PD of PDMA

[Lefty Scaevola]

Of course, much of current management and staff likely views PDMA differently that either I do or Thunderfall did. I am confident that many would view it a a potential threat to good order and peace. I have, over ten years ago, dealt with an actual member rebellion with thirty or so active members asserting their right to political trolling and flaming (everyone left of center was being called a commie and everyone right of center was being called a fascist, and everyone called an idiot) by closing the OT for 3 days and indefinite banning 2 dozen members (out of maybe 25,000 members, and 250 active OT posters) until they made a pledge. So, I a bit more jaded and less apprehensive about potential disorder than current staff, most of whom came after that episode. The main difference today, however, is the size of the membership, I could easily see the front page of site feedback being covered with "I do not like my infraction" threads, in several times the number than induced Thunderfall to kick them in the first place.

 

[Maniacal]

Paranoid is not the word. Bored would be more like it. The first precusor to the PDMA rule was that it was off topic spam in the various game forum threads, and that the only place it was on topic was in Site Feedback forum. I was instrumental in formulating that, from Civ3 threads that would have multiple posts complaining about a flame or troll post I moderated which would derail the thread (about half of those from an Arab - Israeli war being fought out in the Civ3 creation forum).
Thunderfall, IIRC, himself mostly formulated the current rule of not allowing it anywhere public, finding it to be 99% baseless whining. When he got sick and tired of reading thread after thread of the whining, he barred it. I am not sure which if any of the then moderator staff worked with him on that or supported it. I did not, being of the "Let them rave on, that men may know them mad" and "blow off steam" persuasions, but I have been a minority on that ever since.
But what it boils down to is that the PDMA threads were 99% useless gargbage, and The Powers decided not to waste any more time or forum resources with them, just to catch a very rare gem of reason.

Well yes, of course most of it isn't constructive and I understand not wanting it to clutter up the forum. Even so, as I mentioned, sometimes the way the moderators pounce and crack down on PDMA comes off hilariously similar to police state paranoia. A lot of minor PDMA infractions could probably just be ignored or at least there's really no need to give people an infraction for not PMing if its one of their first infractions and everything would be fine, plus it would save moderator time!

 

[Camikaze]

Yes, the questions 'why do we have PDMA rules?' and 'why should we have PDMA rules?' have different answers. History for the former, good order and peace for the latter. If someone asks a moderator the first question but means the second, I can see why they might think the answer a little terse or circular, but it is the correct answer.

On occasion when we haven't been quick enough, a PDMA has managed to gain a page or two of discussion, usually hashing out the same argument that we intervened in in the first place ("Why did I get infracted for calling A an idiot?" "Because you're the idiot" "No you are", etc.), peppered with other remarks not understanding the context of the infraction or the basic rules of the forum.

Edit: crosspost

 

[Mise]

Can we have some specific actions please? There was a bot that used to post various news articles in a special forum. It got axed because it was kind of useless. But the idea of using a bot to post in a special forum is nonetheless not unprecedented. Can this be investigated seriously by the admins, or anyone with some technical knowledge of bots and so on? Rather than just saying "this is a good idea but it's too hard", can the admins take the time to investigate this idea fully?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Of course, much of current management and staff likely views PDMA differently that either I do or Thunderfall did. I am confident that many would view it a a potential threat to good order and peace. I have, over ten years ago, dealt with an actual member rebellion with thirty or so active members asserting their right to political trolling and flaming (everyone left of center was being called a commie and everyone right of center was being called a fascist, and everyone called an idiot) by closing the OT for 3 days and indefinite banning 2 dozen members (out of maybe 25,000 members, and 250 active OT posters) until they made a pledge. So, I a bit more jaded and less apprehensive about potential disorder than current staff, most of whom came after that episode. The main difference today, however, is the size of the membership, I could easily see the front page of site feedback being covered with "I do not like my infraction" threads, in several times the number than induced Thunderfall to kick them in the first place.

