As the replacement Moderation page has developed the old bug so that permalinks no longer navigate to the appropriate comment, so here is yet another page for continuing discussion on moderating issues. The Rules can be found there so anyone with an issue should check that they are familiar with them.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
I was just joking.
I’m ultra-sensitive to such concerns, having been raised on a forum where people where absolutely paranoid about seekrit Admin discussions, having been burned at a site where there were summary bannings (though not as summary as UD).
But my experience is that admins will communicate somehow, non-publicly, whether by PM or email, and probably should, at least if you want some kind of consistency.
Anyway, I think I’ve hidden it. I have also, probably, hidden the dashboard. Perhaps someone would like to see whether they can see the Admin Discussion comments. If they can, they will be reassurred at its innocuity. If they can’t my evil plan is working….
And if the admins can’t find it, they will have to bookmark the page.
Admin discussion should be visible to all, or do it by email. Transparency is a big thing for me and a big attraction of this site. Let’s not start down the penguin equivalent of ‘animal farm’.
keiths:
Lizzie:
That’s perfectly understandable, but why make it password-protected and secret?
It needs to be secret because… what, exactly?
Rich:
Seconded. And I would say that it shouldn’t be done by email for that very reason.
Can I ask: what is the difference between discussing Admin biz by email and doing it on site?
It’s always seemed to me that it’s a distinction without a difference. Neither are transparent.
Lizzie,
Exactly. Hence my questions:
Three reasons:
Firstly, sometimes the issues are confidential;
Secondly, you can end up having a “board about running a board” (see Talk Rational for an example, fond though I am of the place)
Thirdly: each of our own deliberations within ourselves are necessarily secret; I don’t see that any line is crossed when we confer. On the contrary, it’s likely to result in better decisions.
Actually, there is a fourth: believe it or not, being admin of a site is pretty stressful. It is really helpful to have colleagues to confer with before making a decision, and knowing the decision is supported.
I know the arguments the other way, but I’ve tried both.
I agree with Keiths on the email issue (although there’s little we could practically do to prevent it). Ultimately like in life decisions will be made, but people can see the history, context and arguments and decide if they agree, disagree or disagree to the point of removing their participation.
Yes I understand that point. It’s just not how I think I want to run this place. There already is a place that runs that way, and it’s got lots of advantages. But this is a benign dictatorship, not a “Republic of Freethought” or whatever.
So just as you have to put up with my idiosyncrasies, so I think you have to put up with what may be the more considered joint idiosyncrasies of my three top-down appointed admins.
That’s the way it’s been so far, it’s just I’m trying to find a more efficient communication channel, as I don’t think people googling me in emergencies was very efficient.
What will remain transparent is the complaint process and the fact that nothing is deleted.
keiths:
Lizzie:
What sorts of issues are we talking about that are confidential, yet must be discussed among the admins? How often does that actually happen? And if there are issues that are legitimately confidential, why not discuss them by email while conducting other discussions in public?
The admins are in charge whether or not the inter-admin discussions are public.
Our inner deliberations are secret, therefore our admin discussions should be secret? That makes no sense.
I’m sure everyone agrees that conferring is beneficial. But why confer in secret?
All of which is possible in a public discussion.
I’m quite surprised to see you fighting against transparency, Lizzie, especially when you describe yourself as ultra-sensitive to people’s concerns about secrecy.
I think it’s been largely good, but if we’re the anti-UD (are we?) then that has certain obligations. Mung, Barry and William will jizz their pants if they can suggest some (false?) equivalency.
As an example, this morning there was a post awaiting moderation. And I wanted Elizabeth to take a look. I prefer to not identify the poster on the public pages.
Neil,
I suspect that you’re referring to this post by Creodont2.
If my surmise is correct, then why on earth should the poster’s identity be kept confidential? He submitted a comment under his well-known blog nym, intending (and indeed hoping) for it to appear publicly.
What would have been wrong with saying “Lizzie, Creodont2 has submitted a comment that is stuck in moderation because he is currently banned. Could you take a look and decide whether it should be approved?”
No, he was referring to a second comment, in which Creodont2 did what s/he was is banned for not saying he wouldn’t do, having done it several times and been warned, namely posting personal info.
So I trashed it. If Creodont2 wants to post here, s/he knows what the conditions are.
Well, you will just have to be surprised, keiths. As I’ve said, I’m very pro transparency, but I think there are limits, just as I am also very pro free speech, but also think there are limits (and there are certainly limits to what I will host on this site).
What I want to do is to be as clear as possible about what those limits are.
Actually, no, I am not referring to that post. The one that I was referring to was not approved and has not shown up for public viewing.
