Rules

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 we share; what misunderstandings of other views we hold; and, having cleared away the straw men, find out where our real differences lie.  In my experience, when you reach that point, who is right becomes obvious to both parties 🙂

Edited 1/12/15 to change from third to first person plural.

 

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 content of the post, not the perceived failings of the poster. [purple text added 28th November 2015]
    • 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*.

ETA 8th September 2013

  • If you have author permissions, and post an OP, you may find you have the technical ability to edit comments to your post, and move them.  Please do not do so.  Rule violating posts will be moved by moderators, and it is a principle of this site that comments are not edited, deleted, or hidden.

ETA 27th January 2014

  • Don’t use this site to try to “out” other internet denizens or indulge in ad hominem speculations.  Such speculations may, notwithstanding general principles regarding deletion, be deleted. ETA 13th June 2015: please read the guidlines in ETA6 below and note that the rule applies even if the person in question has made the information possible to find out)

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)

 ETA6, June 13th, 2015): Below is a copy&paste from a a post of mine in a discussion regarding the outing rule:

It is part of the founding philosophy of TSZ that no-one “deserves” to be banned. People are banned for one reason only: to ensure that we don’t get posts containing the very narrow range of material that is not allowed here, namely porn/malware (or links to); and material that gives the RL identity of people known to us by their internet names, without their permission (also known, I understand, as “doxxing”).

There are a couple of grey areas regarding that last one but I think I have made the boundaries clear, and will try to make them clearer still:

Firstly: If someone has made it clear who they are in RL, e.g. by linking to their publications, that is fine, and it is still fine for others to acknowledge the identity if their publications are being discussed. However, it is not OK to use that person’s RL name in personal attacks, which are against the game-rules anyway (“assume the other person is posting in good faith”; “address the argument, not the person”) but are not in themselves things I would ever ban anyone for. Such posts just get moved to guano, just as pieces get moved off a chess board. But if in breaking those rules, you invoke someone’s personal ID, that is not on, the reason being that I don’t want such personal attacks here to come up in a google search of that person’s RL name, as such things happen, as I know to my cost.

Secondly, if the person in here is not a regular poster here, but is nonetheless effectively party to the conversations we often have by loud-hailer as it were, at another site, then membership protections apply. In any case, in the case of kairosfocus, I think he is, or was, a registered member here, and you easily can’t tell in any case. So if in doubt, assume membership, either actual or virtual, and don’t link identity with internet handle. In other words, do not post the RL identities of people with whom our personal relations, as it were, are in their internet identities.

ETA 29th November, 2015:

This post by Reciprocating Bill sums up the ethos of the site brilliantly so I’m quoting it here:

Participation at this site entails obligations similar to those that attend playing a game. While there is no objective moral obligation to answer questions, the site has aims, rules and informal stakeholders, just as football has same. When violations of those aims and rules are perceived and/or the enforcement of same is seen as arbitrary or inconsistent, differences and conflicts arise. No resort to objective morality, yet perfectly comprehensible and appropriate opprobrium.

13th December 2015:

This post by DNA_Jock sums up how the implementation of the rules essentially works, and how I think it should work.  If you think it doesn’t, let us know:

DNA_Jock:

walto: it’s arbitrary and capricious which posts get guanoed

I think not. It is stochastic.
Things that increase vs. decrease the probability of guanoing:
1 Clearly breaks rules vs. may be interpreted as rule-breaking.
2 Guanoing requested vs. Target requests post not be guanoed
3 Author perceived to be “home” side vs. Author perceived to be “visitor”
4 Target perceived to be “visitor” vs. Target is an admin
5 Substantive content is low vs. Substantive content is high
6 Derailing active discussion vs. ancient bloody history.
As to the relative importance of the different factors, YMMV.
<snip irrelevant bit>
Discrete-choice modeling, it’s fun.

ETA (by AF) 23.01.20 — TSZ Policy on Racism (as stated by EL here)

I do not want racist material on this site. Like porn, it should be deleted immediately (not moved to Guano).

The poster should be warned, and if there is ONE further violation, then the poster should be banned…

…That is my policy. There is a very short list of things that I simply do not want, and will not have on this site, and racist material is one of them.

410 thoughts on “Rules”

  3. 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? 

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.  🙂

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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?

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

  14. 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).

  16. 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.]

  17. 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).

  18. 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.

  19. Already set to maximum (25) available as an option. Don’t think it’s a good idea to start messing in the css files.

  20. 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.

  21. 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.

  22. 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.

  23. 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.

  24. 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.

  25. @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.

  26. 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?

  27. 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!

  28. 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”

  32. “Rule violating posts will be moved by violators….”

    Did you mean “Rule violating posts will be moved by moderators, not OPs,….”?

  34. Well, TSZ does have some of the most polite violators I’ve seen. I’ve had the urge to escort myself to Guano on several occasions.

  36. They’re just regular spam, Neil. Judging by the photos, one is selling fitted kitchens. I wonder how many Polish readers we have that are in need of a new kitchen. The users list is jampacked with spam registrations too.

