Reform of CFC Public Discussion of Moderator Action Rules

[Jehoshua]

The key issue obviously is providing a thread for appeal of moderator actions in which criticism is not immediately shut down by PDMA as if the critic had violated thai lese majeste laws to go with the previously mentioned monarchy metaphor for our management (afterall as has been stated, moderators /= owner of the website, the staff emerge from and should serve the interests and wellbeing of the community). If the grand secretariat of CFC can fulfil this (apparently well supported amongst the community) development, or provide some satisfactory change from the status quo which assuages some of the underlying concerns being raised, then the key issue one would think will have for the time being been addressed (obviously it could still turn out to be a flop down the line) and we can move forward somewhat from this debate and more towards building up community satisfaction.

Other suggestions made ad hoc on this thread, such as making public minutes of moderator proceedings, are I think tangential rhetorical points emerging from the course of discussion, and are not really important with regards to the key grievance. Indeed I doubt most people would go out of their way to demand their implementation. That said the context in which they were made (moderator respect for the community, recognition that they are not superior to the community, and the need for some degree of transparency amongst other things relating to the implicit relationship between forum staff and the rest of us [and of course mutual respect between players and staff]) is important to keep in mind, even apart from the specific question of PDMA reform.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I've been intending to reply to these points for some time now. So please bear with me on the ones that were posted some days ago.

You can be sure, if there were "appeal" threads, then for every PM which is sent right, you'd get at least 3 posts. Which doesn't make anything easier.

Nonsense. Some people never even bother contacting the infracting moderator after the automated email gets sent. Of those who do, most only send the one message that either asks for clarification, consists of an apology, or says, "Okay." The rest are the people who either want to argue (sometimes they have a good reason for doing so, and sometimes not) or they want clarification. Of all the infractions/warnings that get issued, there are some that are unjustified for the simple reason that either the poster or moderator's first language is not English and a language/vocabulary-related misunderstanding occurred. And the reason some incidents escalate into arguments is because of this scenario:

1. Poster A posts something that Moderator X feels is infractible, and goes ahead with it.

2. Poster A PMs Moderator X for an explanation.

3. Instead of offering an explanation, Moderator X regurgitates the rules link from the first automated PM.

4. Poster A feels frustrated, perhaps even a bit insulted, and gets annoyed that Moderator X has ignored the simple request for an explanation - because the rules are not always clear or may not always be applicable to a particular situation and the poster wants to understand the moderator's thinking or to offer his own explanation.

5. The situation escalates and instead of a successful mutual understanding of the issue, both sides become angry with the other. The poster may end up with a label of "troublemaker" and the moderator may end up in the category of "he/she doesn't have the courtesy to listen to my side of things."

6. Whereupon the poster may be told to appeal to a supermod... and what if the staff member who issued the infraction is a supermod? Some people trust this system to work fairly and impartially, and other people don't.

I don't know everyone's infraction record.

Every active moderator is able to look up every poster's infraction record. That's one of the functions of the vBulletin software.

Retired moderators do not have the authority or accesses that active moderators do. We are regular members with a green badge indicating that we were once on staff but are not any longer.

I've got a question to ask of those wanting open discussion of PDMA. Are you also in favor of moderators openly discussing your actions and their views of you as posters?

Moderators already openly discuss this in the staff forum when deciding whether or not to infract and how much, correct? (this has been mentioned numerous times over the years in Site Feedback so I sincerely hope nobody is going to slap me with PDMA for mentioning it here)

Nobody is asking for a license to flame. But courtesy goes both ways and moderators should never be allowed to troll or flame members. I know I don't allow that on the forums I run and in the past I've even kicked staff not only off staff, but off the forum itself as well for disrespectful treatment of the members.

All of which raises another set of process questions (some which may have been noted earlier in the thread): who do the proponents of this initiative believe should be able to invoke the contemplated public discussion and when? [*]Just the person receiving the infraction? If so, is that after the existing, confidential process has run its course? -- First, try to work it out with the moderator issuing the infraction; if that doesn't work, escalate to the SuperMods -- as an aside, both processes have resulted in infractions being reversed or modified. Or can the person receiving the infraction bypass the existing process and proceed straight to public discussion?

