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."
keiths,
I’m sure other members here are heartily bored reading our differing views regarding how this blog should be run. So this is going to be my only response to you. I’ll start by agreeing on one thing. It is Lizzie’s blog and while your views are noted, it is up to Lizzie how she runs it.
I’d just like to correct a couple of errors in your comment.
1. You refer to an “admission that you have a lying problem”. It was intended as irony and apparently understood as irony by others who read the comment.
2. I did not volunteer to be an admin for TSZ. Lizzie asked me to do it. I gave no specific undertakings because Lizzie asked for none.
I’m not going to respond to further comments from you regarding general policy on administration and my interpretation of it. You have Lizzie’s email address if you want to put a complaint to her.
Alan and kieths,
As a lowly outsider and not-very-regular contributor, I think your personal differences aren’t worth the stress you place on them. I look forward to each of your posts, because you so often see things I wish I could without your help.
I second that. Moderation issues are overrated.
What matters is that we don’t ban people and don’t delete posts.
Everything else is a nit.
Flint,
🙂
Flint,
Personal differences aren’t the issue. The issue is Alan’s public moderation behavior, which affects everyone who posts here.
Can you think of any reason why Alan, unlike Patrick and Neil, should be free to flout the rules and invent his own? Or to actively prevent someone from lodging complaints in the Moderation Issues thread?
Alan,
No, you were admitting that you have a lying problem. After all, I had just demonstrated it.
Here is your admission:
You admitted it because it’s true, and ironically, your present denial actually underscores its truth. Thus we have the ridiculous spectacle of a moderator who brazenly flouts the rules yet presumes to impose them on others.
What, you were drafted and had no legal right to say no? When you agreed to accept the job, you agreed to accept the responsibilities it entailed.
Seriously? You’re going to try to lawyer your way out of this by pretending that you never agreed to follow the rules? Christ, Alan.
No. Comments regarding moderation issues belong in the Moderation Issues thread, where everyone who is affected by moderation can see them. I will continue to make them here. You prevented me from doing so during the Wine Cellar fiasco, which was an outrageous thing for a moderator to do, and directly against Lizzie’s wishes.
Don’t even think about pulling that stunt again.
I admit I wasn’t aware of any of this. My own efforts, such as they are, haven’t been sabotaged. If Alan has done all of these nefarious things, I missed it. To me, this sounds both personal and irrelevant. If your posts have been removed, I think this is a Bad Thing, because I like your posts.
Flint,
Yes, I don’t think you were around at the time.
It’s public and highly relevant. It affects all of us when a moderator invents new rules without consulting Lizzie, or when he interferes with commenters’ attempts to lodge complaints in the Moderation Issues thread.
They weren’t removed, but Alan kept moving them out of the Moderation Issues thread, over my protests. It was a blatant abuse of moderator privileges.
Lizzie wants a shitpile, so she uses shitty moderators and that’s just what she gets.
Lizzie says they are doing a great job and she has great faith in them. Haha. Yep, this is your model moderator here.
Patrick excuse is that the rules allow him to be an asshole in some threads, so why shouldn’t he be. I guess the rules are the only thing that stops him from being the scumbag he is everywhere.
You haven’t missed anything.
There was a disagreement. However, keiths is not a neutral party.
I stand behind Alan, whom I see as having acted in good faith. And, yes, he responded with irony at one time, but apparently some people are not good at picking up irony.
Please, let’s not dredge up misunderstandings from the past.
Neil,
Nor are you. Like Alan, you also got caught trying to invent your own rules, with your foolish “timeout” idea. Your fellow moderator Patrick had to intervene in that case.
You think that when Alan prevented me from posting a complaint in the Moderation Issues thread, he was acting “in good faith”? That’s an, um, unique perspective.
That would be you. Alan’s comment doesn’t even make sense when interpreted ironically:
He meant what he said, but he wishes he hadn’t said it. It’s a bit late for that.
Also, I am not asking Flint or anyone else to take my word on these matters. The evidence is available in the relevant threads. Anyone who wishes to can look for him or herself.
keiths,
You seem to think its all about you Keiths. The fact is Lizzie wants a the site full of trash talking shit, so she has moderators that facilitate that. Simple as that. There are no rules, there are suggestions. Why should you be surprised.
Materialists like trash talking. They need more places for it, pandas thumb and Evc aren’t enough.
No, it’s about all of us who are affected by moderation, including you, phoodoo.
No, that was irony.
Neil said:
I appreciate that, Neil. By the way, your comment is showing in the admin panel and in the recent comments but not, in my browser (Chrome), in this thread.
Flint and anyone else still wanting to read more, I’ll enlarge on Neil’s point about Keiths not being a neutral party in the noyau thread. Apologies to others who have heard it before.
ETA link
Is there a possibility that I’m in your ignore list? It’s easy to do that with a mistaken click.
Now that we have the ignore button, I’d like to suggest thread authors have the privilege of guano-free discussions. And authors can announce also who is on their ignore list for the duration of the discussion.