You make a good point, and one that I have made myself elsewhere. I’m just not yet convinced we want it here.
Up till now we’ve survived on a kind of proxy benign dictatorship, with admins doing what they think I’d have done, without, I don’t think, much in the way of conferring.
It’s possible that we should confer more.
But as I keep saying, this is a blog, running on blog software (for good reasons, I think) not a forum, running on forum software, and that puts some constraints on how we make things work.
Right now, technically, I think we will have to go back to email. But I’m not going to make a hurried decision about this.
Neil,
In that case, what would be wrong with saying “Lizzie, so-and-so has submitted a comment, but I’d like you to take a look before we approve it”?
ETA: With the actual nym in place of “so-and-so”.
Possibly nothing, keiths, and it might be that we do go down that road.
But this started as my personal blog, and I’m not going to rush into changing stuff until I’m convinced of the need.
And given that someone submitted a comment so egregious that it actually had to be censored, shouldn’t that be public knowledge?
(Not the comment, but the fact that it was censored.)
For thee but not for me. Think deeply about that, please.
Not approving the post should be sufficient. I don’t see a need for members to be publicly exposed as bad posters.
I prefer to put up with inappropriate accusations against admins if that is the cost of protecting the privacy of members in such cases.
Neil,
Are you serious? The whole point of transparent moderation decisions is that they’re visible!
You are arguing for the silent deletion of comments. Does that remind you of anyone we know at a “neighboring” website?
This thread is surreal.
Creodont2 himself has been banned. I have made that public, and given the reasons. I see no reason why I should therefore make his attempts to post public.
In fact, I did approve the first post, hoping that perhaps he wanted to open a conversation about posting. But from his second, he clearly didn’t, so I did not let it through.
The whole point of banning someone is so their posts don’t appear on the site.
No he is not. He is arguing for the banning of posts from a banned poster.
Your comments, are, frankly. This is not a site that doesn’t ban people. People who are banned don’t get to post. I do not have to explain to anyone why their posts do not appear: it is because they are banned. And I have been completely transparent as to why. Only two people are banned from this site, both for egregious violation of the site rules. This site has rules.
Oh, I have, Richard, I have.
Lizzie,
That’s not what he said:
I hope you’re right about what he meant, though.
In any case, my original question remains:
As you said, it’s public knowledge that Creodont2 is banned. Why shouldn’t a statement like the above appear on a public admin thread? Neil says it shouldn’t. Do you agree? If so, why?
Let me repost part of an earlier comment:
keiths:
Lizzie:
What sorts of issues are we talking about that are confidential, yet must be discussed among the admins? How often does that actually happen? And if there are issues that are legitimately confidential, why not discuss them by email while conducting other discussions in public?
The admins are in charge whether or not the inter-admin discussions are public.
Our inner deliberations are secret, therefore our admin discussions should be secret? That makes no sense.
I’m sure everyone agrees that conferring is beneficial. But why confer in secret?
All of which is possible in a public discussion.
Because right now I don’t want a public admin thread. I want to continue doing as we’ve been doing, i.e. communicating via PM and email. The only reason this has arisen is because I tried to set up a page on the blog to do it on, as it’s slighlty more convenient to do it as as comments to a post and keeps all decisions together for reference.
I don’t want this site to be all about moderation. We have a Moderation Issues thread, and I hope the issues will, in general, be few. Nobody wants to read a site where all the “recent posts” are about moderation stuff. Even at Talk Rational we had to set it up so that people could ignore that stuff, i.e. not have it in their feed.
But we can’t do that here, it’s not a forum. Nor is it a democracy. It’s a benign dictatorship, as I said. It’s what I buy for my hosting fees – the right to be the ultimate arbiter of what happens on this site. But as my instincts are to be open, and as I’ve said very clearly that there will be no deletions, that all moderation issues can be discussed, and that the only bannings will be for a very narrow and clear range of rule violations, the only issues in practice are over the moving of posts. Which remain visible, quotable and linkable.
Lizzie,
That’s apparent, though I still can’t figure out why.
All of the desiderata you listed above can be satisfied by a public admin thread, with the sole exception of confidential issues, and no one has yet been able to provide a single example of a truly confidential issue that needs to be discussed among the admins. They seem to be nonexistent or quite rare.
Why not use a public admin thread, and if a legitimately confidential issue ever arises, handle it by email?
