On the purpose of moderating

Requesting you're own posts to be deleted or modified should only be an option when you have revealed sensitive information.

As far as moderating wider problems, there should be a consensus before any action is taken. Of course everyone can't agree but those who are about at the time should agree to action taken.

The board moderates the moderators.

I think moderation should never be heavy handed. And why do you not think that Tim? Are you a fan of George Bush Jr?

(hi tim!!)

or, to put it another way, the internet cannot be moderated. if you cannot put your words in one place, put them in another, it really doesnt matter

What Gareth said. This *is* a moderated board and it's my feeling that we can trust them (haha not me!) to behave sensibly and ask for advice when they need it.

37 Plimsoll Road
Finsbury Park
N4 2EB

1) Deletion of pr0n
2) Deletion of offensive/illegal posts/people's real names
3) Removal of duplicate threads that haven't gotten off the ground, or have been posted on the wrong board
4) Simple admin like correcting a typo in a thread title

3) Removal of duplicate threads that haven't gotten off the ground, or have been posted on the wrong board

I'm not entirely convinced by this... if people don't post to threads they will disappear down the new answers page very quickly. What is the problem?

This is not a good thing.

And also that he likes discussing music on ILE, because he's a gouty old fart who can't be bothered clicking ILM at the top of the board.

It's a really hard area to define. I'm going to try and draft some guidelines which the mods can agree on and then can be in the public domain. I also think debate about moderator decisions is really good because we all have made and will make mistakes.

One point somebody makes upthread is very valid: ILX was started as a messageboard with the aim of providing a space for intelligent, polite conversation - stupid and nonsensical and heated conversation too, but not the anarchy of flamewars, trolling, board invasions etc etc that USENET had become. If you prefer that kind of stuff - and it is a lot of fun sometimes - then ILX maybe isn't for you. But don't ask us to change to fit your idea of what a messageboard should be. Like I seem to be saying a lot these days - ILX has never advertised, or recruited, or promoted itself in any way. It's just there - you can walk in and walk out, but it doesn't owe you anything just because you've visited it.

The big obstacle with ILx is that much of what's posted on it is the equivalent of routine pub conversations/debates, but you miss the tone of voice and the delivery, so things can sometimes be read as being aggressive when really they're not.

A set of moderating guidelines would be handy but we've seen that people who come here are very, very quick to jump on what they see as unreasonable moderation.

: - D

I'll challenge racists and bigots where I find them, but provocative trolls aren't worth my time.

Guidelines are a very good idea, I look forward to reading them.

Flip you melonfarmer, I never talk about music on ILE.

I have now thought of a new game - who can get a post to this thread moderated most quickly?

Mine eyes are mine own moderators.

There's also a massive difference between deletion and locking. Locking is a reversible decision and removes nothing from an existing thread - deletion is permanent.

Also - being scared to say something = dud. phrasing it more politely = classic. :)

The problem with the 'ignoring' thing Ed is that what it means is that the less battle-hardened posters, who do find it offensive and not easily ignored, tend to leave before the major trolls do. What causes forums to decline, in my experience, isn't that they get overrun with trolls but that they become very hard-bitten and combatative and cynical. The posters who stay think that's an improvement and say hooray for freer speech. The posters who've left don't say anything.

you pays your money (free!), and make your choice. in the end i'm just glad people go to the effort of making anything like this, or anything, and cant' quite find it in me to have a go at people for providing me with anything. after all, i can just........leave

so, good work all!

On the basis of discussions elsewhere, we all agree that requests for ones own posts to be deleted are deprecated. Unless privacy is compromised. For this reason, I was rather concerned by this, yesterday:

Can someone delete my post on the IL* Challenge thread please... I suddenly regret posting it.
-- Matt DC (runmd...), March 20th, 2003 5:01 PM. (later) (admin) P>----------------------------------------------------------------------

(done, matt.)
-- jess (dubplatestyl...), March 20th, 2003 5:05 PM. (later) (admin)

But then I didn't see what was deleted so I can't really be sure. Jess? [IP addresses deleted by Moderator Nick]

Tom - yes, I agree, which is why I wanted it deleted.

