Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations

[Tsaukpaetra]

@PleegWat said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

This also applies to the porn/kink side, which does not have its own category but has generally been limited to a few threads. I'm sure it leaks as well, though it's hard for me to see the degree to which it does so.

I'm leaking all over the forum!

... Wait....

[abarker]

@Zecc said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@ben_lubar said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

indeed has a reference to that in their forum signature

Wow. Just wow.

How do I downvote a signature?

Honestly, I generally ignore them. Though the ones with ASCII art sometimes catch my eye.

[ben_lubar]

In the past 48 hours, it has become very clear to me why so many moderators have left this forum.

[Polygeekery]

@Weng said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

Another user who thinks that anyone who disagrees with them is a literal Nazi.

Okay fuck right off with that.

I am literally a non-factor in this toxic echochamber and have zero interest in being one.

You guys won. Now leave me the hell out of it.

No problem, but stop coming back and stirring the pot that you claim to have left behind. As a reminder:

@Weng said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:

For the record, @ben_lubar, I'm right there with you on this. A number of people in here, intentionally or otherwise, work straight out of the fascist playbook and, as far as I can tell, turned it into an environment indistinguishable from a radicalization front. It's why I fucked right on off out of here, because I couldn't do a damned thing about it.
Ban hard, ban fast, don't let them talk you out of it, and, frankly, talk to Alex about shutting it down forever.
Deplatform hate. Punch nazis.

[Zenith]

@TwelveBaud said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@Zenith said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

Somebody else brought up a CoC and ...

I have thoughts that are different than yours. But this is neither the time nor the topic. I'll be happy to respectfully spar with you about it once the new admin team is announced and they begin policymaking.

OK. I just don't want to lose the ability to be critical. I think that's an important part of an interesting discussion.

[PJH]

@ben_lubar said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

In the past 48 hours, it has become very clear to me why so many moderators have left this forum.

Ò_o

[Polygeekery]

I am all for this topic either being closed as it has run its course, or anything other than entirely on-topic discussion being nuked or jeffed.

[Zecc]

A-hem.

Not cool, dude. Not cool.

[Weng]

@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@Weng said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

Another user who thinks that anyone who disagrees with them is a literal Nazi.

Okay fuck right off with that.

I am literally a non-factor in this toxic echochamber and have zero interest in being one.

You guys won. Now leave me the hell out of it.

No problem, but stop coming back and stirring the pot that you claim to have left behind. As a reminder:

@Weng said in Discussion of NodeBB Updates:

For the record, @ben_lubar, I'm right there with you on this. A number of people in here, intentionally or otherwise, work straight out of the fascist playbook and, as far as I can tell, turned it into an environment indistinguishable from a radicalization front. It's why I fucked right on off out of here, because I couldn't do a damned thing about it.
Ban hard, ban fast, don't let them talk you out of it, and, frankly, talk to Alex about shutting it down forever.
Deplatform hate. Punch nazis.

At that point you hadn't won.
I'm just here doing a content audit before I go ahead and bury this shit in the landfill of time.

[error]

@topspin said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

They even have their own nazi subs,

[Luhmann]

@Polygeekery
Let's also discard any candidate heavily invested in the fedivers

[topspin]

@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

I am all for this topic either being closed as it has run its course, or anything other than entirely on-topic discussion being nuked or jeffed.

I think we should fork it off. Can bz still do that?

[pie_flavor]

Whee, I missed all the fun again. Here's some of my unsolicited thoughts on the matter.

@remi said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

One last thing: the garage is obviously a contentious area of the forums, in particular in how it sometimes leaks, and how it colours interactions outside of it. I know that I sometimes have to check the category before sending a reply. So, I suggest making it somewhat more obvious. Something like the Lounge background, which IMO does a good job of always reminding us (me, at least) that I'm in a "special" category where I should behave slightly differently. Making the garage visually different would help reminding people (again, me, at least) that things said there should stay there.

This would be a really good idea. In particular due to a technical difficulty: the category icon, which I always check before being a complete jerk, sometimes ends up as General for no fucking reason at all when it's actually a Garage topic. But the background is CSS and so it is present if-and-only-if it's the right category.

@error said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@Groaner said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

few bad apples, or a systemic problem

There were two apples. There's not much distinction.

Oh, you mean the community? I think it's been mostly anarchy up until now, and we're looking at ways to fix that.

I disagree on the 'fix that' part, I think. The reason I originally joined this forum was that it was the sole island of anarchy in a sea of 'banned for wrongthink' (well, at least the sole island that wasn't 4chan).
How many others are the same? We hear every five seconds 'people that left', but how many joined for it too?

@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.

