The Glade 4.0

I'll start. Apologies all around, except for the comment I got warned for.

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Then you start a new thread on the same topic, without referring to the old thread or the dramatics in it. If there's a rule making that topic off-limits because it got out of control, that's a bad rule.



Whether it's a marker of good character is irrelevant. It may indeed facilitate reasonable conversation, but the fact of the matter is that rules that favor politeness are ultimately just a smokescreen for a certain breed of ******* to continue to be totally unreasonable in addressing issues just by avoiding technical violations of the rules.

That entire attitude taken to an extreme is actually one of the biggest problems here; we have one person who thinks he can simply dismiss everything anyone says simply because he thinks holding that opinion in the first place is offensive and an indicator of poor character. Politeness rules just exacerbate that; sooner or later people start claiming controversial opinions are offensive and impolite as a way to win the argument by getting the mods to crush their opponent.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You can apologize for reporting a post that was neither insult nor attack in General. You can apologize for getting two threads split because you made poor assumptions about the nature of another poster's comments. But, I'll let those slide ...

Why don't you apologize to every poster on these forums who has continued giving you support and solid advice over the apparently bad courses of action you planned on taking? Why don't you apologize to everyone you offended in the epic, now-deleted Rants thread wherein you created the image of yourself as a creepy, stalker type (whether that is true or not is immaterial at this point) ...I don't dislike you personally. I dislike your behavior. You'll note that even in my rather vicious diatribe in the Missouri thread, I kept my criticisms and vitriol to your behavior here on the Glade.

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I think as opposed to either deleting posts or locking whole threads, the split and lock method (or even just splitting out the bad posts) works well.

If you just split it out, both the productive and unproductive discussions can go one, each in their respective sections.

If the bad one has gone too far for that, the productive one can go on, without the tripe from the bad one left in. Split and lock.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

In all seriousness, what is the purpose of moderation? Aside from the regular purpose of dealing with spammers (which doesn't seem to be much of a problem, although we've had a couple come in and try that I recall seeing), it originally was to keep a lid on things in Hellfire, and to keep Hellfire from spilling over into the other forums. Today, Hellfire is hands-off, and Heckfire (the subforum that was created to be the heavily moderated one-and-done-offense discussion forum) is basically unused because it's not really moderated either, so what's the point? So if the entire purpose of mods is just to keep the boards clean of spam, that's fine, I have no problem with that, but don't run around acting as if there's any other purpose. The Internet is built on rough consensus and running code. We have a rough consensus that we'll keep the crap in Hellfire, although sometimes there's a slip, and so if the mods aren't going to do the job for which they were originally purposed, I also don't see a problem with them moving crap into Hellfire when it's warranted. Merge Heckfire back into Hellfire, and then call it a day. Otherwise, commit to doing the job for which they were originally emplaced.

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Then again, no one really gives a damn about what they say here, so that level of accountability is kind of irrelevant. Hell, we still have a poster here that advocates gunning down elected officials that vote in ways he disagrees with.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

The purpose of moderation was, is, and always shall be to keep the board from looking like crap. Whether that's because you open threads and see spam, or if you open threads and see porn, or if you open threads and see nothing but flame wars, the purpose of moderation is to prevent that from happening.

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From what I've seen, moderation has been spotty and inconsistent rather frequently. I suspect personal bias, but no one is perfect and a certain amount of that is to be expected, I suppose.

In fairness, we are generally the only ones who look at the board. And, after 10 years of that (or more), we know what to expect.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Then why, Moo, does moderation not fulfill that vision? Sure, the spam and porn items are easily verifiable, but what about that last type?

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After 10 years of posting together, how the heck are we supposed to avoid personal bias? I think it's impossible even with the best effort on the part of the mods to have no personal bias to someone you've been talking to and arguing with for that long.

Not only that, but we don't get much new blood.... The majority of the posters here have been arguing with each other for that long, which almost requires some personal knowledge of the situation to moderate. Things that might seem innocuous to a new poster can often be much deeper references to past arguments or hurts.

I think by this time, we all know how to push each others buttons quite effectively when we get pissed and feel like it.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Well yeah, cause you can't vote out a politician from another state.

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Holy shitsnacks!

True, that can happen if the mods are limited to enforcing very specific, letter of the law, kind of rules. I prefer a less formal approach wherein the mods can ding someone for being an a**hat even if that person is being a superficially polite a**hat. Politeness and respectful discourse involve more than just avoiding explicit swearing and name-calling. Sure, that raises problems of subjectivity, but meh, that's the nature of conversation, and this is a private internet forum, not a court of law. I'm cool with some subjective discretion on the part of the host and his/her designated mods.


As I said earlier, I think mods should use a relatively light touch, particularly when it comes to content rather than presentation, but to some extent, I don't have a problem with taking content into consideration. In fact, I think that's inevitable, so we might as well be honest about it. For instance, this is a predominantly conservative/libertarian forum, so derisive blanket statements about Dems or "libs" are par for the course, whereas equivalent condemnations of Reps or conservatives tend to trigger indignation and complaints of agenda-driven caricaturing or outright trolling. Unlike some, though, I don't have a problem with the mod policy reflecting that bias to some degree, as long as we're honest about it.