my responses have always been based on instinct not rules: i reserve the right to be capricious bcz it's my time being eaten into and grief being added to — life is abt dealing with capricious ppl, and moderators are also ppl and trolls have to learn to deal with them

moderating shd be nearly non-existent and unnoticeable 99% of the time — the problem is always how to ensure the 1% of the time does not become a 10% of the time *as a result of moderator action* (it's like the hippocratic oath: first do no harm... ie to ilx)

I think what happened with blount has damaged the boards quite alot, I can't believe noone pointed out what a chasmic difference in moderator behaviour it was. I feel like a mug for not mentioning this then because it may not have reached the point of trolls realising what a state the whole system is in and taking advantage as has happened recently. I guess the instinct on ILX after a massive argument like on that thread, is to avoid starting things up again, but that would have been insignificant I think in comparison to what has happened.

blaming all this on one moderator "crossing the line" is scapegoat bullshit

I don't think it's unfair, the rest of us who are unable to moderate have to find a different way in which to put a point across, fucking with the status quo of the board and someone's right as a poster (to post, basically) is not on. Also I don't buy this demonstrating the abuse of power reason for one second but that's neither here nor there.

1/ personal info accidentally posted - delete/modify on request

2/ racist taunts used "for real" - "nigger", "paki" etc - lock thread

3/ p0rn images - delete

4/ creepy stalker stuff - depends on viewpoint of person it is aimed at, will play by ear & probably consult w/other mods probably will delete if causing obvious distress.

5/ calum being a pain in the ass & trolling me - change text to "party" font, change colour to mauve, activate flashing letters & marquee scrolling.

Actually, I wouldn't do number 5 really.

I can't think of anything else I'd change at all, not even big old arguments, w/people being rude to each other. I would not be the person to approach if you just regretted posting something because it looks daft.

I wholeheartedly support Tom's aim for the board as stated above, in his first post, and I think that's a reason why, even when you have to metaphorically wade thru crap to get to the good stuff, I still look at and read a bunch of stuff on both boards nearly every day.

Although I locked the thread, and would probably do the same thing again under similar circumstances, I am against deleting such stuff. It is useful to know exactly what you're dealing with sometimes. That's all I can think of for now.

Complaining about all the measures that have been put in place to deal with something and on top of that squeaking that "nothing is being done, am I the only one who sees this" = dud, Ronan.

Yeah, agreed. Which is why I then suggested that some kind of 'on board' alert system might be a better solution, though it means more coding for Graham and I think he's entitled to say 'enough!'

I apologise if you spent a long time on this, that's all you needed to say, but this could have been done onboard aswell in fairness. Afterall the talk here is about keeping people posting here aswell as getting new posters. I don't think I'm the only one who thought it, that's why I asked. I'm not personally attacking G, I just think the board has been wonky and transitional for quite a while now, and that incident flipped it back again.

Isn't there now an emerging problem of over-moderation? People unsure about what should be fodder for deletion and what shouldn't? I don't think that is related to the volume of posters. Anyway I can see you're not going to agree with me on this.

Hence Tom's forthcoming guidelines for moderators, surely?

part of the crux for me i guess was realising — which went double once the c____ r_____ stuff started kicking off — that i wz for the moment entirely fed up of being Mr Main Mediating Diplomat In the Centre of all Storms all the time, and someone else cd pick up the slack: ie what really goaded me into action was realising how grumpy and stressed *I* was getting, and well, fuck that, basically

perhaps THE MOST signifigant cultural difference between England and the U.S. articulated in one tiny lead-in :)

i feel like this over-moderation problem kind of doesn't exist... if there's been more moderation it's because there have been more trolls. the jb incident was isolated and to my mind not symptomatic of general moderation misconduct!

tho i guess i would probably take a fairly hardline fascist approach to moderation if it were up to me! one of the reasons ilx has been attractive to me is cos i haven't had to deal with the usual internet bullshit like trolls/flamewars. i don't really care if a bit of censorship is exerted to maintain that civil ilx feeling - it's just basic quality control. i am satisfied by the way things are now.( haha that almost sounds as tho i'm saying 'the way things are now' = hardline fascist, but no i'm not and they're not!) like gareth and tom have been saying there are always other places to go.

