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."
No, I didn’t “go out of my way” to make it so. I set it up as an alternative to email which is already password protected and secret.
It’s not like there was a public thread that I made private. There was already a private channel (as there is between me and all of you) and tried to find a different venue for it.
So that private information the admins want to share can be done relatively easily. Which could be about their availability, about site security, about personal matters, about technical problems – some of which might be confidential, and some of which might not be.
But the fact is there probably isn’t a good way of doing it, so I think it’s back to email.
geez, if I’ve learned anything on the internets it’s the depth of paranoia that any kind of board admininistration can engender, even on a site as benign as this one!
And the solution is….
We’ve kept the private page, but in fact if you really want to see it, you can find the comments via the dashboard.
This seems a good solution. We can still confer amongst ourselves, and there will be no front-page advertisement of the fact, but if you want to check the record you can (unlike with emails or PMs).
Absolutely. So we’ll see how this goes.
Oh, and dashboard access is now restored. Maybe I said that already.
My last comment for the night.
Lizzie:
Thank you for the change, Lizzie, but I’m still confused. Why is it necessary to keep all traces of the thread off the front page? Why not just use an ordinary public thread so that people know when new comments are submitted?
There’s something happening here
What it is ain’t exactly clear
There’s a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware
I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
There’s battle lines being drawn
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind
I think it’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side
It’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away
We better stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, hey, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, now, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down
Lizzie,
I like it.
For the record, the backchannel discussions are not as exciting as they probably are at UD.
Are you saying that all the whispering about naked penguin pics being floated around between mods is unfounded?!
Cross-posting this from the Permissions thread.
Lizzie,
For the record, no one actually expressed paranoia about what goes on in admin discussions (except walto, jokingly). Rich and I were just trying to figure out why you were insisting on secrecy when one of TSZ’s best features is the culture of openness.
Making the comments visible via the dashboard is a good thing, and it’s consistent with the theme of openness and transparency at TSZ.
I’m not asking for changes, but I would still like to know why you want the thread to be invisible everywhere except within the dashboard. What specifically would be lost if the thread were handled like the Moderation Issues thread, with a link on the front page and notification of new comments?
Again, I am not asking for changes. I just want to understand the rationale behind making the thread (and newly submitted comments on it) invisible to everyone except those who already know about it and are willing to scan the dashboard periodically for new comments.
Thanks.
spin keiths spin!
Lizzie, you’re going down that same path with keiths. I dare say that for the vast majority of us what you have already had to say on the subject is sufficient.
So, back to Salvador and his alleged quote of Glen …
Anyone seen Glen lately?
Cross-posting from the ‘Permissions’ thread:
Lizzie,
It’s clear that you don’t want to answer my question, but why?
Do you think the question is illegitimate? If so, could you say why? If not, then why are you refusing to answer it?
It strikes me as a perfectly reasonable question:
You’re scolding Gregory on another thread for evading questions and refusing to engage arguments, and rightly so; yet that seems to be exactly what you have been doing here and in the Moderation Issues thread.
No, keiths, I’m evading nothing. I just didn’t see your question.
And I’ve already given you the answer. I don’t want that page to be a prominent feature of the site. I’m an active member of a site dominated by discussions about how to run it. I don’t want another.
And fwiw, I wasn’t scolding Gregory for evading questions. Nobody is under any obligation to answer questions. I scolded him for making insinuations about my beliefs and integrity without actually engaging with my arguments. I think he should put up or shut up. But then Gregory gets under my skin. I should ignore him.
Lizzie:
How could you possibly miss it? I posted it on two threads, Moderation Issues and Permissions, both of which you’ve been active on, one of which you just created today, and it’s been on both throughout the day as you’ve continued to post.
The answer you gave was different:
And as I pointed out:
But let’s discuss the new answer:
The decision is solely yours to make, of course, but consider the consequences.
By keeping the thread off the front page and suppressing comment notifications, you are actively trying to hide the discussion from some of the readers. Is that the message you want to send on a blog where openness and transparency are paramount? It seems to clash pretty starkly with this:
Also, you wrote:
You can have consistency even if the discussions are public. We already know that there is sometimes disagreement among the admins. We’ve seen it. Why present a façade of consensus if openness and transparency are a priority?
Again, the decisions are yours alone to make, but beware of unintended consequences.
Lizzie,
Well, you were scolding him for refusing to engage people’s arguments, which amounts to the same thing. Refusal to engage takes many forms, and evasion of pertinent questions is one of them.
Agreed. His snark would be easier to overlook if he would engage our arguments and contribute something to the discussion. Instead, it’s basically nothing but vacuous sniping.
It’s to your credit that you allow everyone to post, including annoying people like Gregory. You’ve prioritized openness over personal preference.
I am a big fan of transparency, but I can also see that moderators (and the site) might benefit from a communication channel where they can be quite frank without their every word being picked over endlessly by some random combative poster.
Just saying.
DNA_Jock,
Lizzie has already chosen to make the comments visible to random posters, combative or not.
