Moderation

As this site is still a fledgling, I’m feeling my way with regard to rules.

So I’m going to start a bit vague, then get more specific as need arises.The principle is in the strapline: Park your priors by the door.  Everyone has priors, they are crucial to way we make sense of the world.  But the impetus behind this site is to be a place where they can be loosened and adjusted while you wait.  So leave them by the door, and pick them up again as you leave!

There are plenty of blogs and forums where people with like priors can hang out and scoff at those who do not share them.  There’s nothing wrong with those sites, and I’ve learned a lot from them. But the idea here is to provide a venue where people with very different priors can come to discover what common ground they share; what misunderstandings of other views they hold; and, having cleared away the straw men, find out where their real differences lie.  In my experience, when you reach that point, who is right becomes obvious to both parties :)

So draft rules:

  • Assume all other posters are posting in good faith.
    • For example, do not accuse other posters of being deliberately misleading
  • Do not use turn this site into as a peanut gallery for observing the antics on other boards. (there are plenty of places on the web where you can do that!)
  • Address the post, not the poster.
    • This means that accusing others of ignorance or stupidity is off topic
    • As is implying that other posters are mentally ill or demented.
  • Don’t advocate illegal activities.
  • Don’t post porn, or links to porn, or any material liable to risk the integrity of another poster’s computer*.

That’ll do for starters!

Posts won’t be moderated unless I find there’s a problem – if your post is held in moderation it’ll just be because the spam filter caught it.

If you want to post OPs, let me know and I’ll register you as a Subscriber.  That means your OPs will be held in moderation until I click the publish button.  If all goes well, I’ll push people up to Author.

One last thing – I’ve set the nesting for threaded comments to be quite deep, because I like nested sites – derails are much less of a problem and I’m an inveterate derailer.  So use the nesting if it suits your post i.e. if you are replying to a specific post rather than making a general point re the OP.

And thanks for coming!

Lizzie

ETA: I’ve added the coloured text above for clarity (22.2.2012)

ETA2: Blue text added above for clarity (7.05.2012)

ETA3: New rule added in purple (12.05.2012)

ETA4: *Violation of rule in purple will result in immediate and permanent ban (14.05.2012)

ETA5: Peanut rule gallery relaxed a little (5th November 2012)

 

231 thoughts on “Moderation”

  1. Thanks for the heads up.  I’m at a conference in Sardinia at the moment, and only intermittently online, but I’ll do a clean up when I get back, and maybe nix the edit toolbar

  2. Today I got, via Skeptical Zone a “friend” request (to be a Friend of my Skeptical Zone persona). It was obvious spam as it talked about how she wanted to me to “know more about me” and “to give you my picture”.

    Gee, I contacted her. We exchanged photos and she flew in last evening. Really quite lovely.

    However, when she proposed that we transfer recorded information using representations and protocols I became a bit uneasy. Then there was something about a perfectly formed red plastic ball and nothing about a safe word. I pressed her on this; she said “word,” and indeed at that very instant a word came out of her mouth.

    At that moment I realized I was in over my head. I mumbled some excuse about my listed entailments, asked for the bathroom and took off.

    But now I can’t sleep.

    Absolutely objective moral of the story: It’s best not to respond to spam.

  3. Help!

    This may need Lizzie’s attention. Junkdnaforlife is ending up in the spam filter and needs rescuing. None of the comments seem problematic, too many links etc. Individual thread starters may have privileges to release comments posted in those threads.

  6. Now that Mung is here, we might want to increase the length of the ‘recent comments’ list.

    There’s plenty of room.  How about making it 40 or 50? 

    • That would not be wise.

      There is absolutely no question that this Mung character is simply going to be another Joe G. That is clearly the reason he is here.

      There will be no attempt on his part to learn any science or participate intelligently in any discussion; and he will simply dance around, insult, and try to spam the entire site into chaos.

      For those of us who remember its history back into the 1970s, this is ID/creationism in the raw.

    • @Mike.