It depends on the code of conduct. European rules, i.e. rules that are very far reaching and then selectively enforced against the bad people and not against the good ones, would not be a good fit here. American rules, i.e. rules written assuming they'd be used in every way possible and so end up very specific and very limited, might be.

[Polygeekery]

@Zecc said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

A-hem.

Where?

[Polygeekery]

@Luhmann said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@Polygeekery
Let's also discard any candidate heavily invested in the fedivers

Seems like a good idea. Especially anyone that mods there.

I think we could make a long list of "If you mod at X, you shouldn't mod here.

• Fediverse
• StackExchange
• Reddit

Any others?

[Mason_Wheeler]

@ben_lubar said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

I still have root access to the server. Which I am not using to cause harm

Oh hey, it's the classic line villains use to try to convince people they're being reasonable!

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IfIWantedYouDead

[hungrier]

@Luhmann said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@Polygeekery
Let's also discard any candidate heavily invested in the fedivers

Why? I think women should be allowed to dive if they want to

[Polygeekery]

@hungrier hey, don't step on @coldandtired's jokes.

[jinpa]

@hungrier said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@Luhmann said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@Polygeekery
Let's also discard any candidate heavily invested in the fedivers

Why? I think women should be allowed to dive if they want to

I think it refers to sunken ship iron salvagers.

[Karla]

@hungrier said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@Luhmann said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@Polygeekery
Let's also discard any candidate heavily invested in the fedivers

Why? I think women should be allowed to dive if they want to

I don't have a license, so I probably shouldn't.

[hungrier]

@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@hungrier hey, don't step on @coldandtired's jokes.

Huh?

[Polygeekery]

@hungrier he is a diver. That is where his username comes from.

Sorry, that was a bit obscure.

[Luhmann]

@blek
He also claimed to have issued warnings.

[HardwareGeek]

@remi said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

Something like the Lounge background, which IMO does a good job of always reminding us (me, at least) that I'm in a "special" category where I should behave slightly differently. Making the garage visually different would help reminding people (again, me, at least) that things said there should stay there.

This is a good idea, and I would wholeheartedly agree, except that the implementation seems to cause a performance problem. There's something about the Lounge, and I assume it's the background, although there could be something else special about it that I don't know about, that makes even scrolling have an annoying lag, especially on my phone, but even on my desktop. Just having the category indicator not disappear when reading a thread would be a big help, at least to me.

[hungrier]

@HardwareGeek It's the box shadow. I've got custom CSS that disables it and the lounge performs like normal.

e:

/* fix horrible lag in lounge */
[data-category-id="16"] body {
    box-shadow: none;
}

[Mason_Wheeler]

@Mason_Wheeler said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@ben_lubar said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

I still have root access to the server. Which I am not using to cause harm

Oh hey, it's the classic line villains use to try to convince people they're being reasonable!

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IfIWantedYouDead

...and just a few short minutes after this, the forum went down for 5 hours.

[HardwareGeek]

Hey, it's back. Maybe this will actually post now.
@remi said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

To make a computer analogy, the forum is a complicated program that exhibits many of the that we talk about. So you set out, very bravely (and I'm absolutely saying that without sarcasm), to refactor and clean out the code, but we all know how easy it is to introduce subtle bugs and performance issues while doing so. And there's no unit test for social relationships...

I would even suggest that it may exhibit some behavior of a chaotic system. Some small changes may lead to disproportionate responses. But you have no idea what those will be until you make the change. Social relationships are weird.

[blek]

@Luhmann I'm not exactly sure which post of mine you're replying to, but anyway, based on the blogpost, I'm assuming the "warnings" was just the "bigotry won't be tolerated" thing he kept saying. The post mentioned the whole thing started with a warning. I didn't even see it, the blogpost claims he "made an announcement" but I literally haven't seen it until I noticed @polygeekery got banned again and found the thread where it was being discussed. And then I got banned for "bigotry not being tolerated".

(IIRC so did you, which I think is hilarious. Get your BINNED badge on, you've literally earned it.)

[GuyWhoKilledBear]

@blek said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

(IIRC so did you, which I think is hilarious. Get your BINNED badge on, you've literally earned it.)

How does one get a BINNED badge?

[hungrier]

@GuyWhoKilledBear You join the BINNED group and somewhere in the settings you can set your badge to it

[pie_flavor]

I should mention: I definitely wouldn't vote for Polygeekery as administrator or moderator. But I definitely would vote for him as some kind of moderator watchdog. I think the word is ombudsman?

