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.

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.