Of course the normal process should be followed at first since most situations get resolved at that stage anyway. On a couple of previous occasions I've cited the example of the Moderator Actions subforum at TrekBBS (a vBulletin forum that is also a large, very active site with an internationally diverse membership and some rules that are extremely lax by CFC standards). The basic rules for using this forum are:

Feedback concerning moderator or administrative actions. PM the moderator first and wait 24-48 hours for a reply before beginning a thread in this forum.

I think it would be beneficial to have another option besides appealing to the supermods. As mentioned, sometimes the staff with whom one has the problem are supermods.

[*]Any other user (call them User B) who notices that a red card was issued to User A and wants a public explanation? If so, is that only if User A has appealed and after the appeal is over? What if User A chooses not to appeal or is even OK with their infraction ("Yeah, I lost my cool. Won't do it again."). Must the consent of User A be obtained before his infractable post/behavior gets rehashed in public? If so, how would this work? Does User B unilaterally open a new thread in the designated forum, or must User B send a PM to someone (a SuperMod?) asking for a discussion thread to be created? In either case, is User A entitled to notice of that and, if so, who is responsible for notifying User A of that, and how? What if User A doesn't regularly check his/her PMs? Is affirmative consent from User A required, or does silence constitute consent (assuming consent is even required)? If User A objects to the discussion of his infraction, can User B still insist on the discussion (i.e., can a large enough number of User Bs asking for a discussion override User A's objection)?

If User B is merely curious, there is always the option of PMing User A and asking what happened, and User A can then decide whether or not to share the information. After all, there are no prohibitions against PM discussions of moderator actions among members (since PMs are supposed to be private).

BTW, one way to find immediate information is to click the card icon. This will take you to a screen that shows which moderator issued the infraction/warning, when the infraction was issued, the category of the infraction and degree of severity (ie. major/minor flaming or spam), how many points the user received, and when these points will expire. This is information that is available to everyone.

What can lead to complications in this hypothetical situation is when it's not immediately obvious to the average user why the infraction was given. In this case, I think people should be entitled to ask why the post was infracted, because obviously it's confusing to see something that looks okay but got carded for some unknown reason. This can lead to frustration and uncertainty over where the line actually is between a post that is okay, one that is sort of okay depending on context and/or the individual moderator's interpretation (ie. what is and is not hate speech or trolling or rude), and one that is clearly not okay.

Some staff have said over the years that "we're not going to tell you where the lines are because then you'll keep posting stuff that tries to get as close as possible without crossing." I think that's an insulting way to treat the members. Most people are not like this. Yes, there are a few notorious individuals who delight in pushing boundaries. Most, however, want to know where the boundaries are so they don't risk pushing them. It's not fair to make people guess and there's been a sense of some situations being a "gotcha!" waiting to happen.

[*]User B objecting to moderator failure to infract User C for behavior that User B thinks should be infracted (either standing alone or in comparison to the behavior that another, infracted user engaged in). Let's charitably assume that User B used the report function to raise their concerns about User C's post and there is no public moderator action regarding User C (after some number of days?). Can User B unilaterally open a thread asking for a public explanation of why no action was taken against User C? Does it matter whether the moderators chose to take action via PM, rather than public infraction? In either case, does User C get notice/have the right to object to that discussion? If so, same process questions as above.

This is one of the issues that has been quite contentious over the years and a prime reason why some people have asked for a public moderators' log of actions taken. Admins and moderators ask members to use the report function to report problem posts, but over the years some people have concluded that there's no point in doing this because they rarely see anything being done about the offending posts.

It's a fair thing to allow people to ask why. If the staff want the members' trust, then there has to be consistent application of the rules, or else a reason provided why this didn't happen. It could be a simple thing like "Sorry, didn't notice it, thanks for bringing it to our attention." That's how I handle the odd thing that goes wrong on my Freecycle group (I'm a moderator there). On any busy group it's not reasonable to expect the staff to read every new post every day. The report function is an essential tool to help keep a site civil - but it's only going to be useful as long as the members see that it works.

Recent example: I reported a post yesterday. I checked back later to see if my report had been acted on, and it was. I saw (by clicking on the red card) what action the moderator took, and I'm pleased that it was (in my opinion) an appropriate way to handle that situation. If no moderator had acted on that report within 24 hours I'd be rather upset, since it was definitely an infractible offense that should be obvious to the average member here.