[blek]

• Click the 3 guys icon ("Groups") in the top panels
• Find the "Binned" group, click it, join it
• Click your avatar in the top right, click Edit profile
• Under "Group Title" (5th from the top for me), set BINNED
• Click Save Changes

[hungrier]

@blek An amazing secret tip I just discovered is that you can click on someone's BINNED badge to take you straight to the group

[blek]

@hungrier DELETE THIS

[pie_flavor]

I'd almost forgotten about the major-event badges. Maybe this deserves one of its own. "I survived Ben Lubar and all I got was this lousy profile badge."

[HardwareGeek]

@topspin said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

There seems to be consensus that the salon has worked terribly

I respectfully disagree. I, at least, appreciate having an area where controversial topics can be discussed without flaming. I'm quite ok with relatively heavy-handed (by TDWTF standards) moderation in that area. I have had to be warned occasionally that my comments were approaching, if not over, the line, but that's because I forgot which category I was posting in; some distinctive indicator, like the lounge background, would greatly reduce that problem, I think.

[xaade]

@Rednaxela said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

The voices that the current sole administrator/moderator/dictator has chosen to elevate over others are frankly concerning.

It really isn't a democracy.

However, if it were, then he'd be outvoted.

If, for some reason, you found a reason to weight his voice as higher than others, then it's not a democracy either.

Which means you have some good reason for biasing the voices that aren't being "elevated"?

[error]

This post is deleted!

[error]

@HardwareGeek said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

Hey, it's back. Maybe this will actually post now.
@remi said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

To make a computer analogy, the forum is a complicated program that exhibits many of the that we talk about. So you set out, very bravely (and I'm absolutely saying that without sarcasm), to refactor and clean out the code, but we all know how easy it is to introduce subtle bugs and performance issues while doing so. And there's no unit test for social relationships...

I would even suggest that it may exhibit some behavior of a chaotic system. Some small changes may lead to disproportionate responses. But you have no idea what those will be until you make the change. Social relationships are weird.

@error_bot xkcd 592

I'm not sure how the previous post got fucked up, but the bot won't respond to edits.

[error_bot]

xkcd said in https://xkcd.com/592/ :

Drama

­

[xaade]

@ben_lubar said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

I do not wish to have my content associated with a website run by someone who would reverse my actions against someone who sent me death threats without asking me a single question, and also claim that my actions caused irreparable harm despite them all being reversed within a period of six minutes.

I read the blog post. You did nothing but spout political buzzwords the entire time.

That's why I can't trust that the content you banned was really as you presented it.

Also, the death threat thing is a long stretch. It relies on interpretation of a dark and crude humor as a call to harm based on a previous assertion that you made yourself that mentioning membership to a group is associating oneself with eugenics. And this interpretation has to stick on someone that is known for cranking up the annoyance factor as a way to play into another person's frustration.

And the final part is that I've seen far too many times the person's crude behavior being facetiously labeled as racist.

I mean, if we're banning people for being perennially rude, then you have a point.

[HardwareGeek]

@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

Passive-aggressive, mostly incapable of engaging in good faith debate and a very black and white view of....pretty much everything.

I don't have the animosity you have toward @Mason_Wheeler that you have. I think he's rather a bit of a jerk on some topics, and I ridicule him in grand TDWTF fashion on those topics, but I tend to quite agree with him on others. However, I see his nomination as at least somewhat controversial, and since the point is achieving consensus, he might not be the best choice.

[HardwareGeek]

@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

Your idea: Change the background color of the Garage.
My idea: Change the background color of the LoungeSalon.
If we did your idea instead of my idea, it wouldn't be a big deal.

[HardwareGeek]

@topspin said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

no poking loopholes

Except @Tsaukpaetra. He'll poke anything.

[GuyWhoKilledBear]

@HardwareGeek said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@GuyWhoKilledBear said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

Your idea: Change the background color of the Garage.
My idea: Change the background color of the LoungeSalon.
If we did your idea instead of my idea, it wouldn't be a big deal.

Because like @remi already said, the background of the Lounge is already a different color.

[xaade]

@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

Anyway, those are my opinions on current nominations.

I would have nominated myself, but I'm like 90% in the garage.

[Benjamin Hall]

I said that I was leaving the forum, but the recent counter-actions have made me partially change my mind. Partially, in that I'm planning to scale back active participation in many areas.

As for moderation/admin, I'm fine with the consensus trio. I don't have the issue that Poly has with Mason, but agree with @HardwareGeek that controversy isn't the best idea at this time. I was relatively fine with the pre-blow-up moderation. Only really having one active mod does explain why some obvious garage bait took a while to get jeffed, however.