Well, that sounds like a reasonable way to handle a rebellion. I did something similar on my old Dune forum (on a much smaller scale) when a group of members started cursing and flaming one of the members who happened to be Frank Herbert's grandson (they didn't approve of his participation in the promoting of Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert's nuDune books). One of the flamers was a staff member, and I ended up permabanning him. Staff do not get a free pass to harass and persecute members for any reason whatsoever, on the forums I run.

As for the second point you make... simply don't allow such threads. Lock them as soon as they appear. An example of a forum where this sort of things happens is TrekBBS. They have a Moderator Actions forum where people can bring up concerns that went unresolved for some reason. The rule is that they have to first try to work it out with the moderator who infracted them. There are rules and guidelines for how that works, and only if those rules are followed and no resolution is reached - only then is the member allowed to bring it up in the MA forum. Anything that's basically pointless whining is immediately locked. Issues that require (or merit) more discussion are left open until the admins reach a solution or make an arbitrary decision. No threads are left open more than a day or two; most are resolved/locked within hours, if not minutes. TrekBBS is a huge forum as well; it uses vBulletin, and has a large, very active membership. Many pro authors and some actors post there. I'm offering that as an example where a limited kind of public discussion of moderator actions can work without turning into a free-for-all. Situations are not necessarily resolved as the member would wish, but at least the staff are seen to be taking their concerns seriously. Perception matters, and the perception of unreasonable and unbending secrecy at CFC is part of what is driving the current thread we're posting in.

 

[ls612]

Been there for the majority of my life, CEO, President, Managing Partner, of businesses: President, Master, etc, of clubs. I have been very sucessful and respected in all of them. Most did not, as a matter of policy or culture, suffer fools to waste their time and resources, nor did they suffer trolls at all; I have a little sign just 3 feet from this keyboard: "No brains, no service". But, In any case, as noted above, it was not my amused disdain that booted 'rant about moderator actions' threads from Site Feedback, it was whatever Thunderfall felt about them.
Here I just keep chugging along, enforcing rules and policy, inlcuding those of them which which I disagree.

I would agree with these points with one exception. In a business it is reasonable to expect competence and intelligence from employees, because you are paying them money. Stupid questions aren't something that should be encouraged in a workplace setting. But this is an online forum, and I don't think it is reasonable to expect every member who comes here as a hobby to know the whole history and rationale for all of the site's policies. I also don't think that it is bad to ask a 'stupid' question on these forums, on the contrary, by doing that you are attempting to learn something. Trolling and intentionally asking dumb things you already know the answer to is another matter entirely.

 

[Takhisis]

I know that this is a 'business' because the site needs GoogleAds to survive, but you can't run it like a company, Lefty. Some things are useful to know because in both cases you have to deal with 'HR', but here we're all supposed to be equals, and doing this for free.

 

[Lefty Scaevola]

Just curious - when was this? The earliest vBulletin I'm familiar with was back around 2005-2006.

2002 for thoses events, IIRC. These forums were UBB before VBB. These forums opened Oct 24, 2000, my join date. I did not let them dragoon me onto staff until about a year after that. Before the UBB, CFC had some sort of use net like branching forum for some months, but none of that could be converted or carried over to the UBB database.

you can't run it like a company, Lefty. Some things are useful to know because in both cases you have to deal with 'HR', but here we're all supposed to be equals, and doing this for free.

I am fully aware of that, particularly regarding volunteer staff, having run more than one club, lodge, etc. But anyway, I do not run much of anything here. Mostly, I give advice, take orders, and follow policy as I understand it, although Supermoderators, as a body, have been given some limited policy making functions as of a few years ago, and also their advice is more relied upon by administration than it was before. Currently I also function as the 'ancient shaman' with the knowledge of the community's history.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

the formally appealed, or also the ones where a moderator might (hypothetically) say something like, "If you edit your post and/or apologize to the person you trolled/flamed/insulted, I would be open to downgrading the infraction"?