      Its good to have Mung here. I don’t believe he’s their most able champion, but at least he’s brave enough to cross the divide. Hey, if he proves ID, then he proves ID. I suspect he’ll be bashing evolution instead, though.

  7. Mike,

    There will be no attempt on his part to learn any science or participate intelligently in any discussion; and he will simply dance around, insult, and try to spam the entire site into chaos.

    That may be, and if he does so, people will learn to ignore his comments or respond to them only selectively, as I do already. The more comments there are in the list, the easier it is for people to skip the unenlightening ones and to find the ones that are actually worth reading.

    The price of open discussion is a certain amount of noise.  Let’s give people the tools to tune out the noise if they wish.

    • The more comments there are in the list, the easier it is for people to skip the unenlightening ones and to find the ones that are actually worth reading.

       

      Ah; I see!  Point taken.  :-)

    • Note the blockquote tags in Mike’s reply. I have that problem too: if you type HTML tags into the Leave a Reply box, the < and > characters get changed into &lt; and &gt;. I can get blockquotes by actually posting the comment and then immediately using the “Click to Edit” function on that comment, as it gives a much simpler HTML-friendly environment.

    • I fixed Mike’s tags.

      When you are ready to make a quote:

      • hit enter to start a new paragraph;
      • hit the icon with double quotes near to of edit box;
      • paste in your quote;
      • hit enter to start another new paragraph;
      • hit the double quotes icon again (to exit quote mode).

      Okay, that sounds like a lot of steps. But it actually feels pretty natural once you start doing it that way.

    • Neil, I tried that after you recommended it. It does not work for me. I hit the double quote button (as I am doing right now after ending this paragraph):

      Then I type some stuff like this.  The hit Enter twice, like this:

      Then I hit the double-quote button again. What happens that all the text in the Leave a Reply box is indented when I hit the button the first time, and all of it is un-indented when I hit it the second time. This is the result.

    • I have been having the same problems; so I have been using the HTML editor and tags.  That means I also have to use the paragraph tags, otherwise I have to reformat my paragraphs in the edit window after I return from the HTML editor. I had forgotten to use the HTML editor on that comment that Neil corrected for me.

      By the way, there is a dark line below the CANCEL button in the lower right-hand corner of the HTML editor that I click on to save the HTML stuff to the edit window.  I initially couldn’t find that button because there is nothing about it that shows what it does.  The only thing I saw at first was the CANCEL button. You have to carefully place the cursor over that line in order to save your HTML to the edit window.  Then you hit the Post Comment button of the edit window after you are done.

      If I don’t need tags, I just use the edit window and not the HTML editor.

      I remember that Elizabeth had a lot of difficulty getting everything to work together so that we could also post math equations.  It never worked consistently for everyone, so she just went back to something that didn’t screw up everything else.

    • I hit the reply button on Keiths post above.  Next I will hit enter.

      Okay, typing this after the enter.  Now hit enter again.

      Immediately after that last enter, the cursor was on a new indented paragraph.  I hit the double quote button, and the cursor lost its indent.  Perhaps it depends on the browser – I am using firefox.

      I’m adding this paragraph in edit. Perhaps I find it easy, because my own blog uses wordpress, and the formatting of comments here is very similar to the formatting of original posts for a wordpress blog.

      What I find for posts on my blog, is that if I paste in multi-paragraph text, the formatting buttons treat all of that as if a single paragraph. So if I want to quote text, I have to paste that separately from text that is not quoted (a distinct paste operation).

    • Things work as they should with Firefox.

      Have got so used to using Chrome that I haven’t used Firefox for maybe a year. Just updated it and am posting this comment via Firefox.

      ETA works fine!

      PS updated plugins and extensions (there were 32 pending) now all up to date.

    • PS updated plugins and extensions (there were 32 pending) now all up to date.

      However, the mail and “Penguin Colony” features don’t work now. I don’t think anybody was actually using them, so not a big deal.

    • Oh dear, I see the Penguin colony has broken up! Though all except the basic module is deactivated.