Keiths, I don’t know if you are a Talk Rational regular, but let me commend it to you. It has all the features you seem to want in a discussion site. I like it. I do not intend to duplicate it here. If I’d wanted this site to be like Talk Rational I wouldn’t have started it, because Talk Rational already exists. And one of the reasons it exists in the form it does is because I was one of the admins at the time it went through a major transparency upheaval. As are result of that upheaval, lots of people left and formed another board (as these things seem to do), called Secular Cafe, where things were not quite so transparent. Both are on the blogroll if you want to check them out. They are both good boards. I prefer Talk Rational.
There are lots of ways to run a discussion board. This is an experiment in running one yet another way. Mostly it works. And I’m not going to make major changes unless I think there is a major problem. And I don’t.
Lizzie,
I agree, and that’s a major reason why I think increased moderation (as proposed for the Wine Cellar, for example) is a bad idea. Highly subjective moderation decisions about what does and doesn’t constitute a “whine” would frustrate people and lead to even more discussion about moderation. They already have. That idea backfired, causing more disruption than it solved.
Lizzie,
Sure, and no one is disputing your right as blog owner to run TSZ however you like.
Rich and I are just pointing out the consequences of one of your decisions.
You started an admin discussion thread which would have been public by default. You went out of your way to make it password-protected and secret. That raised eyebrows, so we asked why it needed to be secret.
None of the reasons you’ve offered so far actually require a secret thread, yet you are clearly determined to maintain the secrecy.
Openness is part of the ethos of TSZ, and an important one. What is it about these admin discussions that needs to be hidden from the members here?
I’m still very pro TSZ, btw.
Well, not exactly. I messed about in the dashboard trying to find a method for setting up a page that wouldn’t be public by default. WordPress offered me a choice between “public”, “password protected” and “private”. I chose “password protected” thinking that comment alerts wouldn’t appear on the front page. But they did (although the first ones were only test posts). So I messed about a bit more, and tried “private” – which seems not to appear at all on the front, but it turned out all the comments were visible from the dashboard! So I turned off the dashboard. Which may turn out to be a problem.
I think WordPress just doesn’t do this very well (it’s dead easy in vbulletin). So it may be back to email.
I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you.
But again, why not just make it a public thread? WordPress does that very well.
(Edited to add Lizzie’s quote for context.)
Rich:
Me too, which is why any step in a UDish direction is concerning.
I don’t really care about this, and I figure the admins will communicate one way or the other (and don’t particularly care what they’re saying when they do). But, as an html illiterate, I DID find having access to the dashboard useful sometimes, and I’m a little sorry to lose that–especially for the purpose of keeping the fact quiet that there are occasionally sub-rosa confabs..
I mean, I don’t think it’s a big deal either way; I just mention it cuz it hasn’t come up. Maybe no one else uses the dashboard?
fyi whatever change was made to the dashboard also disabled messaging.
I’d suggest that, at some point, it becomes impossible to predict what blog structure best promotes the foundational goals of the blog, and hence design the perfect blog. Great designs rarely spring complete from the brow of a designer (contrary to the mythical notions of design perpetuated by the ID movement), and instead arise through iteration, experience and selection. The history of aviation, for example, is littered with countless terrible or misguided combat aircraft designs. So let us put our money where our selectionist mouths are, settle on a reasonable format and observe how well it works, as well as what problems and inevitable unintended consequences it produces. After a reasonable period, iterate.
BTW, I’m not the least bothered by the notion of admins conferring privately. But the poof is in the pudding, and we’ll know soon enough if that is really problem.
Reciprocating Bill:
I agree, and in my upcoming OP (which I promise to finish tonight, come hell or high water) I argue that we’ve already been doing that, in effect if not always deliberately, and that we’ve collected enough information to conclude that increased moderation would be a mistake at this point.
Take your time.
I don’t think you can actually start a new topic at present. Hopefully Elizabeth will fix that in the morning.
Neil,
Thanks for the heads-up.
Reciprocating Bill:
Here’s the funny thing: I wasn’t either, until today. I assumed that they were conferring by occasional email but that it was simply a matter of convenience, not of secrecy.
So it got my attention today when Lizzie created an admin discussion thread and went out of her way to make it password-protected and secret, and it really gets my attention that she is so adamant about maintaining the secrecy, yet hasn’t given any plausible indication of why secrecy is needed.
As I wrote earlier:
She is adamant about secrecy, yet hasn’t shown that it’s needed; and all of this comes at a sensitive time when secrecy sends the wrong message, and when she is taking a circle-the-wagons approach to moderation, claiming against all evidence that there haven’t been major mistakes in moderation here at TSZ.
Lizzie has been a passionate advocate for openness, establishing it as a hallmark of the TSZ ethos. I give her enormous credit for that (and in particular, I think that her decision to allow OPs from our long-time foes was brilliant).
In light of that commendable history, her present insistence on secrecy is baffling.