.
Yeah, I think mason would get overly involved and quite edit/censor heavy. Consider that he's been explicitly mentioned in one of these threads as a regular flagger
The last thing we need is a passive-aggressive mod. And to be quite frank and honest he would be prone to unilateral actions such as we just went through.
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@remi said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Since the problem is not the Salon not being civil (although that is what sparked the current crisis, but I don't think it's the key issue of that forum)
There seems to be consensus that the salon has worked terribly, but for the thread at issue I honestly don't understand what was so wrong about it, the severity of the topic itself notwithstanding.
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@Zenith said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
bragging about punching nazis
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@topspin Well, if you read Ben's own blogpost on the topic, it's clear that the Salon thread was only an excuse. He literally admits in the first paragraph that:
To an outside observer, this may have seemed like a sudden, drastic response. But this is a day I had been planning for quite some time. And it went more or less exactly as I had planned for.
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@Gąska said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
We should get rid of Salon entirely as it's a failed experiment.
Disagree. It should have its own moderator, though, one who's not opposed to the idea of civility. I think the key element should be disallowed words - obscenities (words not traditionally allowed on broadcast television), words which, although having legitimate usages, are used as insults, commonly referring to body parts, etc.). Harsh words, e.g. "moron", "idiot", "retard", "bigot", etc. Personal attacks are harder to define, but should be frowned upon, in proportion to their directness.
These rules would keep away most of the bad actors.
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@Zenith said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Politics has never played in to any moderation decision that I have ever seen.
Weren't you just banned by somebody that posted a blog bragging about punching nazis and deplatforming hate?
Edit: Sorry, I'm catching up on this thread and it occurs to me I might want to get caught up.
Well, moderation that isn't a nutjob flying off the handle and losing his mind and becoming a tinpot dictator. Those don't count.
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@blek said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@topspin Well, if you read Ben's own blogpost on the topic, it's clear that the Salon thread was only an excuse. He literally admits in the first paragraph that:
To an outside observer, this may have seemed like a sudden, drastic response. But this is a day I had been planning for quite some time. And it went more or less exactly as I had planned for.
Well, true, but then I also don't really understand his cunning plan. He could have just used all of the existing hate and vitriol in the garage as an excuse and done all of this at once (including banning bz outright instead of his two-step action), no need to wait for new and completely arbitrary posts.
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@topspin said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@remi said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Since the problem is not the Salon not being civil (although that is what sparked the current crisis, but I don't think it's the key issue of that forum)
There seems to be consensus that the salon has worked terribly, but for the thread at issue I honestly don't understand what was so wrong about it, the severity of the topic itself notwithstanding.
The Kavanaugh salon threads were mentioned before. Those were also acts of moderation that Ben did without consulting anyone. The discussions there seemed civil to me but Ben was of the opinion that there could be no civil discussions on the topic at all. The issue at hand in the hearings was an accusation of sexual assault for an incident alleged to have occurred in the early 1980s, BTW.
I'm honestly not sure where Ben saw bigotry in the police thread (and I know I'm playing into his "alt-right playbook" in saying so). There were a few posts that were getting uncivil but nothing really egregious, unless you consider a different opinion on a controversial topic to be that. The only truly uncivil posts in there were his, IMO. He was clearly angry and his posts (and subsequent actions) showed it, even if he could never articulate much about it.
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@topspin said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@blek said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@topspin Well, if you read Ben's own blogpost on the topic, it's clear that the Salon thread was only an excuse. He literally admits in the first paragraph that:
To an outside observer, this may have seemed like a sudden, drastic response. But this is a day I had been planning for quite some time. And it went more or less exactly as I had planned for.
Well, true, but then I also don't really understand his cunning plan. He could have just used all of the existing hate and vitriol in the garage as an excuse and done all of this at once (including banning bz outright instead of his two-step action), no need to wait for new and completely arbitrary posts.
That assumes a little more rational thought then apparently was present.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I've been a mod on -snip- StackExchange
'Nuf said. Also, anyone who mods on Reddit should also be out of the running. We should also probably set an upper limit on SE points.
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Good discussions so far, and a lot to consider.
There seems to be a lot of "theoretical moderation policy" discussions, talk about some Salon... but could we shift those to a different Meta topic? It's taking a lot of paper for me to print out these posts, and no one wants me wasting paper.