Just from my own experience, mods don't do much to actually mediate between posters. They just hand out infractions or warn them to leave the person alone, but there isn't much done to try and resolve differences or disputes or bad blood. Hell, one mod even tried to close the Olive Branch Thread and then on appeal moved it to the Tavern. Thankfully, the membership have been mature enough to mostly use that thread as intended. However, no one asks them to use it, no one tries to sort out differences beyond infractions. Maybe they think it's not their job to do so, but if the tool(s) are there, why not try and use them?

At the moment, I think we're in a lull where in OT where the really acrymonious types have been shut out for various reasons or by various means. But that took years to get to, from what I understand and was deat with piecemeal - there was no strategy to make jerks play nice. So while they are gone, at any time another group could pop up and there's still no strategy to handle them in a systematic way by mediating disputes, etc.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Just from my own experience, mods don't do much to actually mediate between posters. ... there's still no strategy to handle them in a systematic way by mediating disputes, etc.

This is a key concept.

 

[Synobun]

At the moment, I think we're in a lull where in OT where the really acrymonious types have been shut out for various reasons or by various means. But that took years to get to, from what I understand and was deat with piecemeal - there was no strategy to make jerks play nice. So while they are gone, at any time another group could pop up and there's still no strategy to handle them in a systematic way by mediating disputes, etc.

We could always call it a rebellion and ban a large group of people in a single go. Seems to have worked in the past.

It also kind of sounds like Star Wars...

 

[Takhisis]

Those rebel scum.

 

[Lefty Scaevola]

Scum?, no. Actually flamers and trolls generally (there are exceptions) are fine by me personally, they just are not allowed to practice those crafts at in Thunderfall's house. I can happily trade warfare with them at sites where it is permitted.

 

[Takhisis]

I was paraphrasing the 'You Rebel scum' line from Empire Strikes Back.

 

[ainwood]

Just from my own experience, mods don't do much to actually mediate between posters. They just hand out infractions or warn them to leave the person alone, but there isn't much done to try and resolve differences or disputes or bad blood.

actually, we have tried this, with some (not amazing, but some) success. I don't think it's appropriate to advertise the names of specific individuals, but we have tried it. We could try it more often, if the adversaries were interested in it (there is a private forum that we could use for it). Perhaps we should suggest it to some...

The first step to resolving it is that the people both actually need to want to resolve it. That would not always be the case.

Thoughts on this? As a starter, if any readers have an issue that they want to have mediated, then pm me. If people feel there is a real need for this, then we could formalise it / advertise it.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Yes, acting in good faith, with an honest desire from all parties to meet the other person at least part way, is critical. If those conditions aren't met, mediation is basically futile, and the situation won't be resolved.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

I've had only modest chance to gain practical experience with mediation and put my theories into practice, but I'm a very strong believer that it ought to be a major moderator activity.

See, PMs and the resultant rumor mill are behind a lot of heinous excrement that goes down in this community. -In fact I wrote this up a long time ago a lot better than I can this morning, so I'll just quote:

The thing is, I don’t really want to talk about this; this thread is supposed to be about recruiting and creating activity and moving forward in a positive and productive way, and discussing the unfortunate elements of our collective past doesn’t make the AC community look like an appealing group to join. But the way problems blow up out of control must be addressed, or it could be all for nothing. We can’t just put our NerdWars™ behind us and expect no new ones to crop up.

The community needs to reach a consensus that certain problem-causing behaviors aren’t going to happen anymore. We need a new paradigm, a gentler, more tolerant-of-each-other one, a more transparent way of doing things that we can all agree on and encourage each other to conform to.

We do a lot to entertain each other when things are going smoothly, but we must recognize that we are all nerdz, many of us have poor social skills, and we need to learn to put up with each other’s foibles and diverse (often difficult for each other to understand) approaches to things. It’s worth it if everyone will make an effort to simply play nice. The rewards are high.


The single thing I find most toxic to the peace is the problem of all the nastiness that goes down behind the scenes. I think the root cause for that is fundamental to forum culture. You get sore at someone, or a debate gets heated, and a moderator steps in and says “take it to PMs”. That sounds like the best way, right? And we’ve all seen it a million times if we’ve hung out on a forum for more than five minutes.