My point is that it sort of defeats the purpose to make the comments visible as a gesture of openness, but then to take steps to keep them concealed from as many readers as possible by erasing all traces of the thread from the front page.
Just saying.
(1) The dashboard has lost considerable functionality for us peons. Doesn’t really serve much purpose in its current state. Not sure if that was intentional or an unintended side-effect.
(2) Can’t imagine who DNA_Jock might have been thinking of. Nobody here just likes to fight for the hell of it, right?
(3) Presumably all this stuff will be cleared up by the OP on moderation that was absolutely promised for yesterday.
walto,
Yes. I mentioned that yesterday in the Permissions thread:
And no, walto, my moderation OP won’t fix your dashboard for you.
Definitely unintentional. I’ll look into it.
And no, walto, my moderation OP won’t fix your dashboard for you.
But it will enlighten us on how the dashboard SHOULD work, presumably!
(Don’t be modest!!)
ETA: can you try clearing your cookies, though? It may be an unintended consequence of something I thought I’d reverted, and do seem to have reverted.
This is really a case of making a virtue out of necessity. Blocking access broke the site. We are still working on fixing some of that breakage.
I cleared my cookies.
I mean, I can (and could) get to the dashboard, but it now just contains links to the five most recent posts, and has no other functionalities. Not really much point in restoring access to that page, if that’s all there is to it.
Again, this isn’t wildly important to me, one way or the other. Just trying to understand the current plan.
Authors should find their ability to access the dashboard and publish posts is back to normal. Please flag any continuing issues. If my wife asks, say I wasn’t here. 🙂
YAY ALAN!!!
(I mean, your secret’s safe with me.)
Elizabeth, I’ve seen your expressed worries about moving posts to Guano when they reference you. And I think you would be perfectly justified in moving all of Gregory’s made-up bullshit about you to Guano any time you see it.
I’m pretty sure that some posters here would object but only for the same reasons they might object to guano-izing any post, not because they mistrust your ability to do it without bias from the personal attack on you.
I’m hurt when I see Gregory day after day getting away with telling porky pies about you. I’d be happy seeing them all moved out of discussion to where they belong.
Of course, you should do what you feel right. I’m just saying that at least some of the posters at TSZ – one, at the very least – think you can be active in moderating against attacks on yourself.
I think Gregory is still bitter about the absolute mauling he got over his TedX talk.
He never really got going here, telling folks the didn’t have the necessary History of philosophy / science chops to contradict him from the get go.
hotshoe:
That’s right. I don’t like the rule, and I would prefer that rule-violating posts not be Guano’ed, but there is no question that Gregory’s post does in fact violate the rule.
Well, it’s getting very tedious. It is always off-topic, and doesn’t address anything I’ve actually said. And he rarely posts anything else.
Elizabeth,
Its that you don’t have his HPSS background.
And you haven’t sufficiently “elevated” yourself.
What is HPSS?
I got this in an email:
I beg your pardon for contacting you this way but I can’t reach the site long enough to contact anyone else.
Are you, or is anyone else, having trouble with loading or logging into TSZ because of timeout errors? I can reach the site generally at the beginning of the day but as the day progresses I get more and more timeouts that last for longer and longer. Browser scrubbing only works intermittently and only for minutes before another timeout regime takes hold. Being logged in seems to make it all happen faster. This has been going for weeks (since the beginning of June when I started reading again). I’m very curious if this is a general difficulty.
Not found that myself. hmmm.
I’ve had no problem. I had problems like that over at UD for a while but those seem to have cleared up.
Hey Admins, how do I do the “Continue Reading…” thingy so my OP’s don’t take up so much space on the main page? Or is that an Admin only capability? thanks.
Mung,
Stick this into your HTML where you want the page break to appear:
<!–more–>
There’s an icon on the toolbar, with a kind of horizontal bar across it. If you click on that, it inserts the “Continue Reading” widget into place.
thanks!
Lizzie,
That’s better, because then he won’t have to remember the “<!–more–>” string.
I’m stuck with remembering it because I normally compose my OPs outside of WordPress.
keiths,
Guano!
Patrick,
Heh. I thought the same thing when I proofread the comment just before clicking ‘Post’.
It wasn’t intentional, but I like the way the tension builds and then deflates like a Patriots football when you hit the word “HTML”.
Mods, maybe you’ve already discussed this, but I don’t understand why, when I click on one of the “recent comments” links, I’m often sent, not to that comment, but to the second to last page of the comments. Similarly, when I click on the comments link above an OP, I will sometimes be taken to the last page and sometimes to the second last page. Is that something you can fix?
I accidentally edited out the content of Erik’s comment in the Supreme Court thread. If one of the moderators checking this thread can restore it I would be grateful.
Sorry.
I think I fixed it. Fortunately, the old text was still visible in my RSS reader.
hotshoe_,
Are you referring to your comment beginning with “Not parsimonious to appeal to some unspecified “natural law”. No need to invent or invest in such an idea.”?
It was the linked comment, which Neil has fixed — now it looks like what I was trying to reply to, before I messed it up — and I’m going to my messing up as an omen to ignore/not reply to that particular comment any more.
Thanks, Neil 🙂