In other words authors and participants can waive the rights of being protected by mods since the ignore button is often good enough.
Mods won’t have to get involved and disagreements like what is happening now between mods and commenters can be reduced.
Is there any harm in trying? For example, some conversations in Noyau calmed down on their own.
That may not resolve the current disputes, but it may reduce future incidents.
Let’s leverage the benefit of the ignore button now that we have it.
Bingo! *blushes* No idea how I managed that. And, no, I don’t have anyone else on ignore either.
Flint said:
Assembling a list of quotes without context is not in and of itself quote-mining, even if they are assembled for the purpose of quote-miners to use them.
No, not by definition. They’re just a collection of quotes.
I’ve answered the question several times. You just don’t like the answer. “Why” they have been removed from their context is irrelevant. Removing quotes from their context and collecting them on a website doesn’t in itself constitute quote-mining – even if those quotes are deliberately assembed for the purpose of quote-mining.
You seem to think that a quote taken from their context is sufficient to call a quote a “quote-mine”. It is not. All quotes, to one degree or another, are “taken from their context”.
The purpose of their extraction is irrelevant to a finding of whether or not those quotes on that page bereft of any sort of context are instances of “quote-mines”. They are not.
phoodoo,
Phoodoo you seem unable to learn. Remember all that egg on your face the last time you motive Mongered in Lizzie’s absence?
No, keiths, I’m not. Try and read for comprehension next time.
This misunderstands the place of guano. For that matter, in misunderstands the site itself.
TSZ is not a private discussion club. It’s a public site that all can see. Most readers from the public have not signed up, so do not have an option to put a user on ignore.
Moving a post to guano is not a punishment. It’s a way of keeping the discussion a little cleaner for the benefit of the non-members who read this site. That is to say, comments are moved to guano mainly to reduce the distraction that they would otherwise cause to outside readers.
What is the purpose of their extraction then?
The “ignore” button is not too far from the “Reply” button. I’ve done that by mistake, though I recognize the mistake and correct it.
I mostly read on my RSS feed reader, which isn’t affected by “Ignore”.
Why would a quote-miner use a quote that was not amenable to quote-mining?
I guess this should not be a total shock coming from you. After all, you would argue that every person should have a gun and that guns per se are not bad, it’s the people that kill people with them that are bad.
So a list of quote mines, like a box of guns, is harmless until someone uses it with intent. Laughable.
Have you looked around at the laughing stock your country has become to the rest of the world? No, of course not. I doubt you’ve even travelled outside of the USA.
Neil,
But we have the ignore button now.
Personally I shut off 4 or 5 commenters and my discussions look orderly to me.
I provided a suggestion to help the mod and also to reduce conflicts, not carry a private discussion. If anything, guano-free zones would make discussion even more open.
That said thanks for the staff serving as moderators to my discussions. I estimate you guys sifted through 2000 comments by all participants.
Just trying to make your jobs easier and create less unnecessary hard feelings when commenters have comments guanoed. We have the ignore button now. Shouldn’t that make life easier?
OMagain said:
ROFL. Yes, Mr. Brainwashed Liberal, a box of guns is harmless in and of itself. In our analogy, copies of those guns can be extracted and used for many different purposes – target shooting, friendly competition, self-protection, and murder. If you use the copy of the gun to kill someone, then that particular copy becomes a murder weapon. It doesn’t make the original copy, still in the box, also a murder weapon.
If you copy and use a quote from the list as a quote mine, it doesn’t make the quote in the list also a quote-mine.
I think it was mung who swore for weeks that Lizzie had abandoned the site because it was such a den of iniquity. I don’t recall anyone doing anything classy like apologizing.
Apologies if I am wrong about either of these.
I think Neil was unfairly attacked for attempting to resolve an unpleasant situation largely of your making. I regret not being more supportive of Neil’s action at the time. It was done with the best of intentions.
Would someone like to author an OP on gun control?
I should be safe enough with my collection of anthrax spores, then. It’s only copies of them that are going to do the damage. I gathered them for the innocent purpose of … uh … research? Yeah, research.
Alan,
Since we are discussing your abuse of moderator privileges, our conversation belongs here, in the Moderation Issues thread — not in Noyau.
You wrote:
A commitment that involved abiding by Lizzie’s rules for the blog. Why do you have such chronic trouble honoring that straightforward commitment?
Why on earth would you unilaterally decide to regard that as the “prime directive”, instead of simply following the rules that Lizzie had already carefully established to promote her goals for the site? Nothing about the situation required new rules, and it wasn’t your place to invent them. Why not just do your job?
Also, you’re portraying this as some thoughtful implementation of a “prime directive”, when in fact you were just reacting emotionally and impulsively. As I commented to Lizzie at the time:
If you are not logged into the site, there is no “Ignore” button. Most people reading the site are not logged in.
