I'm not sure that idea isn't sheer genius. I have trouble imagining it working, and I think it would only address a small aspect of what I've been talking about, and could easily undermine some of the rest, but it would not be nothing.
Perhaps a staff ombudsman would be doable? Go look up how that works at newspapers that have one; if someone wise, trustworthy, and even-handed enough can be found, the perception of justice at CFC could profit enormously.
...
Bj, your talk of the polite staff room discourse is troubling, as the internal logic and my experience of human nature both say no way. I bow to the top managers if they've achieved that. I've been in a couple staff areas myself, and frankly, half of what a staff room is
for is so the staff can fight issues out and not undermine each other in doing it in public, and some of the rest is a safe place for blowing off steam badmouthing annoying members. And then there's the passing around of PMs members thought were between them and a staffer, for purposes of discussion or ridicule, often both. I've seen where it had been done to me before I came in, which was
great fun. Heinous, vicious, excrement goes down in staff rooms, and it's nearly impossible to credit assertions to the contrary where the staff seems so burned out and hostile. It appears that either the groupthink charge has some weight, or someone's not being entirely honest. I believe I've been insulted if you thought I was dumb enough to swallow that, but your masters cannot fault you for trying.
Moving on...
What is the best response for those who are slow to be responsible for what they say and do here?
This is too vague a question to answer usefully in any detail, keeping in mind all the principles I've already articulated.
Some of them you'll probably end up having to go Zeus on, but I regard any situation where I have to
assert my authority as a failure on my part. You can't know everyone in a place as busy as CFC, which is a pity, because knowing a member is central for coming up with tactics to best handle that member. One of my favorites at Dung Mountain is a frequent drunk poster (I think); a few times I've needed to PM him to point out that over-frank public discussion of subject X embarrasses AC2. He probably would have gotten permabanned a long time ago at CFC -HE thinks so- but the thing is, this guy is on the bus and all about the community. He contributes a lot. His late night rampages are far more entertaining than problematic, and his heart is in the right place. I can usually work with anyone whose heart is in the right place.
I'm trying to say that different tactics work for different posters, and you need a worthwhile sense of who you're managing to take the subtle aproach. Most people are worth getting to know.
So the short answer is patience. You never know who will have an epithany if you work with them, should their sins not be serious, but more a problem in the aggregate. You always have your obsidian sword-club to fall back on, but once that's been used, the just talking to them tends to be sabotaged.
How do we treat those for whom the opportunity to speak out is more important than the community?
If by that you mean trolls and other self-centered problem members, the short answer is get rid of them, but short answers are usually evil, in that we are nerds and
want things to be that simple, and we are capable of doing much wrong to people over matters of principle.
Let me say this: you're still not entirely sure of my motives and whatnot, and I'm not entirely sure of yours. We don't really get 100% certainty of other people in this life, and we have to make some suppositions. Even if I wasn't talking about nerds on innerwebs forums, I can never be sure whether that rude guy over there is
actually hateful or just from New Jersey (not a slam on Joizy; cultural standards differ, which doesn't make any standard inherently wrong, provided other standards are considered when needed). I have a lot of eastern European friends, even know a few in RL, and (broadly speaking) their cultural standards of civility are radically different than the "What you mean, suh?" culture of which I am a product. -But I can get along fine with those guys; they don't play casual social games, you know where you stand pretty well, and if they make a habit of casual minor rudeness to you, it means they like you, or they wouldn't be talking to you so much. And they're thick-skinned. I can work with them; they play fair.
All of which is my long-winded way of pointing out the presumtion in your question that you correctly read the intent of the entire set of someone else's behavior.
I've met a lot of trolls who were worth talking to; I don't think I've converted many from the dark side, but I've had a few privately tell me I'm okay at the end of the raid. (The best counter I ever saw to a truly malicious and implacable troll, BTW, was when one started several dicey, not quite closeable/bannable but dicey, threads, and someone [on staff and leading, as it happened] fired off a few PMs to many of the usual OTf supects reminding not to feed, and said troll only got one bland reply to one of something over ten posts - the raid was over almost instantly, and the troll threads sank out of sight, neglected, alone and unloved.)
That guy who is very active, one might say spammy, and not all that well behaved? I'm thinking of a specific (now permabanned) member here whom I would love to have at AC2. He and I would quarrel frequently enough, I think, but he has something to offer, and I see no fundamental malice, but rather someone who absolutely cares about the community yet expresses it poorly. That's someone I can probably work with. It
would take
work, and the time required may not be feasible for other managers, of course.
Give me more details and I can give you a more specific answer.