So if no moderator had acted on this report, the question is whether or not I'd have the right to ask why nothing had been done (since from my pov that would have been the case). I think people should have this right, because it could be something as simple as "Oops, we overlooked that, sorry" or "We're still looking into that and a decision has not yet been made" and it would get people to stop fretting about it if they knew this was the case. Of course it could also be a case of staff and members having a serious disagreement over whether or not the post is objectionable, offensive, or whatever and in such a situation I think the member deserves to know why the staff don't see it as an infractible offense. Otherwise, the result is confusion, frustration, and even a perception of moderator bias - particularly if one member gets infracted for something that another member does not.

In the case of reported posts that have been dealt with via PM or other methods rather than a publicly-visible card or in-post mod text, a simple "this matter has been dealt with via PM" should suffice. After all, it's usually not so much a matter of what specific action has been taken as long as some action was taken that matters to people who report a post.

I seem to recall some time back that someone suggested adding something to indicate that a post had been reported. There are pros and cons to this, but at least it would show people that someone had reported it so maybe 15 more people wouldn't bother.

I've already voted with my feet. I've proven at my own forum that well-treated people treat the management better - and the Alpha Centauri community has traditionally not been exactly a model of maturity and peace. We're growing and getting better all the time, and I ain't got time for a CFC where I can't expect civility from the management, let alone respect. I'd like to help grow CFC's Alpha Centauri subforum -there's life in the ol' game yet, as AC2 proves- but I'm not a masochist, and you people are missing out on some great patches, mods, and scenarios.

It's a shame that there have been recent posts that seem to equate activity on a forum other than CFC with disloyalty and an "either get your <anatomy> back here or shut up" attitude. It's a big internet and mutual cooperation between forums that have common interests can only benefit both places.

There was a large gaming forum I belonged to years ago where things got nasty to the extent that five offshoot forums were created. Did the parent forum's staff try to work things out or at least say "good luck, and drop by to visit some time"? No, it did not. Some of us were accused of some pretty vile things, the least of which was disloyalty.

It's not disloyal to want more than one place to engage in an activity. Think of it this way: You have a favorite coffee shop where you go every day to have lunch and chat with some friends who are also regulars there. Let's say that for whatever reason some of these regulars start frequenting a different coffee shop, but still enjoy going to the first one. What would you think if the proprietor of the first shop started screaming "You're disloyal! How dare you have an opinion about the coffee I serve or the sandwich ingredients I use or the rules I post about wifi use if you go to this other coffee shop! You don't get an opinion about my shop unless you stop going there!"

Sounds unprofessional and rude, right? Absolutely NOBODY who joined this forum signed an exclusivity agreement that said we'd never play or discuss Civ or other topics from this forum on another site. From what I understand about the NES folks is that some of them are happy to frequent both forums and there's nothing wrong with that. I spend more time here than I do at Alpha Centauri 2, but what I get from that forum is something I don't get here.

Nobody's trying to take members away from CFC, and it's frankly ridiculous and a bit paranoid to suggest that this is going on - no matter if the other forum in question is The Frontier, Apolyton, AC2, or any other site that has content/discussions/activities related to stuff that also happens here.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

To add on to Ms. D'Ur's remarks, it's simply unprofitable to worry about forum loyalty or the lack thereof - keeping the members happy is the name of the game. If people get mad and leave, maybe it's too late to fix the problem in that particular case, and maybe it's not; but even though it's impossible to please everyone, it's good to understand where the dissenters are coming from, to possibly not let the problem happen again the next time... A body could discount those opinions, but doing so is hardly the wisest course, in the long run.

 

[sophie]

It may be more work, but even some kind of PM to reporting posters notifying them whether action/no action was taken against a post they reported would be helpful. The system is so cumbersome - you have to physically go back and look for a post you reported to see if anything was done about it - that it perpetuates this sense that moderators don't do anything/things you say or do don't really matter in the long run. Reporting posts honestly just feels like pissing into the wind. Which is why I generally don't do it anymore. It's much easier to just tell off the poster publicly and move on.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

I have had what I said in a post report leaked to the offender.

I'm told there was an investigation when I thought to complain later, but no one ever bothered to tell me anything whatsoever about the result.

-I wish it had been otherwise, to say the least.