  37. They’re just regular spam, Neil.

    Thanks for checking.

    I’m surprised that a subscriber can create a draft post.

    Yes, I knew there were many spam registrations. Since you cannot post comment spam without registering, that is to be expected.

  38. Is anyone else having trouble with the editor jumping all around while trying to correct something?

    I usually paste stuff in, but if I try to correct a mistake, I find the editor constantly jumps away from the place I am trying to insert a comma or some other small correction. Sometimes it jumps around almost constantly.

  41. Just a minor moderation comment here.

    A recent message by Gregory was actually posted twice. The first time it was flagged for moderation. The second time, it went through without being flagged.

    I’m not sure why that happens. I’ve seen it happen to others. People seem to instinctively repost.

    When that happens, I send the one that did not appear to trash, eventually to be deleted. Other moderators seem to handle it the same way.

    I mention this purely as information, for those who see some of the evidence and wonder what happened.

  42. I have restored Gregory to Author status.

    I suspect we were a little harsh. We had assumed that he deleted comments, but actually they went to trash from where they could be restored.

    And now KN has done something similar. So both should be treated alike.

  43. The fact of the matter is that Barry’s post made me so angry that I did in fact delete it. So while I’m grateful that the post was restored, that doesn’t change the fact that my action was in violation of TSZ rules for moderation.

    But now I must accept responsibility for that action. To that end, I hereby request that my authorship and moderation privileges be withdrawn, though I shall continue to participate otherwise.

  44. Kantian Naturalist: To that end, I hereby request that my authorship and moderation privileges be withdrawn, though I shall continue to participate otherwise.

    For the present, I am choosing not to do this.

    Firstly, you recognize the mistake.

    Secondly, I am not sure if it works. If I remove author privileges, you would need moderator assistance to post a new thread. But I’m not sure if that prevents you from being able to moderate comments on your own thread. Maybe I should create a special account for myself to test these things.

  45. Can something please be done about Gregory? He is seriously misusing his moderator privileges. His latest trick is hold my posts in the moderation queue so they don’t appear, exactly as is done at UD.

    It’s obvious to me this guy isn’t interested in good faith discussion. Why is he still given the benefit of the doubt after he has clearly shown his disingenuous intentions?

  46. Kantian Naturalist,

    I agree with Neil, KN, we understand the procedure for moving comments is not obvious and the rule about no deletions was not perhaps as widely known as was assumed.

    Regarding wordpress rôles, I think the only way to step outside the 5 options provided is to modify the CSS code, which I don’t think would be a good idea.

  47. thorton: Can something please be done about Gregory? He is seriously misusing his moderator privileges. His latest trick is hold my posts in the moderation queue so they don’t appear, exactly as is done at UD.

    Hi Thorton

    If Gregory is putting comments into moderation, I consider that outside Lizzie’s rules, as it is effectively deleting.. Gregory has author status, which allows him to delete comments in his own threads and not elsewhere. There is no option to fine-tune member rôles so authors must agree not to delete comments. Admins (Lizzie, Neil, Patrick, Mark, eigenstate and me) are the only members who have the ability to move comments. If any of us miss something, a heads-up is all that should be required.

    Hopefully, Gregory will see this and take note.

    I’ll monitor this thread as time permits if you want so add something.

  49. “Moving is all we do here” – Lizzie

    Yes, I see this and take note. As I could not see how to move off-topic posts, I flagged them for moderation. Not for deletion, but for moving. Should a moderator decide said post(s) should not be moved, I assume it/they would then be unflagged and returned to the thread.

    Disallowing moderation flagging by ‘authors’ would be to effectively take away all ‘author’ influence over a thread and give them instead to ‘regular’ posters, who have not contributed the OP. A kind of reverse hierarchy that can lead to highjacking.

    It is your choice to make, Lizzie, of course, since it’s your site. But realise there are people that wish to abuse the system, who are not thread authors. E.g. http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/?p=3601&cpage=1#comment-34870
    “This will get moved to guano but…”

    Or this: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/?p=3552&cpage=2#comment-34794
    “Since my previous comment is likely to go to guano, I will rephrase my comment to make it less offensive.”

    Is this not an abuse of TSZ system? – “I’ll be a rude jerk to someone, but then shortly afterwards say sorry for it, so then it’s o.k.?” It will take longer to clear moderation if ‘author’ rights are reduced to just making OPs.

  50. Gregory: Disallowing moderation flagging by ‘authors’ would be to effectively take away all ‘author’ influence over a thread and give them instead to ‘regular’ posters, who have not contributed the OP.

    That’s the way it is in most Internet forums.

    The author is, almost by definition, a biased participant, so should not be making moderation decisions.

    That said, I do appreciate that you put some comments in moderation, rather than deleting them. But, personally, I think you used rather poor judgment and objected to far too many comments. And, by doing so, you generated a reaction.

Comments are closed.