      Does anyone think it’s worth trying to resurrect it? As Neil says, it wasn’t proving at all popular.

  8. I have moved two comments to Guano.  Neither of them was from Mung.

     

    Please watch the tone of your comments.  If you feel a strong urge to post the kind of comment that belongs in Guano, then please post it there yourself and save me the trouble of having to move it.

     

    There are some other comments that are borderline, that I chose not to move.

  9. Does anyone object to the idea of increasing the length of the recent comments list to 40 or 50, so that useful comments aren’t completely lost in the avalanche of Mung spam?

  10. I have moved 3 comments from Guano, back to the originating thread.

     

    Apparently, it causes problems if you move a message, but don’t move all of the replies to that message.  The ordering of comments becomes confused.

    • If they were my guano comments, I would be happy to edit out all the words just to leave the comment as a placeholder.  I don’t think it’s possible for the commenter to edit after a certain timespan.  

      Is it possible for the moderator to edit a person’s comments and leave an editorial note that it’s a placeholder?   Still possible a day or two later?

      If it were my comment, I certainly wouldn’t object if you could do so.  

      [If I recollect, all of my comments which had been moved to guano still remain there, so I don't think this question of moderator editing affects me now.  Regardless, my position is the same: moderating to remove offensive content from the thread while preserving comment order is just fine.]

    • If they were my guano comments, …

      Let me be a bit clearer.

      The comments moved back where by Mung.

      I don’t think any comments had content so offensive as to warrant moderator editing. The ones that I moved to Guano had little content that contributed to the discussion and tended to be little more than snark.

  11. OK, now I am using Firefox.  Now I will hit Enter. and then press the quote-mark button.

    And then type this in, then I will hit Enter and then once again press the quote-mark button.

    And the indenting seems to be correct, this line isn’t indented but the previous one is. Hmmm. (Though there is no italic font for the quote). So Firefox lets this work. The other attempt which did not work was with Safari.

    OK, one more development. When I posted the comment, the quoted sentence was in italic. It hadn’t been while in the “Reply to” box, which is why I said above that it was not italic. (I have added this paragraph in the Edit Comment editor).

    • OK, one more development. When I posted the comment, the quoted sentence was in italic. It hadn’t been while in the “Reply to” box, which is why I said above that it was not italic. (I have added this paragraph in the Edit Comment editor).

      I’m pretty sure that is part of the theme. This theme sets quoted text to italic. However, if you make it italic in the edit window, that will toggle it to be not-italic as posted.

  12. I made a change in the site settings this morning.

    It was configured to send only the last 10 items on its RSS feed.  I find it easier to follow TSZ on my RSS reader (I’m using “liferea” on linux for that).  This morning, when I started up liferea, it picked up 10 new comments, but there were actually 11.  It had missed one.

    I have upped the setting to the last 20 items.  I suppose an alternative would have been to leave my rss reader on overnight – I’ll start doing that if 20 turns out to be insufficient.

  13. Using “theskepticalzone.com” as a URL currently redirects the browser to “http://theskepticalzone.com/setup.php”, which displays some error messages.

    Does anyone know how to redirect “theskepticalzone.com” to “http://theskepticalzone.com/wp”, which is the actual homepage for the blog?

  14. I’ve been meaning to do that for a while, but I’m still working on setting up the forum, after which the direction will be different.

    But someone else may have a better clue!

  15. To everyone who posted one or more OPs at TSZ before the site was hacked: I suggest you follow this link, make a list of the OPs that don’t include your name but should, and post your list in this thread so that Lizzie can, at her convenience, restore your name to the ‘posted by’ fields.

    Lizzie,

    Here’s my list:

    1. David B. Hart and the problem of evil

    2. Why Mung is an ID supporter

    3. A specific instance of the problem of evil

    4. A challenge to kairosfocus

    5. Things That IDers Don’t Understand, Part 1 — Intelligent Design is not compatible with the evidence for common descent

    6. A (repeated) challenge to Upright Biped

    7. Dembski: “Conservation of Information Made Simple”

Leave a Reply