I’ll talk from my own experiences, here, not naming names and certainly not sending anyone any secret messages or wanting to set any records straight, but because those are the cases I know. If you recognize yourself or anyone else, please understand that this is only for instructional purposes and please don’t send anyone any PMs about it.

People get even nastier in PMs sometimes. They say things they wouldn’t dream of in front of witnesses.

I had a friend in the old days who is pretty likely responsible for my powerful dislike of sending or receiving PMs, notwithstanding how many I’ve sent and received lately; he would just go on and on and ON about whatever we were debating, getting longer and longer the longer he went until I could rewrite War and Peace faster than I could answer his every little point. People in RL often find me quite pedantic, but this was ridiculous, and he would get pretty snotty about it, to the point I more than once had to flat refuse to keep engaging him, saying I was struggling not to get mad and he needed to drop it.

And that’s a quite reletively benign example.

Another friend was -I dunno- having a bad weekend, and when I PMed something brief and apologetic over a very minor thing, I got this vicious, detailed, seemingly calculated venom-bomb back that -- ended the friendship for good. We just stopped speaking. Zero to infinity instantly, and no one knew what really happened. When said ex-friend left the forum for mostly RL reasons, I got PMed about, blamed by people who didn’t have any way of knowing what was really going on.

PMs get abused in a lot of ways that hurt us all. Check this quote of an old post, with identifying information, redacted:

And may I suggest that such matters be handled either publicly, OR privately, in the future? Those of you condeming xxxx's action as "immature" don't know the dirty underground of PM-passing that seems to underly the community at the moment. Crap is leaking all over the place, disrupting games, even into my own PM boxes... and I don't even have anything to do with any of it!

I understand xxxx's action. At this point, he couldn't know WHO is saying WHAT about him behind his back, so if he wants to correct the record, it's gotta be done publicly.

I happen to have been the subject of the poison PMs this guy was getting. He didn’t much seem to believe what he was being told, but left the community in disgust shortly thereafter. I happened to know a good deal of what was being said to who behind my back for a good year that this whisper campaign went on, and there were several casualties…

Nasty stuff said in PMs has a way of spreading even without anyone mounting a PR jihad. Nobody much in the entire wider TBS community over a number of forums I’m aware of is much good at keeping their mouth shut. Bystanders hear rumors and distortions, form ignorant opinions based on half the relevant information, if that, if everything they’ve heard is even true, and no good comes of any of it.

I once did a PM info-dump in self-defense against someone who betrayed me and violated my trust in the worst possible way, figuring his betrayal abrogated my ethical obligation to keep his confidences, and needing to fight some very wrong assumptions against me. It worked like a charm - but an ADMIN let slip to him that I had done it, which caused endless trouble. A forum administrator couldn't keep his mouth shut. That’s how bad the half-information leaks screwing everything up for everyone is. Honestly, if you can’t say it in public, be smart and just don’t say it. Be careful who you trust, best by skipping the PMs entirely.

If someone just has to confide in you about some drama, be a friend and adult, and don’t even hint elsewhere. I hate PMs for any number of reasons, but they are worse than useless if we forget for a second that they’re Vegas; what happens there has to stay there. The alternative is eternal NerdWars™.


The better alternative is maximum transparency. Keeping things in the open to prevent the rampant misunderstanding that has happened so often. Mods say “take it to PMs.” Well, I’m a mod now; my personal policy -not that I’m about moderating humans at all outside emergencies and I‘m not in charge here in AC- but one I’ve mentioned to Solver, who didn’t say no, is that here in AC, we get a little more latitude to try to talk things out. I hope to sell the others on the policy.

Here’s how I see that going down:
This is no license to flame. Flamewars are no good, offensive to bystanders, and very much against what WPC is all about. So the obvious solution is for the community to develop a consensus to engage in helpful mediation.

