Please use this thread for alerting admins to moderation issues and for discussion or complaints arising from particular decisions.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Please use this thread for alerting admins to moderation issues and for discussion or complaints arising from particular decisions.
Yes, thank you.
Really? That’s wonderful news!
At the moment, I cannot think of anyone whom I’d rather see join the moderation klatch.
Well, at least not anyone who usually plays for the other team 🙂
Erik writes (here)
There is no specific off-topic rule, Erik. There is a rule that moderation issues are raised only in the moderation issues thread.
Your guano’d comment:
breaks the rule on not attacking the individual.
FWIW, I don’t think that remark is an ad hom.
walto,
No? Perhaps it was border-line. Though it also breaks the rule on discussing moderation issues in other than the moderation issues thread. It also lacks mitigating features such as substantive content. Though it is perhaps mitigated by Erik not being familiar with the rules as they stand. (He’s not the only one)
I’ll move it back.
False. Attack on the individual is when the individual is attacked. I made a general comment about how moderators can be annoying. Of course you had been leading by example there and you directly prompted my comment, and surely most bystanders understand all this, but my comment was still general, not an attack on your person, you touchy wimp <– now this is individual
Since you lack the necessary competence of identifying attacks on the individual, let me help you out – "Fuck off, douchebag!" http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/burden-tennis/comment-page-8/#comment-120061 Comparing this comment to mine, it should be obvious that your stated reason to guano mine is beyond ridiculous.
Note that I am not complaining for guanoing me. I am just pointing out that the reason you stated is false. You are free to guano as much as you want, as long as you do it comparatively fairly. You lack fairness. That's a problem.
Erik,
The comment you link to is certainly rule-breaking and it’s one I didn’t happen to notice it until you pointed it out. As I’ve said before, I’m currently unable to spare enough time to read all comments diligently and will be relinquishing moderating duties as soon as Lizzie is able to return and make other arrangements.
As the target, I request that hotshoe’s “Fuck off, douchebag” comment not be guano’ed.
At this point, it is also in the “ancient bloody history” category.
🙂
ETA: I also view her comments as being highly (but perhaps unintentionally) substantive…
Indeed, which is why I haven’t guano’d it now!
And you, Erik, are constitutively disingenuous. That’s disappointing.
Erik is right. That’s not Erik’s claim, it’s been doing the rounds since before Erik was born. He merely repeated the claim in his opening gambit:
(Note that in this comment he is using ‘literal’ in the colloquial “did in fact happen” sense, rather than the philological “word-by-word interpretation of the text” sense that he subsequently retreated to. How else does one interpret “Jesus may have walked literally on water” ??)
Erik later made a couple of claims about the Flood, the historical reliability of Genesis, and fossils in the Himalayas. Caused quite a fracas. By the end of it all, he was reduced to invoking alterate definitions of ‘truth’.
True, and exceedingly well put. Lizzie did not agree that you failed to support your claims; Lizzie did not agree that you did support your claims; Lizzie very specifically declined to offer an opinion on that subject. And, ‘specifically’, (although Lizzie also offered no opinion on this issue either), you did “give a response” to Patrick’s questions, saying “I refuse to give you my personal interpretation due to our lack of common ground and due to your hostility.”, which is non-responsive.
No moderator can read everything, and I’ve never seen a forum where everyone agreed on every moderation decision. The point of guano was to defuse toxic comments without deleting them.
I don’t know the details of any complaints and I don’t really care to know them. I followed the complaints for a week or two and decided the complainers were obsessed with something of no importance. In the current round I only look in occasionally.
An important aspect when considering rules, their meaning and application, is to evaluate their efficiency, simplicity of enforcement, so that the moderators would not have to overwork. However, as moderators here seem to lack the overall understanding of the role of being a moderator and they often themselves aggravate small issues and thus cause themselves more work, I suspect that improvement of rules here would not have any benefit. In your case today, you guanoed a comment that plain obviously didn’t need guanoing and then you moved it back. Double work.
By the way, does every participant have OP privileges here? Maybe I will write an OP.
Most do. As far as I know, everyone can compose an OP. At the worst, they might have to ask for it to be approved.
I just switched you from “Contributor” to “New Author”, so I think you can post an OP without assistance.
Thank you. I will try it out some day.
I think you have misunderstood.
If the only thing we can do is move offending posts to guano, then our ability to deal with problems is very limited.
Ideally, moderation would not be necessary as most commenters overwhelmingly manage to keep within the rules without difficulty.
Indeed. However, my aim was an attempt to de-escalate what I perceived as an escalating situation.
Author status is available* on request to anyone who doesn’t already have it. I just checked and you already have “New Author” status. You’ll find post-editing your OP is not possible, so you need to preview in order to spot and correct typos before publishing.
*caveats apply!
LOL Ninja’d by Neil!
And you are saying that the only thing you can do is move offending posts to guano? You cannot for example ban troublemakers that were previously banned but who turn up again? You cannot refrain from adding to bickering, nagging and bullying?
I realize these things are not in your rules, but there are certain characteristics that moderators universally must have in order to qualify as moderators regardless of the rules specific to the site. First you have to have balanced tone and integrity when participating in discussions, so you can exercise determination and authority when solving disputes. But moderators here are so disorderly that they end up openly infighting instead.