[more seriously, it seriously fucks with the integrity of discourse if people are changing what they said, as it is unfair on the people who followed up their post, their responses no longer referencing the post they once did]

[even more seriously, it might wreak havoc with the space-time continuum]

(although the only way to enforce it is self-restraint, natch)

A key point actually is that individual moderators CAN'T BAN PEOPLE. What happened to Blount wasn't a moderation issue really, it was a site creator/publisher issue (which might have been why most of the mods weren't that fussed - there was nothing they could do either way anyway). Discussion about banning tends to happen either on-board or on the 12 Foot Lizards mailing list which you are all invited to join.

we've got the log here, so we (sort of) know what's happening. but now i'm curious as to what the other 3 modifications to this thread were, besides that IP address thing?

mark's explained his reasons and they're fair enough, I realise as a non-moderator it's easy to criticise and so I'm not saying anyone did a rubbish job or anything. I just think this discussion is the one we should have had back then and could have had too. It might have prevented alot of hassle.

I thought there was discussion along these lines. Everyone admitted that what he did was wrong. I'm not sure what the moderators were to do other than say what he did was wrong, and it shouldn't happen again.

anyone who did complain being told to lay off and the matter being belittled.

I didn't think this to be the case. I think that Graham's reasons for doing this were outlined, and that the moderators were just asking for a little understanding from the people who were calling him horrible and suchlike. In the heat of the moment it's probably very easy to slip and do something like what Graham did.

Everyone makes mistakes, and while what Graham did was very wrong I don't know what other corrective action could have been taken that would have improved things.

And of course, if no one is interested, the list can die a horrible and gruesome death via neglect.

There are some other things I don't like (eg squabbling) but I think they can generally be avoided.

Incidentally, although if someone asks for their own posts to be changed/deleted I think there is less burden on the mod to make a case for the change, I don't think we should automatically do it. We aren't here to tidy up mistakes and typos and save people from the consequences of their misjudgements.

You know, there was a music that was made by people who predominantly shared my social attitudes. The music was called "alternative rock," and by and large it sucked. I'm thinking that most of the musicians that I write about, the ones who make the music that I do like, and most of their core audience, would have their threads locked and their posts deleted if Dan's-Norman's-Sterling's current practice were to continue (assuming that they'd show up at a site like this in the first place). And I'm not able to fathom the basic hypocrisy of a board that withstood (hell, benefited from) a-year-and-a-half of the Jay-Z/Nas threads and their wall-to-wall homophobia and sexism and Manny Guevera's constant viciousness, and Doomie's compulsive posting, and Marcello's lashing out at everyone for months on end, yet now reaches for the airbrush in the event that a SARS discussion should turn "irrational." Gawd, this is such bullshit.

Yeah, and I do appreciate you guys for volunteering to moderate and to help the board (I consider Sterling an online friend at this point, and I almost always get a kick out of Dan's and Norman's posts), and I know that no one's perfect, I just don't think you're doing any good by acting like nannies. The board can take care of itself. It really can. As Tracer and a bunch of others have said, if you think there are too many idiotic posts, then start posting good ones yourself. If there's an organized attempt to take over the board and make it a hate site, that's when you act - not every time someone says something disturbing or a troll cries for attention.

(ew)

I totally know what you mean...

this is not 2001 or 2002 anymore. some of us are trying to move on. try and keep up.

on a wider perspective, bereavement counselling is also helping. there i can scream and cry as much as i want, which stops me doing it in front of friends, or here.

marcello: he isn't blaming anyone in particurlar for anything.

First, what you posted there is constructive.