My beliefs as to moderation go like this:

• Out-of-category stuff gets jeffed, with at most a warning. Period. This includes flames/attacks on the help threads, any political or culture-wars stuff in other threads, etc. Personal attacks (especially out-of-context ones like mentioning someone to attack them in a thread they're not active in) automatically get jeffed to the garage and are considered a significant violation of mores.
• Repeat offenders get warnings and get higher scrutiny (are a priority to jeff).
• Only the worst, repeated, unrepentant people get any kind of ban.

I will say that the worst of the Garage leakage was intentional, and done by people firmly opposed to the garage's very existence. It became difficult to tell whether their opposition was (as they claimed) to the tone or to the fact that people who thought differently were allowed to post on politics.

Personally, I've probably learned more actually useful stuff from posts in the garage than in any of the "main" (ie non-help) threads on this forum. Once you see that it's mostly just performance art (people playing characters and delighting in tweaking each other and flouting convention), much of the nastiness goes away. At least for me. But then again, I'm no innocent with regards to intemperate remarks either. So grain of salt.

[apapadimoulis]

@Rednaxela said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

Ben did a good job all in all, and even if certain decisions were more unilateral than they ought to have been

I want to be clear. Ben did an excellent job. I like Ben. I trust Ben. Still. Had I given clearer guidelines from the start, I am certain he would have escalated his concerns to me much sooner. That's a matter of judgement, on both of our parts, and this is an experience we will both learn from.

I don't have enough context (yet) to understand the administrative actions I've undone, I just undid them because I value transparency/fairness, and wanted to make that clear with a "reset". They will be reevaluated, later. Banning regular members is not something I believe a community should taken lightly (as I wrote in another topic), which is why there needs to be transparency/fairness around that process.

Also, the Ben-bashing/attacks stop now. Appropriate disagreement is fine, but that's a subjective line that I won't clarify, and there's no one else to take it up with. Also, I don't pay attention to timestamps, and I will likely forget when I said this, so better edit your recent posts/signatures/etc. just in case I see them and misinterpret them.

I did warn you I wasn't very good at moderation.

@Rednaxela said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

The voices that the current sole administrator/moderator/dictator has chosen to elevate over others are frankly concerning.

There are two levels of voices on the forums right now.

1. sole administrator/moderator/dictator
2. everyone else

If you're talking about me elevating myself above everyone else, then yes, I agree, that should be concerning.

Otherwise, I'm listening to everyone in level-2, whether in this thread or in a private message over email/etc. Please read my profile for instructions on how to private contact. Your voice will be heard, and I'm very capable of discerning between quantity and quality of communication. This topic is very informative to me already.

I've written the community guidelines, and while those are up for clarification, they are not up for debate. This is a software community, there will be transparency, there will be diversity, and members will act appropriately.

Anyone can be nominated to the admin team to clarify and implement the guidelines. There will not be a vote, but I will take into consideration the community's feedback.

Not everyone will agree with those broad/vague guidelines, or my plan to form a team, and that's fine; not all communities are for everyone.

When the policies are implemented, there will be changes. Not everyone will be happy. Ultimately, they won't be implemented perfectly, but we will measure, learn, and improve as we go along. If I felt this place was "beyond repair" then I would have shut it down.

I will "step away" at some point, but I will always be "the last stop" when it comes to accountability, and I will always be reachable.

If you feel "silenced" now, then let me reiterate - please privately contact me. This is your chance to be heard by the only person (right now) who can change things; so share what you think is broken, ideally suggest how to fix it, and I will listen.

[HardwareGeek]

@GOG said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@topspin said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

@GOG said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

Honestly, I find the whole situation not a bit heartbreaking, because I have a lot of respect for Ben and really appreciate everything he has done for this forum.

Ditto. (I assume the “not” is there in error)

I’m pissed at being labeled a bigot (and never felt he liked me, but he makes it hard to tell), but I’ve always held him in high regard.

"Not a bit" = "a lot"

I think that's the opposite of how it's generally used in English. As a native speaker, I've always understood "not a bit" = "not at all". Maybe there's a regional or contextual thing where it's used differently — it wouldn't be the only such in English — but I've never been aware of one.

[cvi]

@Polygeekery said in Administration/Moderation Changes & New Admin Team Nominations:

This would fall under that. I would be very reluctant to do so, but would if the community wants me to.

Honestly, I don't. Sorry, but whenever shit hits the fan around here, you seem to be involved somehow (at least happily fanning the flames). Sure, there's always another guy as well (and they might even have started it after some fashion), but, well, can't help to notice a certain pattern. My €0.50.

As for nominations (if we're still doing those), I support @boomzilla. I'd like to see either @error or @PleegWat (or both for that matter) on the team as well, so those would be other two nominations, I guess.