 

[Bootstoots]

About reported posts, I'll try to give some detail as to what happens when someone reports a post, how often posts are acted on, and so forth. Obviously ex-staff will already know what a reported post looks like, but I think it may be helpful for others who want to know the details.

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Whenever a post is reported, a notorious spambot automatically posts a thread in a subforum of the staff forum. The thread contains a link to the post, the post reporter's comment, and the text of the post. Here's an example:

Spoiler The_J reports an adspammer :

Moderators can then weigh in on the course of action to take on the post, and an action is taken (or not). The action is then recorded in the thread and the thread is marked closed to indicate that it's been taken care of. That's just organizational - anybody can post with questions, comments, follow-up, etc if necessary (since mods can post in closed threads).

The mods spend a fair amount of time in the reported post forum and usually respond fairly quickly to new reported post threads. It's extremely uncommon that a thread doesn't get at least one reply, although that reply might just say that no action is needed. As a rule, if you report a post, it will be seen.

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Now I'll talk about some reported post stats for recent OT posts. I went through the reported post forum and clicked on 102 post report threads. These were all the reports of OT posts I found on the first 10 pages of the forum which were not made by a current moderator. These go back to the last couple of days of November.

I tallied up the outcomes in several categories. Here is a breakdown, in roughly decreasing order of severity:

Infraction and/or ban (excludes ad spam): 16
Warning: 6
Modtext and/or thread closure*: 16
PM sent to poster**: 5
"Custodial" action***: 13
Ad spam cleanup: 12
Infraction given but reversed: 1
No action: 33

*No warning or infraction issued, just modtext.
**No warning, infraction, or modtext; just a PM and maybe the removal of an image or link
***Deleting double posts, closing duplicate threads, archiving serial threads, editing polls, etc.

Of all 102 reported posts, only 2 had no replies whatsoever. In one case the issue was already dealt with in another closely related reported post; the other was on an acceptable babe thread post. All others had at least one reply, although the most obvious "no action", spambot, or custodial reports usually only have one or two brief replies. And just over two-thirds resulted in some sort of action.

I didn't tally up non-OT report threads, but the pattern seems nearly identical there too.

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I hope this does at least show that we do devote some time to every report that comes in. If anyone reports a thread and doesn't see any action, they can PM any of that forum's mods. You'll usually get at least a brief reply; if not, you can ask someone else. Although I'm not sure whether we'll end up allowing a PDMA thread or not, PMs are always allowed.

Within OT, I'll certainly volunteer to take any questions anyone has about why we acted/didn't act the way we did at any point. It might take a little while to get back, and I can't give details about exactly which moderators (besides me) feel which way, who reported the post, or the like. But otherwise I'll be as open as possible.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Interesting discussion on reporting, I always had the perception that whether a post gets infracted is arbitrary and is often based on personal moderator annoyance, with them preferring, in their decisions, to analyse the form, rather than content (post crude insults, get infracted, post something similar, or worse, in a minimally polite form, don't get infracted).

I do have some sympathy with moderators on the issue, though - it can be hard to determine when analysing the content ends and infracting people for unpopular political options begins. Not really sure if anything can be done about it in a legalistic framework, since it's a "I know it when I see it" thing.

 

[Bootstoots]

To some extent we really are politeness police - someone who is behaving rudely and who is also making some intolerant statement will be treated considerably more harshly than someone who posts the same opinion politely. Obviously there are limits to this: polite neo-Nazis are still not going to last long. But on the flip side, anyone who is extremely rude is not welcome here no matter how mainstream their opinions may be.

If anything, I'd prefer to keep the range of possible beliefs here as wide as possible. It's a challenge to keep a very politically diverse community from devolving into the sort of shouting match that most internet forums are.

In this case it's worth it. CFC's OT managed to keep me interested for 8 years after I mostly stopped playing Civ, and CFC is the only site I've encountered that hooked me so completely that I'd be willing to spend a bunch of time moderating to make sure it stayed worthwhile.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

...it can be hard to determine when analysing the content ends and infracting people for unpopular political options begins...

There were times when an infractee would accuse me of political bias, when no such thing happened. Moderators have to set aside their personal political opinions when moderating political threads. So, for example, if a moderator infracts a poster who says something negative about Republicans, do not assume that means the moderator supports the Republicans. That's something that is between the moderator and his/her conscience, and he/she has no obligation to make personal political preferences known to the members here. As long as the moderator remains impartial, that's what counts. And keep in mind that it's absurd to accuse a non-American moderator of this sort of bias anyway, since most other countries don't have these parties and may not even have a similar political system at all.