But anyways, those should eventually be decided by the admin team (considering input from the community), and are obviously flexible to change. For now, I just want to focus on figuring out the new admin team who will implement the guidelines appropriately.
In the meantime, there really isn't a lot of things that need moderation now, especially with the newly-instituted policy that expressly goes against the newly-instituted guidelines: don't upset the sole admin/moderator/dictator, or he may ban/delete/edit you depending on how he feels.
AS for the nominations, I think it's this so far: Mason_Wheeler, Atazhaia, lolwhat, PleegWat, Carnage, loopback0, Zecc, error, Tsaukpaetra, sloosecannon, abarker, boomzilla
If I missed anyone, please let me know, or if there's someone else, please nominate; I'll start talking to the nominees in a private chat, maybe one-on-one, and go from there.
Ultimately I want to end with a transparent community policy (more defined than my guidelines) with clear roles and responsibilities, that are decided-upon in a private setting, and that the admin team and I will agree to support as a team (even if we don't individually agree on everything).
For now, I gotta call it a night!
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@topspin Yeah, I don't really understand it either, the post is so incredibly self-congratulatory it sounds like he genuinely thought he was springing a clever trap and saving a community from a Nazi occupation as if we're all in a movie and he's the hero, but only Ben knows for sure what was going through his head.
Edit: I also only now noticed that he says he immediately gave temp bans to "the users I had seen being racist, homophobic, and transphobic the second- and third-most" and now I'm mad I didn't even make it to top 3.
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@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Also, anyone who mods on Reddit should also be out of the running.
Hey, reddit is fun! They even have their own nazi subs, so you should feel right at home.
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@Atazhaia said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Zenith said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
bragging about punching nazis
But have you ever punched a gorilla twice your size?
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@boomzilla said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I'm honestly not sure where Ben saw bigotry in the police thread (and I know I'm playing into his "alt-right playbook" in saying so). There were a few posts that were getting uncivil but nothing really egregious, unless you consider a different opinion on a controversial topic to be that. The only truly uncivil posts in there were his, IMO. He was clearly angry and his posts (and subsequent actions) showed it, even if he could never articulate much about it.
Well, his point of frustration as I understand it partly was that it's just dressing up bigotry under the mask of civility. Take a purely hypothetical example, you might well argue that blacks are subhumans that don't deserve the right to live, in a very calm and civilized manner. I know the arguments for freedom of speech, I'm just trying to point out that civility isn't quite the only thing everyone judges what's acceptable.
Not that I see that having happened there.
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@boomzilla said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
There were a few posts that were getting uncivil but nothing really egregious, unless you consider a different opinion on a controversial topic to be that.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
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@remi said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@GuyWhoKilledBear Since the problem is not the Salon not being civil (although that is what sparked the current crisis, but I don't think it's the key issue of that forum), but the Garage leaking out to other parts (including the Salon, but not only there), I think marking out the Salon wouldn't really accomplish much.
(edit: the Salon is actually also a problem, but not quite the same as the Garage. I wouldn't be opposed to it being nuked as a failed experiment, although it did contain a couple of interesting threads...)
IMO it's the Garage that needs marking out -- not to censor it in any way (or at least not significantly more than now), but so that people are clearly aware that they're in it or not.
I'm basing this suggestion on the Lounge, where it seems to work fairly well. With a couple of minor slip ups, Lounge stuff stays in the Lounge, people almost never bring in Lounge stuff in non-Lounge threads (and the few exceptions are usually for minor things that could have been outside the Lounge (there is one exception to that that comes to my mind, but that's still a single one and related to... many other things)). So I don't see what would be lost by trying that out in the Garage as well?
There's three kinds of garage leaking.
- The kind where the poster accidentally posts something in the non-garage version of a topic.
- The kind where the poster and the offended party legitimately disagree on the garage-worthiness of a specific set of words.
- The kind where the poster knows the rules and deliberately posts garage content outside the garage.
Changing the background color on the garage is only going to solve the first kind of leak.
From my foxhole, most of the accidental (Type 1) garage leaking posts have been posts that should have been in the garage being made in the lounge.
So we should put "Warning, don't make a mistake" in the place where we don't want people making mistakes.
In terms of what would be "lost" if we put the background color change on the garage instead of the lounge? Nothing. I think one way works better conceptually, but at a certain point debating it is just bikeshedding.