Second, you refer to my "current practice" re locking threads. So far i have locked one thread, and apart from that the only mod stuff I've done that i remember offhand is that I categorised some threads, and I corrected bad HTML in one of my own posts. the thread I locked, i did because one poster threw out three racist insults in the space of three or four posts. I tend to go on the rule of three as a guideline, IE 1/happenstance 2/coincidence 3/enemy action. It was obviously not part of hip hop parlance as in the jay z vs nas thread. I thought, and still think it was straight racist trolling, and I think that's completely unacceptable. That said, I find myself in the position where i'm looking at the board, especially iLM, and I'm depressed at the way the shit is croeding out the good stuff. Calum's stupid sexist woman fearing trolling, 7 or 8 near-identical threads cropping up, one after the other, and not one of them worth the time of day. em@il's stupid shit, the goddamn motherfucking boring listmaking, "is kelly osbourne's vagina more attractive than her face". In all honesty, if I'd started this list, I'd delete the lot of it. i'd ban calum, I'd impose posting limits on geir and on em@il. But, what i'm actually going to do is nothing. I'll lock racist abuse, I'll lock creepy cyber-stalking on request of the recipient, and I'll blank out personal details inadvertently posted on request, but that's all I'm going to do. But the stupidity, the lack of any wit or thought, the sheer grinding motherfucking stupidity that's appearing, maan, it is fucking getting me down, I'll tell you. And the people posting it are so prolific!!

thirdly, I'd start posting more myself, but I haven't got much to say these days, and I couldn't keep up with the shit-posters anyway.

Thanks Frank (really)

Worked better in context, where it was a fabulous post, but I wanted you to get the flavor. The point is, lots of the Throwdown was great, so great that some of us (Ned, Sterling, me) made the effort to get it to spill over onto the rest of the board, which can't happen if the rules of the board become "You can't do that here." (Not to mention the fact that if we'd locked the Throwdown thread we'd have murdered a good piece of culture, albeit one that was crawling with homophobia, which indeed was in hip-hop parlance; which didn't make it any less hatred of gays.)

What I said about alternative rock wasn't bullshit, but was not particularly intelligible either. The idea was that if we prune away the sensibilities that don't match ours, then we become alternative rock.

Here's the first throwdown, well worth a look (esp. for my Chandler impersonation).

Marcello, I admire you, and I think you misunderstood my point, which I said better on the shout-at-the-moderators thread, which is that the board was able to handle you and doomie without censoring you or deleting your threads, and allowed you to work out what you needed to.

Norman, I don't dispute your analysis: the guy was looking for trouble. And his threadfellows were handling it nicely, even discussing what was valid in his arguments, and finessing his attempts at combat. And I don't think you helped matters by locking the thread. And Manny/Anny on the Throwdown thread was looking to hurt people every bit as much as any troll I've seen, and the Throwdown thread handled him without calling on the fuzz, and if the fuzz had locked the thread (which they would have with your three strikes rule), you'd have killed a good bit of culture, as I said.

I don't know how many times I have to state that I didn't lock that thread until someone started making requests for posts to be deleted. Had it been clearer that the request was a joke, I wouldn't have done anything.

At any rate, since the inevitable result of ANY of the moderators doing any moderating is the proliferation of posters complaining about the amount of moderation that's going on, I seriously question why there are so many moderators.

Also, no one was calling for Ramosi's posts to be moderated and his writing style would fit in on Jay-Z/Nas very well.

Seconded re Ramosi BTW. I really wish he'd post more (or come back & post again, i suspect is more accurate)

I loved that throwdown crowd. They were fine folks.

"as long as its done with panache"

If Mary had (jokingly) asked that you jump off a bridge, etc., etc.

Still, I can't believe how many posts we've generated, and how much agitation and panic there has been, over so little. Calum, EM@IL and so on are really no big deal and the near-hysteria over Geir was particularly absurd. I hope having like 15 moderators running around isn't encouraging this. Certainly we have had more moderating action lately than ever before, and while I don't think any of it has amounted to horrible mistakes or had terrible consequences, I do hope we can get back to discussing more non-meta stuff - and if an avowed PoMoHo is saying this, surely that proves we are getting too far up our own arses?