 

[pigswill]

Could the OP clarify the poll? The question is 'discuss or appeal moderator actions', the options only relate to publicly appealing moderator actions.

It appears to me that an appeal would only apply to the member directly affected by a moderator action while a discussion would apply to any member of the forum who wanted to state an opinion on the matter.

edit: I believe that the member directly affected by a moderator action already has the ability to privately appeal a moderator action through the pm system.

 

[pigswill]

There's also a seperate issue of whether a moderator is taking unilateral action or responding to a complaint by another member of the forum which raises other issues such as anonymous whistleblowing vs the accused's right to face the accuser.

 

[Thlayli]

Within OT, I'll certainly volunteer to take any questions anyone has about why we acted/didn't act the way we did at any point. It might take a little while to get back, and I can't give details about exactly which moderators (besides me) feel which way, who reported the post, or the like. But otherwise I'll be as open as possible.

That's kind of you to make that offer, Bootstoots. It's always refreshing to see moderators talking about how much they care. Also that data is fascinating, though it does make clear that moderators are rarely if ever willing to reverse their infractions.

You know Bootstoots, I'd be willing to offer something similar. I've become well-educated with site rules and their applications throughout this whole process, and in the event of a confused user coming into a PDMA appeal thread and not understanding why the moderators acted a certain way, I think I could help them consult the site rules and help to determine if a moderator's actions are in line with them. I'm sure a lot of us are willing to do that.

I'd like to be part of the solution, too. If I'm not banned from explaining how a moderator acted, I and others can help our fellow members to interpret moderator actions in the context of CFC site rules, which belong to all of us. It sounds nice, doesn't it?

At this point, it would be interesting to see if Lefty would be willing to experiment with an appeal thread for a trial period, say 1-2 months. After all, there's nothing to lose! Most of the community favors it, if it fails you can just go back to the same old policy, and if it succeeds, you've solved the problem. So what's the downside?

 

[Bootstoots]

That's kind of you to make that offer, Bootstoots. It's always refreshing to see moderators talking about how much they care. Also that data is fascinating, though it does make clear that moderators are rarely if ever willing to reverse their infractions.

I looked through the infractions forum (another staff subforum - all infractions and warnings are automatically logged there) and took a brief look to see if the ratio of infractions standing to reversed was similar overall. It was: I'd guess the stand-reverse ratio is around 15-20 to 1.

That's not as bad as it sounds. For every potentially controversial infraction we give, a large number are for obvious misbehavior. These were the offenses for the most recent five infractions I've given:

• Calling an entire ethnic group "effing traitors"
• Saying that a poster should be executed
• Calling religious posters "you religious nuts" and claiming they couldn't wait to post about the Chapel Hill shooting because the shooter was an atheist
• Derailing threads by making numerous completely irrelevant posts about medieval Poland
• Posting an extremely distorted (to the point of being racist propaganda) "infographic" about black-on-white crime from an openly racist website

The reversal in my dataset from my last post was also mine. Somebody posted "And you are lynching Negroes!", it was reported, and I infracted it thinking it was the poster's words and not catching the reference to Soviet propaganda. I reversed it the next morning after both the poster and another moderator pointed this out.

Most reversals come from PM conversations with the poster or from other moderators saying that an infraction isn't warranted. When there is a PM exchange and the poster has some ground to stand on, reversals are very common. Usually it's either a misunderstanding like the reversal I mentioned, some other moderating mistake, or something minor where a poster convinces the moderator that an infraction is more than is usually given in those circumstances.

I will concede that appeals are rare and successful appeals are still rarer. That's usually because the moderator agrees to reverse based on a PM exchange or discussion with other moderators; it's exceedingly rare for a mod to dig in and refuse to reverse questionable infractions.

You know Bootstoots, I'd be willing to offer something similar. I've become well-educated with site rules and their applications throughout this whole process, and in the event of a confused user coming into a PDMA appeal thread and not understanding why the moderators acted a certain way, I think I could help them consult the site rules and help to determine if a moderator's actions are in line with them. I'm sure a lot of us are willing to do that.