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@boomzilla said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I'd also say that I'd be against a formal Code of Conduct. That sort of thing always seems to lead to rules lawyering and bad decisions.
I've been quiet throughout this whole thing, but this is something I have to disagree with. If any moderating is to be done, it needs to be done via a set of rules that are clearly published, reviewable by the members, and adhered to, otherwise you end up with moderation done seemingly willy-nilly. I've moderated a few forums in my time (one of which was comprised solely of salty EVE Online members, and boy do they get rowdy) and each one just ended up devolving into chaos without clearly defined and accessible rules.
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I nominate, without knowing their level of unwillingness for such
tasks, @dkf as a voice of reason and @TimeBandit to crush the windows side.
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@topspin said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Dragoon said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I truly believe that all speech is valid and should never be censored.
Death threats?
If you're an admin/mod and someone steps out of line, you don't censor. You downvote and leave the evidence out for others to see and make their own judgements.
Then you progressively escalate: first you tell them off, then if other people have shown they agree with your judgment (multiple downvotes of the offending post, flags), you move the offending post to another thread (probably leaving behind a post explaining the move).
If they insist with their bad behaviour, you explain how it is unacceptable and give them fair warning that action will have to be taken if they persist. If they still insist, you temporarily ban them. If after the ban they still insist, you repeatedly increase the ban duration, ultimately up to permanent.At no point should the evidence of the bad behaviour be removed, unless it's that bad. If for nothing else, to cover your own ass.
I don't think this is rocket surgery.
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@Jaloopa said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@jinpa said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Good to hear from you, Alex. I would like to nominate @Mason_Wheeler. He's probably the most consistently civilized person here (you're civilized as well, but you're not a regular on your forums ) , which would be a nice balance. In addition, he's a Windows guy. Politically, I would describe him as a centrist.
Oh, fuck no. Just no. He is precisely none of those things.
Yeah, I think mason would get overly involved and quite edit/censor heavy. Consider that he's been explicitly mentioned in one of these threads as a regular flagger
@jinpa said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
It [Salon] should have its own moderator, though, one who's not opposed to the idea of civility.
Hmm... How about making @Mason_Wheeler the moderator for Salon?
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A question on the talk of topic specific mods. Maybe @boomzilla can answer.
Can a category specific mod bam someone (temporarily or permanently) from individual categories?
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
There's three kinds of garage leaking.
I'm not sure this really covers everything. I know that there were times I caught myself from being harsh to someone in a non-Garage thread, based on what I had just read from them in a Garage thread. Above the almost-leakage that I caused (but didn't... or at least I was never called for it), this shows some sort of conceptual leakage (if that means anything...?) where a poster becomes associated with what they said in the Garage -- that will obviously always happen, but I think marking the Garage differently may help creating some sort of barrier between "User X in the Garage" and "User X elsewhere", the former being fair game for pointing out how retarded they are, the latter being someone with whom you can discuss Windows registry edits (and point out how retarded they are, ok, the end result is the same...
).But we could debate all those possible leakage scenarios for ages without coming to any conclusion and I think the key point, really, is that changing the colour might not solve many problems but it will likely solve some, and the cost is zero. So really, why not at least give it a try?
(I might try adding a custom CSS myself, but obviously it will only affect myself, and my suggestion is that this is a "nudge" that would benefit everyone, not just me)
Also I'm a bit confused by what you said:
In terms of what would be "lost" if we put the background color change on the garage instead of the lounge? Nothing. I think one way works better conceptually, but at a certain point debating it is just bikeshedding.
I think initially you were suggesting to colour the Salon (instead of my proposal to colour the Garage), now you're talking of colouring the Garage instead of the Lounge, but I never said anything about the Lounge (apart from using it as exemple of colouring that more-or-less works). I wouldn't change anything to the Lounge, just add a new background to the Garage.
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@topspin said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I nominate, without knowing their level of unwillingness for such
tasks, @dkf as a voice of reason and @TimeBandit to crush the windows side.I (unfortunately) use all major OS and can therefore shit on them equally, but I guess I can champion for macOS as most people seem to champion for Windows or Linux here.
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@topspin said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@blek said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@topspin Well, if you read Ben's own blogpost on the topic, it's clear that the Salon thread was only an excuse. He literally admits in the first paragraph that:
To an outside observer, this may have seemed like a sudden, drastic response. But this is a day I had been planning for quite some time. And it went more or less exactly as I had planned for.