This is not that thing bystanders sometimes do where they go into a fight and say something like “You guys are both jerks.” I’ve been on the receiving end of that too many times, and wasn’t grateful at all for the even-handed treatment. No, I’m talking about mods and other people coming in and saying “You’re both good guys; as I see it the problem is that you, X, want A, and your insistent way of pursuing it is provoking Y, who loses interest in accommodating you by at least moving from C to B. Y ought to do that, but you need to be more considerate about the way you ask.”

[blinks] Well, it makes sense to me…

All this, all of it, needs You doing your part, whether anyone else seems to be doing it or not. You and you and YOU. That’s how positive change happens with someone having to go first and hoping others follow. We CAN deal honestly and honorably with each other, and we MUST.

Yeah; it's not that easy, I know. But I ask the management here - how often do you just post and say "Knock it off/dial it back, guys."? That doesn't take mod powers. How often do you point out that there looks to be miscommunication going on? How often do you post an observation that two or more parties are getting mad arguing over matters of opinion with nothing at stake? (The eternal nerd innerwebs fallacy, taking it upon ourselves to correct people for being wrong - I still wrestle with that one myself. I'm doing it now. The key to doing it right is realizing that any truth that can't be measured is opinion, and we shouldn't get mad over differences of opinion - even though people who like TNG and Treks thereafter are indeed wrong. )

Mediation's a thing the whole community ought to be doing, peer pressure being a powerful social force and a very positive one when done right, and mods/admins as the community leaders they naturally are should be taking point and leading on it.


We are OT now. Is that okay?

 

[Camikaze]

To the extent that this conversation seems largely about the Tavern alone, it's worth noting that one of the ideas of the Tavern is that moderators should only have to intervene in very limited circumstances, and if you're behaving in such a way as to require our attention, then there's going to be a greater punishment for that (i.e. summary bans). In OT we used to do a lot more 'keep it civil, guys' warnings if things were starting to heat up, but that's much more towards the hand-holding end of the spectrum than what the Tavern is designed for. You're much more likely to see that sort of warning in other forums (e.g. Civ5), where we often intervene just to tell people to cool it a little.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

actually, we have tried this, with some (not amazing, but some) success. I don't think it's appropriate to advertise the names of specific individuals, but we have tried it. We could try it more often, if the adversaries were interested in it (there is a private forum that we could use for it). Perhaps we should suggest it to some...

The first step to resolving it is that the people both actually need to want to resolve it. That would not always be the case.

Thoughts on this? As a starter, if any readers have an issue that they want to have mediated, then pm me. If people feel there is a real need for this, then we could formalise it / advertise it.

Wow, where to start?

Well there is naturally three big issues with this, one is that posters may not be inclined to participate in any kind of mediation, one is that there may not be a 'dueling pair' that need redress but just one person and the other is moderator time. I will try and address all as best I can.

The first issue is tricky because there are posters who are just out to flame and troll and don't care who they target and don't need a reason to target, they just do it. There isn't much on top of what's already being done that can deal with them, though I've suggested that for truly recurrent problems the permanent point system should be applied more liberally and/or more temp bans need to be given out. That puts teeth to the punishments, as there is strong evidence to support the conclusion that the normal accumulation of points just isn't enough to really stop bad actors.

But then there are posters that for whatever reason have taken a strong dislike to other users and this may be mutual. So then you have wanton antagonism where they follow each other around, playing tag and gunking up the forums with multiple personal attacks. I'll go on record as saying I don't think this is a huge issue at the moment, but it was in the immediate past and could pop up in the future. And no, I don't actually have just one or two examples in mind, there was more than a few, though many of these dueling pairs shared common members between them.

Anywho, just handing out infractions isn't going to stop that kind of tag, really. It's not until bans are threatened/handed out that it seems to die down and even then the effect is temporary. So why not try some dialogue? For example, you have X and Y and they've been trolling each other and as a result a mod decides to give them both infractions. In the process of writing up the infraction, why not ask them to explain why they are acting like they are instead of just quoting the rules and saying, 'don't be a jerk'?