I'd like to be part of the solution, too. If I'm not banned from explaining how a moderator acted, I and others can help our fellow members to interpret moderator actions in the context of CFC site rules, which belong to all of us. It sounds nice, doesn't it?

At this point, it would be interesting to see if Lefty would be willing to experiment with an appeal thread for a trial period, say 1-2 months. After all, there's nothing to lose! Most of the community favors it, if it fails you can just go back to the same old policy, and if it succeeds, you've solved the problem. So what's the downside?

I would favor a moderator action Q&A thread similar to Birdjaguar's proposal here:

I'd prefer a question and answer thread where posters can ask questions directed at specific moderators about the hows and whys of what they do or did. I think those are less likely to get out of control and are more likely to be thoughtful. For example: @Birdjaguar: you have responded to several reported posts [link, link, link] that are clearly trolling, but did not infract the culprit; the rules say....

There is certainly some support for such a thread, although there's no consensus as yet. There is a long and active thread in the staff forum where we're discussing it.

Informally, the rules were relaxed again for this thread and the NES/IOT merger threads. But from the time Birdjaguar made that suggestion on Feb 6, the quality of this thread and the NES/IOT merger threads went downhill dramatically in exactly the same fashion as the predecessor threads from last fall.

The fact that it was tried another time and the outcome was the same is yet another strike against allowing an official PDMA thread even as an experiment in the minds of many staff members. All similar experiments, most recently this one, have been flops and have seriously undermined your case. I personally would still favor allowing a Q&A thread in principle, but I would now favor waiting until the NES/IOT uproar simmers down before we start.

As for moderators caring, what I've seen both in public and in the staff forum strongly suggests that the NES moderators and the others who have involved themselves here do care a great deal about the members. They have been in extensive discussions with you and the rest of the community, and continue to do so despite taking quite a bit of abuse over a period of more than five months now. I like to think I'm a relatively nice moderator, and I'm certainly willing to explain my actions (whether in public if a Q&A thread is agreed upon or in private if not), but I don't know that I would be willing to put up with what they have had to work with for as long as they have if a similar event were to happen in OT.

 

[Thlayli]

Informally, the rules were relaxed again for this thread and the NES/IOT merger threads. But from the time Birdjaguar made that suggestion on Feb 6, the quality of this thread and the NES/IOT merger threads went downhill dramatically in exactly the same fashion as the predecessor threads from last fall.

The fact that it was tried another time and the outcome was the same is yet another strike against allowing an official PDMA thread even as an experiment in the minds of many staff members. All similar experiments, most recently this one, have been flops and have seriously undermined your case. I personally would still favor allowing a Q&A thread in principle, but I would now favor waiting until the NES/IOT uproar simmers down before we start.

This is entirely unfair though, for multiple reasons. First, there was no explicit mention from the moderators that the PDMA rules were being relaxed, and that our performance in the thread would be used as some kind of metric to determine future policy. This relaxation was done in secret, with absolutely no coordination with the members whatsoever.

Secondly, you're only relaxing PDMA in an ad hoc fashion when dissent rises to such an incredibly high level that there's no other outlet than to have a full and honest discussion. Since you choose to relax it in moments of supreme emotional outrage, it stands to reason that your sample is going to be biased towards people getting emotional.

Thirdly, they haven't been flops at all. They've led towards open, honest discussion between moderators and players and an attempt to reach some kind of equitable solution.

I don't think the mods understand this - PDMA happens constantly. In our IRC networks, and on associated forums offsite, we can and will discuss moderator behavior as much as we want. So it can either happen in a setting over which you have no control, or ability to defend yourself, or in one where you can. You cannot stop PDMA. You can stop it on CFC, but you can't stop it 100%. All the mods do by banning it here is plug their ears and pretend people aren't talking about them.

 

[Luckymoose]

So they are honeypotting us, gotcha.

 

[Thlayli]

They're creating a fantasy world with forbidden topics of conversation and a dedicated team of censors to root it out - Great Firewall, anyone?

I'm all in favor of letting this issue die down and giving the moderators time to work it out, but I have a feeling that some powerful admins are just too conservative to let go of the privilege, even in a limited fashion. If we had confidence that something was going to come through rather than a simple "let's wait for it to die down and ignore it as always" policy, I'd feel better about stopping my complaints.