Well, true, but then I also don't really understand his cunning plan. He could have just used all of the existing hate and vitriol in the garage as an excuse and done all of this at once (including banning bz outright instead of his two-step action), no need to wait for new and completely arbitrary posts.
From the blog post, I've gathered that the original plan was just banning a few people for a few hours and making new rules, and that's it, but he couldn't take the criticism and went on a ban spree afterwards, in the heat of the moment.
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@apapadimoulis said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
AS for the nominations, I think it's this so far: Mason_Wheeler, Atazhaia, lolwhat, PleegWat, Carnage, loopback0, Zecc, error, Tsaukpaetra, sloosecannon, abarker, boomzilla
I would like to weigh in on the nominations.
Mason_Wheeler
No. He does not have the temperament or impartiality for the job. At all. I am sure that plenty of people here don't think I would be a good mod. He would be much worse. Passive-aggressive, mostly incapable of engaging in good faith debate and a very black and white view of....pretty much everything. Our mods need to spend a lot of time in the gray. Well, all of their time in the gray. He cannot do this. It will not end well.
Atazhaia
No objection comes to mind.
lolwhat
I like him, we've hung out in real life, but I don't think he is a good choice for moderator. Sorry man, I call 'em like I see 'em.
PleegWat
No objection at all. Seems like a good choice to me on first blush.
Carnage
Same as PleegWat
loopback0, Zecc, error
They could be lumped in with the last two. Probably good choices.
Tsaukpaetra and sloosecannon
Probably not great choices. I like you guys. But making you two mods would be the same mistake that making Yami a mod was. You are both too passive. Not assertive enough. A moderator should be someone who is not afraid of confrontation and I get the feeling that you would be. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Mason, I have a feeling that you guys would not do anything and end up feeling disenfranchised from the forums if you took the moderation job and may end up just leaving the forums. I think it is best for the both of you if you were not moderators.
No offense meant. I like you guys as people, but I do not think that being a moderator would be a good fit for either of you.
abarker
He did a great job last time. Fair, even-handed, not afraid of confrontation without being overbearing. At least once when he was a mod he sent me a PM about a @Fox interaction saying "You're not over the line yet, but you're getting close so you might want to tone it down a notch". He handled it well, dealt with the situation and actually moderated without having to censor. If he will take the job he would be a great fit.
But, and this is a big "but"
, he is only back on the forums regularly because his office is closed because of COVID. Once the office opens back up and he is back in his open floor plan I do not think he will be around enough to moderate. So there's that. If he gets offered the job I think we should look at it as a possibly very temporary thing that he will not have the bandwidth for at some point soon.boomzilla
His nomination is more of a formality as far as I see it. Of course he should be mod/admin, for as long as he continues doing a good job and for as long as he is willing to do it.
Anyway, those are my opinions on current nominations. I now await the incoming downvotes. Have at it boys.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
If any moderating is to be done, it needs to be done via a set of rules that are clearly published, reviewable by the members, and adhered to, otherwise you end up with moderation done seemingly willy-nilly.
The thing is, moderation done willy-nilly worked very well once upon the time (circa '14-'15).
Fun fact: back in CS days, I was a long time lurker, but I never made an account because I found people's behavior incredibly hostile and I wanted no part in that.
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@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@jinpa said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
He is precisely none of those things.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to slight you. I don't know how you slipped my mind. You (along with the "late" @blakeyrat) are well-known for your almost excessive civility.
Hey, at least you know where I stand on things. I'm an open book. But I'm not unfair.
I think we can all agree you are an asshole.
Trying to find some common ground here, people!
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@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
abarker
He did a great job last time. Fair, even-handed, not afraid of confrontation without being overbearing. At least once when he was a mod he sent me a PM about a @Fox interaction saying "You're not over the line yet, but you're getting close so you might want to tone it down a notch". He handled it well, dealt with the situation and actually moderated without having to censor. If he will take the job he would be a great fit.
But, and this is a big "but" , he is only back on the forums regularly because his office is closed because of COVID. Once the office opens back up and he is back in his open floor plan I do not think he will be around enough to moderate. So there's that. If he gets offered the job I think we should look at it as a possibly very temporary thing that he will not have the bandwidth for at some point soon.