You could invite them to hash it out in a 3 way CC'd PM, or in your private group, or in the Olive Branch Thread. After the moderator has gotten responses on why each party feels the need to be a dick to the other, s/he can try and present these grievances to the other party in as neutral a way as possible and ask, 'well, what do you have to say to this'. Maybe having them talk through the mod is best, instead of directly to each other. But either way, if the two parties can come to some sort of understanding as to what it is that they do that antagonizes the other person, they can at least reflect on that and possible try and reach some sort of accommodation. Example:

X: It really freaking pisses me off when Y calls people 'baby murderers'. I don't agree one bit with his stance, but I come here to debate. It's just that when he uses that rhetoric, I can't debate that, I feel he's just trolling and intentionally aggravating and I can't stand it.

Now Y may not respond at all. But now that he knows what's the crux of the dispute (not his stance, which is fair game for debate but rather his choice in rhetoric), he may choose to ease off the inflammatory rhetoric because in the end he too is there to debate and the constant antagonism gets old. Failing that, at least the moderator knows why X really has a problem and can better react in the future to stop Y when he starts on the inflammatory rhetoric with a warning (via PM or even in-thread) to head it off before X escalates things in response to unfettered antagonistic rhetoric from Y.

You could even incentivize the process. Now I'm not saying that offering to downgrade an infraction is always appropriate, but it may be warranted under certain circumstances. So a mod may see a problem that's presented itself in multiple threads (antagonism between X and Y) in the form of constant harassment. If the harassment isn't entirely unforgiveable, then he can offer to downgrade an infraction form say, a 2 point major flaming infraction to a 1 point minor infraction if they agree to mediate and then do so in a constructive manner.

Alternatively, the mod could use the stick and say, 'if you both don't agree to mediate, you'll both get an double infraction' [or they could both lose the opportunity at a down-grade]. Or if one wants to participate and the other doesn't, maybe the one who doesn't gets the double-infraction, or the one who does gets the downgrade.

There's lots of options to play with.

Ok, so that's antagonistic pairs, but there are also people who aren't necessarily antagonistic towards one person but rather have lashed out in some manner. I can tell you from personal experience that one of the most productive infractions I ever had, if one can say that, came from a moderator who showed a modicum of interest in why I lashed out.

He didn't offer, nor was there any expectation of any sort of downgrade of my infraction. But he essentially said, 'Hey, you're normally pretty decent. Why so angry?" And we went back and forth and at some point he stopped responding, which is totally fine as I was at least heard-out. I have no right to think that he would divulge to me that he was going to look at other posters/issues that I raised, it's none of my business really. But I had the satisfaction of being heard and talked to like an adult and most importantly it made me feel like the mod felt I had a stake in this community and deserved to be heard and made me feel like he too had a stake in ensuring some sort of decency, rather than just being an infraction-bot.

Right in this very thread, I see posters who are frustrated by what seems to be a lack of communication at heart. Very good, non-troll posters got infracted for whatever reason and although allowing PDMA is not going to happen (and probably shouldn't have happened) a simply, 'What's up with you?' type of message from the mod who handed down the infraction would have gone a long way toward easing that frustration. I have had, as have many others, the experience of getting an infraction with the accompanying message, 'don't be a jerk'.

Obviously, quite a lot of infractions don't warrant much more than that, but quite often they do - and in particular when they're given to users who are generally responsible and nice to other posters. Can it hurt to talk to them - even if it's simply to say, 'Look, you're frustrated. I get that. But you can't go around doing ABC here. Maybe if you approached the issue from this angle instead, you could address your frustration and not risk infraction next time'.


Ok, so now the time issue. I realize mod time truly is precious and in short supply. These sorts of things will take a lot of time, to be sure. However, you have to ask if these sorts of things will eventually save a lot of time by reaching more positive outcomes that prevent later problems?

 

[Takhisis]

If we're turning mods into attorneys and judges, I want my lawyers. I summon MobBoss to the stand as my pro tempore counsel.