It is time for a change in the way things are moderated

Odd. I can't think of anyone remaining in OT that would be a good candidate for moderator....

 

I'm definitely a little too loopy to qualify. I'd probably end up erasing a few dozen thousand threads.

 

That would account for 99% of the posters of OT .

 

Because our consistency is just great as it is

@Valka- To carry on would be PDMA, but I do have something very specific in mind.

 

Feel free to drop me a PM, then. Now you've got me curious.

 

I also visit this free site and enjoy myself , thus I demand that moderators contribute a great deal of time and effort and anything less than perfection will be noted .

Obviously that's a little extreme , and it's good that the quality of moderation is discussed . But I just think it wouldn't hurt to be a little more appreciative . It won't kill ya .

 

Split OT. Keep one forum called OT that is explicitly for non-political, non-philosophical, non-religious light discussion. Have a hard no flaming, no homophobia, no racism, no misogyny ruleset. Only Friendship and Sunlight Allowed.

Politics, religion etc get labelled as serious discussion only, and posted in a new forum considered to be under Red Diamond standards at all times. I guess in this forum you could allow the low grade racism and homophobia that some posters claim are core components of their belief systems, and so therefore protected against criticism, much as what goes on in current OT.

 

I don't think such ideas are protected against criticism, just that they don't get infracted just for their views. Racism I'm pretty sure is specifically banned anyway though.

What I think is really ridiculous is what certain people will let pass for racism, homophobia, or misogyny. But that's another thread.

 

I had an idea like that and was going to post it but decided I did not want to get laughed off.

My idea was to create two forums, Lite-OT and Serious-OT. Light-OT can contain the cereal threads and perhaps the Arts & Entertainment and Jokes and maybe Sports subforums. Serious-OT would be most of the OT and the other subforums for history and science. I say put them as subforums to keep it relatively organized. And of course the names would be up to debate (Light-OT and Serious-OT just dont sound that good).

Of course now that Ive posted it nobody will take the idea seriously

 

That there are different treatments of these forms of bigotry because some targets are more socially acceptable than others is evidence of prejudice on the part of the moderation team.

 

Nobody is going to laugh at this. I proposed this back in 2005 and actually seeked public input (you can still find the threads if you search hard enough); TF was actually going to implement it until I asked him to hold off because I got cold feet at the last minute, over the very loud objections fr maybe 1/10 to 1/3 of the OT posterkind back then (depending on how large I want to estimate the silent lurker-type population to be).

Since then, I'm pretty much can't be motivated to go thru trying to 'convince' (battle?) these people to at least give it a try and see how it goes.

 

When I said cereal threads I meant serial and not threads about Cheerios vs. Rice Krispies or something. I always seem to do that

Also this leads to another idea. Split the OT mods into two groups. Have a rotating system where one week Group A does Light-OT and Group B does Serious-OT. Then second week, Group A does Serious-OT and Group B does Light-OT. It may help somewhat if you know you dont have to deal with political debates at the end of the week. Also just put all the mods on both forums so you dont need an admin to constantly change that and one of the others could help out in case of a spambot infestation.

 

Most of the perceived inaction probably stems fr us not agreeing on whether it's actionable or non-actionable. We have a large team nowadays; if mods disagree too much (believe me, we're sometimes so 'different' that someone's 'prejudice' will be cancelled out by the rest), we usually don't take action. We try not to let prejudice get in the way. Most of the time, there's no black-or-white way to decide on action for most of the issues you attribute to 'prejudice'.

At the end of the day, this is a free site, with volunteers helping to keep order in OT. Yes, the main objective is to maintain order in the forums, so everyone can enjoy using them and that we don't get into trouble with various authorities, rather than trying to run and manage debates (we try where possible and as you can see, we're justly being rewarded with complaints). I've always said in the staff forum - there shld a limit to how much effort we want to (or can) run the 'perfect' political-type debate.

If you really want real, unlimited, no holds barred, heavy political debate (which is where most of our OT issues are from), maybe you shldn't try to get it at a gaming forum?

 

There's no reason why 'light' 'social' threads need to be restricted to cereal threads, once we have a social forum set up?

Non-political threads can also be fairly serious and informative in its own ways - like seeking advice/suggestions for health improvements, exercising, raising kids etc.

 

Well sereal threads are the main example of "light" ones -- birthday threads are another, and the ones about cameras circling the world, interesting non-political (as in unlikely to start a flamewar) news, etc.

 

This is an amazing copout for pretty much any criticism of anything at CFC.

 

Is most of the team even participating regularly?