I can confirm that this is the case. Ultimately, my boss wants everyone to be working from home just because there's less stress for everyone, and this might end up being a permanent thing. But, I won't have any idea until after the whole COVID thing is over.
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@e4tmyl33t said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@boomzilla said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I'd also say that I'd be against a formal Code of Conduct. That sort of thing always seems to lead to rules lawyering and bad decisions.
I've been quiet throughout this whole thing, but this is something I have to disagree with. If any moderating is to be done, it needs to be done via a set of rules that are clearly published, reviewable by the members, and adhered to, otherwise you end up with moderation done seemingly willy-nilly. I've moderated a few forums in my time (one of which was comprised solely of salty EVE Online members, and boy do they get rowdy) and each one just ended up devolving into chaos without clearly defined and accessible rules.
There's two problems with this view.
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Asking for a clear set of rules is a Nazi and alt-right tactic.
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The well has sort of been poisoned on the phrase "Code of Conduct." In today's tech world, Codes of Conduct tend to be heavy handed and themselves biased towards a specific viewpoint and against a specific other viewpoint. They also tend to apply off-site. Except for "No doxing," I don't think any WTDWTF rule should apply to anything except what I type into the website.
We should have clear, written, public rules for moderation that are followed by the moderators and ideally by the users as well.
I think we're just asking for trouble by calling it a code of conduct.
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@topspin said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Dragoon said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I truly believe that all speech is valid and should never be censored.
Death threats?
Wouldn't you rather an idiot be able to say such things? Rather than not, and kill you anyway?
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@remi said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I think initially you were suggesting to colour the Salon (instead of my proposal to colour the Garage), now you're talking of colouring the Garage instead of the Lounge, but I never said anything about the Lounge (apart from using it as exemple of colouring that more-or-less works). I wouldn't change anything to the Lounge, just add a new background to the Garage.
It's real simple.
Your idea: Change the background color of the Garage.
My idea: Change the background color of theLoungeSalon.If we did your idea instead of my idea, it wouldn't be a big deal.
Edit: Derp.
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@boomzilla said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I'd also say that I'd be against a formal Code of Conduct. That sort of thing always seems to lead to rules lawyering and bad decisions.
Better to have rules lawyering than no rules at all, imo. The community can see when rules lawyering is occurring. But someone who gets posts removed or accounts suspended should at least be pointed towards the rule they're breaking.
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@topspin said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@boomzilla said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I'm honestly not sure where Ben saw bigotry in the police thread (and I know I'm playing into his "alt-right playbook" in saying so). There were a few posts that were getting uncivil but nothing really egregious, unless you consider a different opinion on a controversial topic to be that. The only truly uncivil posts in there were his, IMO. He was clearly angry and his posts (and subsequent actions) showed it, even if he could never articulate much about it.
Well, his point of frustration as I understand it partly was that it's just dressing up bigotry under the mask of civility. Take a purely hypothetical example, you might well argue that blacks are subhumans that don't deserve the right to live, in a very calm and civilized manner. I know the arguments for freedom of speech, I'm just trying to point out that civility isn't quite the only thing everyone judges what's acceptable.
No, I agree with what you're saying. Civility isn't only using nice words.
Not that I see that having happened there.
Yes, that's my point, exactly.
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@xaade said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@topspin said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@Dragoon said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I truly believe that all speech is valid and should never be censored.
Death threats?
Wouldn't you rather an idiot be able to say such things? Rather than not, and kill you anyway?
On here, there's not much support this will garner.
Over in more common social media, we've had this type of thing propagate and escalate into actual murder.
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@bobjanova said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
@boomzilla said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
I'd also say that I'd be against a formal Code of Conduct. That sort of thing always seems to lead to rules lawyering and bad decisions.
Better to have rules lawyering than no rules at all, imo. The community can see when rules lawyering is occurring. But someone who gets posts removed or accounts suspended should at least be pointed towards the rule they're breaking.
One of the rules could be "no poking loopholes".
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@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:
Anyway, those are my opinions on current nominations.
Broadly speaking, you've just said what I would if I had cared about detailing each and every candidate.
Basically, you're a moron but I agree with you
, so I'm not quite sure what that makes me 
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@remi you're moron-adjacent and possibly an alt-right sympathizer.