Alan:
No, it was just another walto flareup. As I noted, those die out rather quickly:
Alan:
Right. You impulsively and unnecessarily invented new rules instead of simply following Lizzie’s, which were adequate to the task. It created a mess that she had to clean up later, and it generated far more chaos than it eliminated.
She renamed it after I pointed out that the name “Wine Cellar” was derogatory:
Alan:
Your precipitate “Wine Cellar” move created chaos, so Patrick came up with a better idea:
See how well that worked? Patrick had an idea. Instead of just barging ahead and implementing it, he ran it by Lizzie and everyone else. It made sense, so Lizzie decided to implement it, and it has worked out well.
Contrast that with your behavior. You reacted emotionally and impulsively to a situation, created a new rule that was not needed, and barged ahead and implemented it without consulting Lizzie (or anyone else). While defending your action, you actually prevented me from posting in the Moderation Issues thread — a massive abuse of your moderator privileges. Your unilateral actions created a huge disruption and left a mess that Lizzie had to clean up. She wisely rejected your idea — to have moderators move “whines” to the W(h)ine Cellar — and adopted Patrick’s instead.
Could the lesson be any more obvious?
We’re not. My comment in noyau was intended as clarification for Flint and anyone else unaware of the history of of your theatrical over-reactions to any curbing of your tendency to bully interlocutors.
I thinke this ought to stop.
I was “bullied” for a couple hundred posts.
I do not consider heated discussion to be bullying. I have been bullied in real life, and internet flame wars are not bullying.
The nearest thing to internet bullying is banning, deleting, editing posts.
Heated argument may be unseemly, but it is not bullying. Recipients of the heat need to realize that one of two things pertain: One is wrong and merits the strong opposition; or the opposition is overwrought, and that this will be apparent to onlookers. Actually, both might be true.
The guano/noyau rules are the best I’ve sen on the internet. Personal attacks are confined to one thread, where anyone who doesn’t like like them can ignore them. And personal attacks not posted to noyau go to guano. It’s simple.
Obviously, personal attacks come in different temperatures, and some try to sneak in under the door. That’s why moderators get paid the big bucks.
Alan,
Neil was reprimanded — both by me and by his fellow moderator Patrick — for unilaterally censoring a discussion here at TSZ, preventing the parties from commenting. Like you, he impulsively created a new rule instead of sticking to Lizzie’s.
He at least appears to have learned his lesson. Why haven’t you? How many fiascos will it take before the lesson sinks in?
You are now — unbelievably — arguing that you never agreed to abide by Lizzie’s rules:
The entire issue here is your repeated insistence on creating your own rules instead of following Lizzie’s. This is her blog, Alan, not yours.
I shouldn’t have to ask you this, but apparently it’s necessary.
Going forward, do you agree, as a moderator, to stop inventing your own rules and to be bound by Lizzie’s rules instead?
Agreed. It is just unethical and dishonest. That is so much better.
Incredible! Your hounding of Neil for acting in the best interests of this site and for volunteering his services to maintain it and your re-branding it as “reprimanding” is farcical.
Sal,
We actually have a proposed solution that Lizzie likes, if we can just overcome the technical difficulties:
I had intended to look at this over the holidays, but unfortunately, an emergency arose at the office and I spent most of the time working instead.
Alan,
Like you, Neil overreacted and created a new “timeout” rule instead of following Lizzie’s rules, which were sufficient.
His timeout rule was rejected for obvious reasons. Lizzie doesn’t want censorship here at TSZ.
He seems to have learned his lesson. Why haven’t you?
That’s great. But let me suggest you set up an empty wordpress template and use copies of the files produced by the backup plugin to create a facsimile. You can then play around with the software to your heart’s content without any risk of compromising this site. I can email you download links if you like.
Alan,
I certainly wouldn’t experiment on the live site! That’s asking for trouble.
Meanwhile, I would appreciate an answer to this question, which gets at the heart of the matter:
phoodoo,
Thank you for raising an issue regarding moderation in the Moderation Issues thread. The Skeptical Zone prides itself on open discussion and never deleting comments. We appreciate you taking the time to improve the site.
After careful investigation, an admin has determined that the comment you are complaining about was posted in the Noyau thread. That thread is where participants can blow off steam without their comments being subject to the usual site rules. As such, the comment you quoted does not violate any rules, any more than the name calling in your comment to which it was a reply.
Noyau is not for everyone. We at The Skeptical Zone encourage those of a more delicate disposition and refined sensibilities to avoid it.
Thank you again for helping to improve the site. We look forward to your continued participation.
Alan Fox,
If anyone does, please avoid the euphemism and call it by the accurate name of “victim disarmament.”
Patrick,
That’s probably the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about delicate and refined phoodoo.
Could be a lively discussion! 🙂
keiths,
A variant of that I’ve been looking into would leave a link to the Guano’d comment when one is moved. That would retain the context of the thread and make it easier for those who want to see the comment to do so.
I haven’t spent a lot of time on it and I’m very worried that it will involve me writing PHP.
No you shouldn’t and it isn’t.