And yes Lefty, that means you, and no, I'm not technically carrying out PDMA, since I'm just speculating on your opinions, not your actions.

 

[sophie]

I don't think the mods understand this - PDMA happens constantly. In our IRC networks, and on associated forums offsite, we can and will discuss moderator behavior as much as we want. So it can either happen in a setting over which you have no control, or ability to defend yourself, or in one where you can. You cannot stop PDMA. You can stop it on CFC, but you can't stop it 100%. All the mods do by banning it here is plug their ears and pretend people aren't talking about them.

I think this is an important point to keep in mind. The idea behind PDMA rules is to help keep things from getting too out of hand. If people are allowed to go on massive rants about infractions they received or the unfairness of a moderator then people may start piling on and acting up. Which would be fine(ish) if cfc was a closed system, existing in a vacuum. It's not. Instead what happens is if someone gets annoyed about a perceived unfair moderator action they go on one of the many CFC-themed IRC channels to complain/commiserate with fellow posters. Those posters may justify/confirm/enable that irritation until a group gets up in arms about what's happening and then you start getting coordinated line-pushing elsewhere on the forums in retaliation. For better or for worse that's just what happens. A lot of that stuff could be prevented if there was an approved forum for posters to air their grievances with moderators so that an understanding can be reached about why the moderator acted in the way he did, and whether or not that action was even justified, rather than what we have now which is a lot of people getting pissed off at a phantom unable to defend him (or her) self which can result in otherwise innocent scenarios getting blown way out of proportion.

 

[Birdjaguar]

While I don't think it has been mentioned yet, the very public nature of a PDMA thread may be part of the problem. Being dog piled by angry members would not be much fun. Hence my more structured and less free form suggestion. But what if the thread was in a separate subforum that was not visible to non members and only accessible if a member signed in? Such a structure would make the discussions more private with the dirty laundry less visible.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

While I don't think it has been mentioned yet, the very public nature of a PDMA thread may be part of the problem. Being dog piled by angry members would not be much fun. Hence my more structured and less free form suggestion. But what if the thread was in a separate subforum that was not visible to non members and only accessible if a member signed in? Such a structure would make the discussions more private with the dirty laundry less visible.

It's my understanding that this is how it works at TrekBBS (when I linked to it before in the old PDMA thread I was told that nobody here could see it; since I'm always logged in there, I always see it and hadn't realized it wasn't visible to lurkers).

 

[Bootstoots]

This is entirely unfair though, for multiple reasons. First, there was no explicit mention from the moderators that the PDMA rules were being relaxed, and that our performance in the thread would be used as some kind of metric to determine future policy. This relaxation was done in secret, with absolutely no coordination with the members whatsoever.

Secondly, you're only relaxing PDMA in an ad hoc fashion when dissent rises to such an incredibly high level that there's no other outlet than to have a full and honest discussion. Since you choose to relax it in moments of supreme emotional outrage, it stands to reason that your sample is going to be biased towards people getting emotional.

I think those are reasonable points. The relaxation of the rules was only de-facto and was not coordinated ahead of time by the moderators, nor was it said explicitly that the rules were being relaxed. The option to enforce the rules at any time was reserved and eventually used in some cases when the argument got entirely out of hand in the opinion of the admins.

I'm certainly not going to claim that it's a perfectly apples-to-apples comparison, but what I am saying is that the outcomes we've seen generally do not bode well for the success of a Q&A thread at least in the case of very contentious moderation decisions. In any Q&A thread that is posted, the admins will certainly have to be able to declare an issue &#8220;decided&#8221; and disallow further discussion of the issue once it has been discussed ad nauseum and no further understanding appears to be forthcoming. Overall, I think a Q&A thread would work out fairly well if it&#8217;s kept within limits like that.

Thirdly, they haven't been flops at all. They've led towards open, honest discussion between moderators and players and an attempt to reach some kind of equitable solution.

This thread has been more or less okay and I'm glad you posted it. The NES/IOT merge threads and parts of the Argentina thread have been very much a different story, as were most of the threads that were involved in the controversy last fall. In a vacuum I would completely support this idea, but some of the behavior we have seen leads me to think that there is something to the belief that allowing PDMA is just a waste of time.