The distinction shouldn't be too heavy-handed, but, going back to my point about politeness requiring more than just surface manners, I think the context/audience is relevant when gauging the offensiveness of a comment. When you (metaphorically) walk into a room full of conservatives and bring up the latest "liberals suck" story from Fox News, you're just engaging in a little locker room trash talk, but when you walk into the same room and bring up the latest "conservatives suck" story from Daily Kos, you're trying to piss people off. I have no problem with mods recognizing that distinction and responding accordingly.

Let's not mince words. You're plaining talking about Elmo, so you may as well just say it. I've taken issue with his "hang-em-all" attitude on several occasions myself; however, for all that, he's never advocated gunning someone purely for the reason that they don't vote the same way he does. That's a misrepresentation of his opinions.


That certainly isn't true of everyone. And, ideally, I'd like to eventually see adequate moderation here such that those who don't care what they say are going to have to learn to care if they want to maintain their posting privileges. Of course, I need to stress that this just my personal opinion on matters. I certainly don't call all the shots around here, and I'll abide by whatever moderating context Dash agrees to.

There's a larger conversation here about Hellfire and its ruleset (or rather lack thereof), but at the moment, Dash is on vacation. My impression is that Mook started this thread just to get a conversation started on the subject in the meanwhile.

My 2cp worth is that while there are a few people who are advocating for an absence of any moderation, it doesn't seem that anyone is particularly happy with the actual outcome of that policy. Again, just my opinion.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Because what you want and what you get don't always match up. We try our best, but nothing is ever simple. We do make mistakes, but I'd like to believe that even when we go astray we do so while trying to do the right thing.

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How, exactly, is one to do the latter without rules?



It isn't bias, it's either laziness or a distaste for doing the very job they volunteered for. Either of which is fine, provided others are brought on board to fill weak spots.

Ok, so now we've added Stathol to help fill a weak spot, but there are no rules to the entire board, so what exactly would he be moderating? His gut feeling? Precariously arbitrary.



Lack of rules and lack of enforcement of those rules.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Ok, I can see that. But should not rules be so black and white that they can be applied evenly? Of what use is a rule if mod "X" applies it one way to his ally, but another way to his foe? At that point it is no longer a rule. It is a club to beat people over the head with.

It's tough because when there are is an actual ruleset around here it seems to be more fun to play lawyer and find the loopholes than it does to just learn to obey them.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

[Bolded by me.]

I think that's horseshit, frankly. Not sure what else to say except that the "hands off" or "light handed" approach has been failing every iteration of the Ranger's Glade I've been party to, which is only about 40% of the timeline, but enough to see it doesn't work.

The fact that we retain new members such as Squirrel Girl, Kirra, Farther, or others is surprising in light of the limp-wristed nature of the moderation trends.



That would be a wholly positive thing, especially in comparison to the current policies (or lack thereof).



I think you guys have the best intentions. I think you fail to meet up to those intentions through heavy focus on naive moderation policy from Dash, and inability or unwillingness to actually do the parts of the volunteer position that pertain to the "3rd focus" you listed above in regards to flame/troll behavior.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

This is not always possible. Take the portion in the old rules (don't have the current ones on hand) about flamebaiting... It's very possible for someone to bait in a manner that might not be so obvious to anyone that doesn't know the pair and their history. It's also very possible to have some posters that seem outwardly rather inflammatory, but we know that that's just how they are, they aren't intentionally trying to stir up crap. To others, this may seem like an uneven application of the rules. But is it really?

That said, I can't really think of any examples in quite some time where any of our rules were inequitably applied.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

That is why I resigned as a moderator, because Dash changes from having rules to just arbitrary enforcement of whatever a mod thought was "proper."



I believe that is everywhere. I also believe that that is much less annoying as a moderator than having zero guidance from a ruleset whatsoever.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

[Bolded by me]

I can't stress this enough: there are no forum rules anywhere on this board. Hellfire has the closest thing via an "announcement" post, and that rule is "don't be an ***."

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Yeah, I know.

They got removed in the restructuring process, were supposed to get re-posted in general, and never did, iirc.

I still go by the old rules (think Taly wrote them up?) as they were quite good.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

I just want to throw in that Hellfire is not under-utilized because of a lack of moderation. It is under-utilized because it is a cop-out forum for cowardly posters who want to post opinions without anyone being able to question them/call them out plus no one here seems willing and/or able to slip on kid gloves and treat controversial topics respectfully.

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But can't rules be written in a way that eliminates such loopholes? Let me ask you this, just as an example: "Name-calling, actual or implied, will not be tolerated." That way, "You are an asshat" as well as "You are acting like an asshat." would both be violations of the rule. Anything negative that aims at the poster instead of the post would, it seems to me, be a violation that could be moderated evenly.

Or am I being too simplistic?