After the death of my father in January - where - I had brought it up briefly on a thread and was immediately chastised by Gareth for suffering a death - I had to rethink my position on ILX. I was using it as I would emails to friends (Mark S, Suzy, Marcello and Kate have all been the victim of my compulsive postings) - which would be - in times of crisis (last year was a mental fucker) - I would sit and write and write and write and write - sometimes not even looking for advice but for an opportunity to sit and read my thoughts on the subject and if, during times of crisis, I had a dialogue with friends, Suzy, Mark S and even you Marcello - I did feel that I had sorted it out. But the hive position of ILX has grown so strong - that I felt that it was pointless for me to continue on the way that I had been using ILX. And maybe never fully thought through the voyeurtistic aspect of sharing such postings online. I had my friends and my friends will see me through. The Hive Mind Mentality has grown so strong that the opportunity for others or others experiencing or working through problems or issues will never happen again. We will never get that insight unless it is from members of The Hive Mind Mentality. The Becky Lucas sittuation was a prime example of extremely compelling reading of someone in obvious distress. I felt queasy yet was fascinated by the way the Hive Mind Mentality pulled together to delete her exsistence from ILX. ILX is not what I thought it would be or maybe it never was. I bonded with Marcello because I recognised and knew intimately the pain that death can and will bring. My advice helped. I was called a fucker and what not for stating things 'as they were'.

The Bang thread brought on fruitful discussions under this, my fake name, say what you will about me but the trolling brought on several high profile names from the magazine and they defended the BANG position. It was compulsion from me because I was involved with the magazine at the early stages - I was confused and maybe scared of my decision that it was 'not for me'.

But never mind - the response of ILX to the death of my father and the cruelty and heartlessness just brought me back to the time of bullies and victims. See, folks, I'm not a victim. And I have stopped using ILX as a diary. Well, maybe not stopped altogether, but I do think twice before I do contribute.

Which is a shame. But oh well. I knew it was happening in January. And it's grown since then.

(By the way, Gareth and Jim both had apologised for their comments in January - no hard feelings - it's the hive collective mind, not a reflection on the individual.)

fwiw, i suffered 3 deaths within a recent period at that time.

Like if someone goes around wearing pants on their head of course they're going to be treated weird -- well what the fuck did they expect? And then if they go complain about it people will rightfully say put yr. pants on your ass like everyone else. I suppose you could call this a repressive hive-mind. Or you could just accept that standards, social signifiers etc. are everywhere and then ask how best to negotiate between them, and how and where to push them in directions you'd like.

Outre behavior gets tolerated more also when ppl. can fit it in with a framework of someone they *like* things about, and in fact probably diminishes to the extent ppl. understand that their positive qualities *are* recognized -- sonny is probably a k-classix example of behavior modification *working* -- i.e. ilx at the time negotiated with sonny at the time how we could get along together. It was painful and required questioning assumptions on both our parts, and also often frustrating.

However flawed in execution, my moderation of Calum was intended not to drive him from the boards, but to help him understand what was and wasn't a way to operate. But the problem is that moderation has the stronger effect of creating a *further* us/them divide which fuXoRs things up more, generally.

But see at the same point Calum for example, *is* working to turn ILX into a place where we talk about popstar ass all the time in fairly crass and frustrating ways. So I feel that I *am* working against him, if not in moderation, then in posting.

What bugs me about ppl. treating Geir as a troll is that he obv. isn't one -- it's not about the out-of-control search for validation but really just about his passion for opinions which are outside of the "hivemind."

Trolls aren't things people *are* I think, but things they *do*, habits and patterns they fall into, abusiveness, self-destructiveness, self-consciousness, a sense of isolation and defensiveness shouting into the void. And then doing so *obsessively*.

So yeah I wanna bring calum into the ILX community, but in this case absolutely *not* on his terms, which is the tricky part. One way or another I don't wanna give an inch on his crass bullshit sexism, and the thing is I don't think that his sexism is anything more than a prop or crutch which he'd be better off without -- the problem is to convince *him* of this.

[haha Tom said back the first time he came round that he was the ultimate product of the Britpop british ladpress -- don't blame him, he's a victim of society.]

In the BANG thread I noticed something else also -- that the styles of the "big guns" in posting were fairly incompatible with ILX, and if things kept getting fought out that way really would have turned TP NK etc. into trolls. The "intellectualization" of everything which seems to be the bugbear of ILX-hatas is really perhaps the only rational response to the diversity of opinion etc. we contain. Arguments which only result in escalation of heat and passion are inevitably flamefests. To keep a sense of community, the common denominator perhaps isn't any particular valueset other than the notion that we can talk things out and respect differences. (Rorty really may be our philosopher-king.) So in a rilly abstract sense I would almost say that a troll is someone who ultimately lacks faith in the power of words and ideas, who attributes conversation an unmediated externality. Hence also rockism as ILX's bugbear -- not coz it's any more wrong than any other approach to musical appreciation but because it stops converstion dead in its tracks.