Yes, precisely.
I think I have mostly refrained from those activities.
We wear two hats. I hope I can’t be accused of using moderator powers to win arguments.
Has anybody ever won an argument here?
Alan,
…but you somehow find the time to abuse your moderator powers in service of your personal grievances. Repeatedly.
Only rule-violating comments may be guanoed. You know this. Lizzie wants moderators to exercise restraint and keep their moderation on the light side. You know this also. Bogus moderation actions exacerbate tensions rather than de-escalating them. You know this too, having precipitated shit storms again and again through ill-considered moderation decisions, as in the case of the “W(h)ine Cellar” debacle.
Despite all this, you guano non-rule-violating comments (as in this case) again and again because you act based on personal urges and only later attempt to rationalize your actions in terms of the rules.
Moderation requires some amount of self-control. You have so far failed to demonstrate even that minimal amount.
keiths,
Thanks for your input, Keiths. You seem to be reading Lizzie’s mind now. I’m impressed.
Alan,
Fixed that for you:
There’s also a rule that meta-issues are raised only in the moderation issues thread. Or so I’ve been told.
Perhaps Patrick can take a break from trying to codify things that won’t actually be rules and get the actual unwritten rules that are rules put into writing on the Rules page.
Has anyone ever made an argument here?
There is no rule that states that only rule-violating comments may be guanoed just as there is no rule stating that rule-violating comments must be sent to Guano.
Hee hee. Dream on, sweetheart, dream on!
I agree with Erik again, in comments scant hours apart. It truly is the End of Days.
It’s nice to find out I’m missed when I’m not online.
I agree with you, Mung. This thread would be appropriate in Moderation Issues because it is a meta-discussion about the site. I see why the sheer volume the topic is generating motivated Neil to move it to a separate thread, but that decision was inconsistent with the decision to close the threads that you started.
What do you suggest to resolve the issue?
There is no rule that allows admins to move comments that don’t violate the rules. Doing so would be an abuse of admin privileges.
Frankie wins them all of the time. Well, at least in his own mind.
Absolutely nothing. I’ve always known that the decision to close mine was arbitrary and capricious and logically and morally indefensible. It was a pure power play and it can’t be undone.
And what, Lizzie’s gong to admit she made a mistake?
As they say, two wrongs don’t make a right. Or three, or four…
Well, if you want to play that game …
There is no rule that allows admins to not move comments to Guano that they openly acknowledge do violate the rules. Failure to do so would be an abuse of admin privileges.
🙂
Prolly missed those because I’ve got him on ignore.
Mung,
We’re (almost) all human, mung!
But some humans are better than others, and we’d like that clearly set out in the rules please.
Evolution has no evidence and is unfalsifiable, while ID has evidence and is totally falsifiable.
That’s what you’re missing, along with the fact that he wins every encounter.
Glen Davidson
No, Mung, since enforcement is acknowledged to be stochastic.
Alternatively, Neil made a mistake.
Alternatively, Neil preserved the value of the Moderation Issues thread by taking a high volume topic out of it.
Alternatively (and not mutually exclusively), your proliferation of low volume meta-discussion threads was seen as spamming the front page and was stopped on those grounds.
Alternatively (and still not mutually exclusively), you actually were trying to spam the front page and looking to provoke a reaction that you could milk for months afterwards.
I believe that’s already in the works mung. keiths has made his list of values, Patrick has endorsed it and likely zipped it off to Elizabeth.
Modesty was not among them, I don’t think.
Good to know. Thanks!
Indeed. Any admin who behaved that way would be morally obligated to report his behavior to the site owner and offer his resignation.
Be careful, patrick. Not everyone may be as lazy as I am.
Mung,
I agree that closing your thread was a mistake, Mung. And if I recall correctly, I’m not the only person (besides you) who has said so, though I haven’t gone back to confirm that.
I honestly don’t know why you place such a high value on reason. Elizabeth already ruled that the “value” of this thread is on a par with Noyau, which is why so many comments of no value at all are allowed to stay and Neil has to move topics out of this thread to allow a discussion of value to take place.
It’s a topic that I debated with Elizabeth upon which she refused to be swayed. Why do we need yet another thread with Noyau rules?
I still agree with you on that topic. The rules should not be so relaxed in this thread. Participants shouldn’t be subject to Noyau-style interactions in order to discuss moderation issues.
The rules should be relaxed enough to allow strong criticism of the admins here, though.
This is a red herring. It had already been decided that meta-issues were to be discussed in the moderation issues thread and threads had already been closed to comments before that ever took place.
This comment of yours is a prime example of what I meant when I claimed that you are honesty challenged.
Elizabeth:
Yet here you are, Patrick, talking about TSZ in a main page thread. There’s no point in having TSZ. Mung’s nefarious plot is about to come to fruition. Muwahahahaha!
And don’t forget that time-honoured favourite: Wavelength = Frequency.
He totally killed with that one.
Before what took place? I’m talking about a possible thought process behind the closing of your threads.
Your baseless libel doesn’t follow from anything I’ve written.
Since we’re on the topic, please explain what your goal was in starting all of those new threads in the first place.