The Glade 4.0

This thread is to discuss how you all feel about how the Glade is moderated. It's been almost a year since this iteration of the Glade was created, and a lot of changes have happened. So what do you think of your experience here? If you give constructive feedback, we'll try to take it to heart. If you think the Glade should be completely unmoderated, ... well sorry but I don't think that's going to happen.

I put this thread in Hellfire so you can say what you want, though I left a stub in General in case anyone who doesn't frequent Hellfire wants to chip in.

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I don't think it should be moderated at all, but I'm OK with the guy that feeds the hamster disagreeing with me.

Personally, I just wouldn't put that much effort into it. It's a thankless job.

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In time, this too shall pass.

I'm just grateful that someone is hosting us and taking care of all the technical stuff and all the "work."
I don't really have any complaints. I'm happy. Thanks.

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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

I like the move to split and lock pollution out of general threads, especially the important ones. We should see more of that.

As far as political discussions go I think the "at your own risk" dynamic that we are currently using for Hellfire is fine, not great but I think it beats the alternatives.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I think all the moderators and posters here know my opinion of moderation policy, behavior, and rule-setting here. I can repeat my stance if you've forgotten, but I'd prefer not to.

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

Over the course of the last year I've found a few things while helping with the Glade:
1) Moderating is annoying. You gotta read threads you don't care about, or you think you can skip over a thread because it's something silly and happy go lucky and find that it turned into a shitstorm overnight. Reports are good, because I can see the reported post icon from the topic index.
2) Temporary bans don't seem to work. I think they just allow a guy to read the forum and build up resentment to both the People Being Wrong on the Internet, and also the forum moderators, who are obviously in league with the PBWotI and trying to stifle the Truth(tm). As I've never been banned from a forum, this is just speculation.
3) I don't know if permanent bans work; we've only used it twice (once was a spambot), and I don't know if the banned person ever tried to come back.
4) Locking a thread is a good way to stop a conversation that's gone bad. But not always.
5) Even if I don't use "moderator voice", if I say stop, most people stop. But not always.
6) People tend to react very strongly, and sometimes very surprisingly, when their particular emotional hotspots are touched.
7) Some people seem to overreact. A lot.
8) A posted set of rules seems to be more a list of how far people can go and get away with it, rather than a list of what not to do.
9) Moobot is a lazy bot and didn't do any moderation the entire time he was a moderator.

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I got the idea from the AnimeOnDvd forum. I like it, though I've gotten PMs regarding specific instances of when I used before.

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What moderators? We've got a guy who occasionally posts in blue text to make himself feel special, and an admin who structured the moderation policy specifically to avoid moderators ever having to perform the job.

All in all, it's been exactly what I thought it was going to be, which is to say: shitty. We have precisely the same unmoderated Glade that we've always had, we're just less honest about it.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Yeah...moderation hasn't really worked. Most people do a pretty good job about keeping **** where it belongs, but some people can't seem to grasp that concept. The board as a whole should get on those people's cases when they post **** that doesn't belong in a particular sub forum.

Hell, I don't even know who the moderators are anymore aside from Michael(who apparently quit the glade today? or something) and that Mookhow is the admin who basically has final say in everything.

Really, I have to sides to this. On one had, I don't think moderation is really super necessary, but on the other side, I don't want every sub forum to turn into Hellfire where people are hostile all over the place. Like I said, most people behave. And I think everyone will if the rest of the board calls people on it.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

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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.

I think part of the problem lately (I PM'd Dash about this a few weeks ago) has been that there aren't enough mods.

If you have 5 or 6 reasonably active mods for a forum this size, and each are given subsections, the job doesn't weigh so heavily on any one mod. We used to have more, but they have been whittled down and never replaced. With Mike quitting, we're down to Lenas, Mook, and Dash. And I know Mook that you at least would prefer to not have to be a super active mod.

I think splitting out inflammatory discussions from otherwise productive threads is a great idea, no one seems to get as upset over it as with locking. It allows both discussions to continue.

I think that when a discussion that is particularly "energetic" is cut off, that instead of solving the problem by allowing the two (or more) parties to cool off, instead (as with temp bans) it allows things to fester.

Being able to split that discussion out and let the two sides finish it up (hopefully the rest are smart enough to just stay away from it) allows it to resolve as much as it's going to, imo.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

The conversations here are too charged and too steeped in a decade's worth of baggage to have unbiased, fair mods. Appointing community members to be moderators only makes things worse.

That being said, I think the rules should be in *fierce* effect outside this forum. If folks want to be assholes, this is the place to be an *******. Anywhere else, this place should read like caring and sharing hour. What happens in this place should remain in this place. And if folks can't hack it, there's the door.

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

Moderation is, has been, and always will be pointless here.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I volunteer to be a mod on the food forum. All people who have anything bad to say about food shall be dealt with severely, but fairly. (I jest)

My only problem with the moderation is that they have not yet gone forth and smote mine enemies from before me, or at least gone and killed for me...

Otherwise... I have been given precisely one warning on the board, and I deserved it.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

It seems kind of pointless unless you're going to be hard core about it. There are still probably situations where a mod might need to step in I suppose, but there's no point in trying too hard otherwise.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In general I don't think a mod should ever be moderating a thread that they have a vested interest in. I've been a moderator on previous versions and it seemed to work best when one of us asked another to take a look so we weren't being accused of using our 'vast wizardly powers' to silence dissenting opinions. The problem is that we're a much less active board now... with the few mods we have it would be tough to message someone and hope they got around to checking out a thread before it exploded.

So maybe we need a board-wide mod drive?

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

The moderation system was working great up until it got nuked out of Hellfire.

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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."

I really don't have any problem with the way moderation has been applied. It isn't too heavy-handed and it isn't completely absent either.

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Mods would be good. I'm all for them.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

Yeah, I was hoping Hellfire would just be a "police yourselves" area. Unfortunately, some folks view it as a "no respect" zone and just piss all over the place because they can.

Really? It seems to me that the people who view "Hellfire" as a no respect zone are the ones who currently run to Moderation all the time. Thoughtful, well-sourced posts are dismissed with "ideological blinders". Captain Victim Card only posts to take shots at people. RangerDave has outright admitted he has neither the time nor inclination to engage topics "seriously" ...

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Which has nothing to do with the moderation discussion in this thread. For the record, I've never once reported anything to the mods or requested their intervention in a thread.

Not saying you did, just pointing out that the group of people who treat this as a no-respect zone are not so obvious. The problem with Hellfire isn't that we disagree (we in general), it's that no matter how thoughtful a post is made by one side, the Liberal side immediately dismisses it without even attempting to engage the conversation of late.

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It's not just "the liberal side" dismissing arguments...

I think most of us have gotten so sure of what we think vs. what the others think, that we all tend to dismiss arguments based on the person making them at times.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.