I don't think the mods understand this - PDMA happens constantly. In our IRC networks, and on associated forums offsite, we can and will discuss moderator behavior as much as we want. So it can either happen in a setting over which you have no control, or ability to defend yourself, or in one where you can. You cannot stop PDMA. You can stop it on CFC, but you can't stop it 100%. All the mods do by banning it here is plug their ears and pretend people aren't talking about them.

I not only understand that but wouldn&#8217;t dream of it being any other way. You should by all means talk about whatever you want anywhere offsite, and IRC channels and other sites are great ways to vent about what happens here in ways that would not be allowed on the site. Relaxing PDMA rules in usergroups (edit: meant social groups) could be a decent idea as well, although I have not discussed this with any other staff members and they may well have reasonable objections.

I think this is an important point to keep in mind. The idea behind PDMA rules is to help keep things from getting too out of hand. If people are allowed to go on massive rants about infractions they received or the unfairness of a moderator then people may start piling on and acting up. Which would be fine(ish) if cfc was a closed system, existing in a vacuum. It's not. Instead what happens is if someone gets annoyed about a perceived unfair moderator action they go on one of the many CFC-themed IRC channels to complain/commiserate with fellow posters. Those posters may justify/confirm/enable that irritation until a group gets up in arms about what's happening and then you start getting coordinated line-pushing elsewhere on the forums in retaliation. For better or for worse that's just what happens. A lot of that stuff could be prevented if there was an approved forum for posters to air their grievances with moderators so that an understanding can be reached about why the moderator acted in the way he did, and whether or not that action was even justified, rather than what we have now which is a lot of people getting pissed off at a phantom unable to defend him (or her) self which can result in otherwise innocent scenarios getting blown way out of proportion.

That is a good argument. Coming from outside NES or IOT, a lot of what I&#8217;ve been seeing since September has made very little sense to me. If public feedback had been available in real time, much of what happened might have been averted.

For instance, the initial blowup appeared to be triggered by the existence of a dogmatic anarcho-capitalist in the WWW thread. As anybody in OT or really any general discussion forum on the internet knows, internet libertarians are one of the several groups of people who reliably act as lightning rods. They appear, make stereotypical (and usually bad IMO) libertarian arguments, and soon a flame war erupts. This is a regular occurrence in OT, and it&#8217;s unremarkable. Often we have to intervene to stop the flamewar, resulting in several infractions and possibly the closing of the thread, but that&#8217;s nothing out of the ordinary for OT moderation.

In order to understand what was going on, I looked in the old WWW thread shortly after it was closed, reading the last 60 pages in depth and skimming back further. I found that it was essentially an entire OT compressed into a single thread, and that a number of discussions were had that covered nearly the entire political gamut. I saw the Amon flamewar, and while it was serious enough that intervention was required and a number of infractions were handed out to all sides for trolling and flaming each other, nothing about it seemed especially unusual. In my opinion, Amon&#8217;s opinions were cringeworthy but not quite actionable in and of themselves, falling more on the anarcho-capitalist &#8220;people have the right to defend their property including against the government&#8221; side of things rather than &#8220;we should blow up a Federal building&#8221;. That&#8217;s a subjective call, but I try to err more on the more permissive side when possible, so I&#8217;d probably have made same decision BSmith made.

In OT, a person making these arguments would have triggered a run-of-the-mill flamewar but no lingering problems once it was shut down. The NES reaction was quite different. Symphony D quit spectacularly after being banned for accumulated points. The point ban was happenstance - in the flamewar he managed to accumulate 8 points while Amon got only 7 and didn&#8217;t trip a ban. Nothing seemed unusual before his quit on September 9. Within 24 hours, pandemonium had broken out and there was already talk of moving.

What I had assumed is that this was an &#8220;archduke gets shot in Sarajevo&#8221; moment. I thought there was a backstory I didn&#8217;t understand and that what I had seen was just the tip of some iceberg. While I still think this is likely to be true, I also now realize that internal discussions within #nes, via PM, and offsite coupled with a lack of ability to make public comments may have resulted in a positive feedback loop amplifying the anger at moderator decisions without the involved moderators being able to say why they made the decisions they did. On the flip side, a similar if less severe dynamic occurred in the staff forums.

So yes, now that I&#8217;ve thought about it, I can easily see how allowing a thread or a subforum where PDMA is allowed within limits could have positive effects and help to defuse situations like this in the future.