Why should the staff subject themselves to such radical changes when the site is very successful and its probably just a few spoiled apples who feel their personal needs are not being accommodated?
I've already mentioned a lot of reasons (doing the right thing is the one I think most important, but also streamlining a broken system to something more efficient, attracting all the kind of people I meet at AC2 who wouldn't be caught dead here as things stand, and better staff morale all come to mind). The latter half of the question is loaded and not necessarily true/fair, but I'll note that and move on.
Let me expand on the attracting people issue, since it's Thunderfall I really have to convince of anything: I have not even a ballpark idea of how the banner ads are doing for money, but I'm guessing they contribute in a very non-trivial way to the server bills and such. If CFC breaks even now, a doubling of membership and activity ought to result in an amount of profit equal to nearly the current overhead, depending on the nature of the hosting agreement and bandwidth thresholds thereof. I should think the 5X figure I admittedly pulled out of my butt would be talking about at
least serious pocket money, given the assumptions I've laid out. [puts on Hal Holbrook mask, takes a drag on a cigarette, and says "Follow the money"]
Step three: Profit!
I do not know what you do for a living, but I do recall saying you were approaching 50. I was in school quite a while ago also, but my current RL job is actually work compared to what I did in school. Such questions are part and parcel to solving problems. If you don't ask and answer the right questions, you will not make any progress. Many folks see a problem like "no discussion of PDMA" and say that to fix it, we need to open a PDMA thread or forum and we will be done. Failing to put such changes into a larger context will only doom the process to "the law of unintended consequences".
And yet I am often insulted for long and rambling posts. People are not simple, the universe is not simple, truth itself is almost never simple, and everything's ultimately connected.
Yes; the larger context is everything. That is why I think the remedial gestures you mention are ultimately inadequite. I've seen plenty of explanation of why the PDMA rule, but none of why even a forum notorious for the bad behavior of the members, where hostility seems the mode attitude, doesn't need such a rule and CFC does. Perhaps the thing I said about taking the forbidden as a dare? I engage in exaggeration when I assert that
everything is forbidden here, but perhaps there's a threshold in play, and were the level of regulation lower, less would NEED to be forbidden.
If the problem is "poor leadership that leads to poor attitudes on moderation, which leads to poor moderation and shackled members", then just getting new moderators will not solve the problem. With such a paradigm shift you need a new foundation followed by a whole new structures built upon that foundation. Serious thoughtfulness is required both to build the new world order and to then implement it and hire new folks who are capable of carrying out such a plan.
Plainly, clearing house is far from the first thing to try. That would be stupid. If Mod X is a petty Barney Fife-level bully, you still cannot know that he is incapable of losening up and learning without someone trying to lead him into doing so.
X may well not be long for this forum, but that's up to him, and only a side effect of what I propose.
It is a tall order. An ambitious one. How do we proceed? Do you have a 5 or 8 or 10 step plan that we could flesh out? What would the first step be? Start me down your road. I'm up for it.
I'm working on it. Again, there is information I need to give a truly useful answer, having never been on staff here, and no one's going to sacrifice their postition on staff to give it to me. I can articulate principals and my reasons, but this is ultimately going to be in the hands of others who know the lay of the land and have the right access.
It has to start with the owner, who is substantially older, and I daresay, wiser, than 13 years ago. There are things that happened in 2002 that are unlikely to happen now for a number of reasons, and maybe it's time to step back and assess all that. John McCain once said of his campaign finance reform bill that of
course in closing loopholes it created new ones - and people would find them and exploit them, and someone would have to reform his reform down the road; that's how it
works.
...
It suddenly strikes me that I profit enormously from all this shop-talk no matter how it plays out - every bit of noise I see about the lame crap members might pull is forewarned/forearmed for me. I'd rather have an idea in place I won't need about possible future trouble than need an idea I don't have, so taking a class in the CFC way is educational...
and stuff like that. Forum goodies that can be rewarded to members who do something simply wonderful? A million little things a staffer can do to attaboy good citizens, as little as posting "You have done well".
or a simple "I agree." or "QFT" or "Good post". Expressing accord is sometimes all I have to add, and is not nothing or spam, and a rule forbidding is very, IMAO, unnecessary, silly, and ultimately counterproductive.
I'd actually forgotten about that post, but I believe it just as much now as then.
. A mod visiting certainly doesn't mean that CFC staff are circling any wagons (they aren't). You raised my curiosity and I went to see what it was all about. I did not read any of the AC threads. The most interesting was your rules discussion thread that you started last Nov? and ran up to now, or at least recently. It is like many of the ones we have had here. Different names, but many of the same themes.