Mechanics, okay, you guys should have standards. There seem to be a lot of people on this thread, however, who know how other people are supposed to think. There's racist and sexist and there's hypersensitive. There's also bossy, the gravest sin of all (right up there with simony, whatever that is).

I think the thing is, basically, that ILM is becoming further and further away from whatever it used to be or whatever alot of the regulars really liked it for, people are finding that hard to take, because it is. We can't change this by making laws or implementing them or moderating, and that's also pretty annoying.

And noone is blaming Doomie or Marcello.

(As have others on the the techno thread, been excellent, that is. That and the Bang! thread, which has its detractors [me, in some sense, being one of them] have been all that's been keeping me coming to ILM this week. Oh that and compulsion.)

Ronan's anti-electronica Loveless or Revolver argument in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen.

ilx: IT'S FOR LIFE NOT JUST FOR XMAS!! YOU OWE YR PUBLIC FOREVER!! ART = SUFFERING!! etc

(sorry, couldn't resist)

also, as i said on ilm, could we please stop accepting (i don't think anyone solicited) advice from doomie on how to run ilx?

(i.e. Taking someone's advice about compulsion and control. Cheers)

Also, more seriously, I don't think your interactions here did you a lot of good before, so I do hope you just get what you want out of it this time without it coming to any kind of furious crisis. I know you've met four ILXers who I know reasonably well too, and I believe that you like and respect them. I've met lots more, and I'm fairly confident that you'd find most of them worthy of much the same reaction. (I exclude myself, obviously.)

My opinion is that moderating is very much the last resort.
Requesting you're own posts to be deleted or modified should only be an option when you have revealed sensitive information.

As far as moderating wider problems, there should be a consensus before any action is taken. Of course everyone can't agree but those who are about at the time should agree to action taken.

The board moderates the moderators.

-- Ed (dali), Friday, March 21, 2003 10:15 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

bang on

I still stand by that.

I love how Gareth trolled this thread with a real name and address four and a half years ago and it has still never been deleted.

Sonny Tremaine was doomie, right?

Can someone delete my post on the IL* Challenge thread please... I suddenly regret posting it.
-- Matt DC (runmd...), March 20th, 2003 5:01 PM. (later) (admin) P>----------------------------------------------------------------------

(done, matt.)
-- jess (dubplatestyl...), March 20th, 2003 5:05 PM. (later) (admin)

I have no memory of what this was!

Haha oh yes it was me impersonating Gr4h4m in psycho mode.

He had other modes?

Okay I mean *really* psycho mode.

the mods should be armed at all times.
just incase.

I find it very easy to ignore offensive, stupid posts and morons, they soon go away if you do.

-- Ed (dali), Friday, March 21, 2003

"morons" was over the line

"Morans" would have been acceptable.

see one of the things ppl who say "oh it's all bad these days" mainly can't see or have a sense of is the quality and amiable relevance of their OWN contribution => they (WRONGLY) lack confidence that they're a force for good just by doing what they ordinarily do => they switch from what they ordinarily do well to pouting and/or flouncing out (haha blouncing out), and actually THIS may be the act of delinquency rather than the original (quickly forgotten) irritant

I still don't know where I stand in the debate. I do think that both extremesserve their purpose but at the end of the day I prefer ILX to stay super-NON-moderated. It does drive people away but I s'pose that also happens with extremely moderated boards as well.

Ultimately people drive themselves away. It's not like this place is teeming with the really nasty bigotry that infests other boards.

True in a way. But nasty sniping does *push* people away a bit faster than usual, no?

It's just the assumption that sniping is the only form of being an insufferable prick that rankles.

Hahahah. Lots of things push people away faster than usual. But it's less socially acceptable to rail at someone for not being very bright & insinuating themselves into arguments they don't get than it is to vilify someone for not being kind and sensitive enough.