Reform of 'PDMA' Guidelines and Establishment of Public Appeal Thread/Forum

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Thlayli

Le Pétit Prince
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Recent events in the Never Ending Stories forum have caused a community consensus in our forum to emerge, that the current PDMA (public discussion of moderator action) process is insufficient to address the concerns many have about moderator behavior.

Moderators deserve to be respected, but there needs to be a better grievance resolution process in the event of mistakes and hurt feelings on behalf of the community. The current private appeals process is unnecessarily opaque and does not hold moderators sufficiently responsible for mistakes. If moderators are doing their jobs, they should have nothing to fear from explaining their actions where necessary.

As such, there needs to be a thread or sub-forum where complaints and concerns can be brought up publicly, and where moderators and community members can discuss the rationales for moderator actions as equals. This would be an exception to the current PDMA policy, under which no discussion of moderator actions is ever allowed.

The rules as they stand represent a foolish policy which does more to separate the moderators from the community which they moderate than to protect moderators. The term 'moderator' means a guide, not a policeman, but lately some moderators seem to be embracing the latter mentality. The Internet in general is a place for free discussion, and while the maintenance of an orderly forum with thousands of members means adherence to the rules is important, lack of accountability to the forum at large can cause the growth of an insular and authoritarian mentality among moderators that offends many of us forum members.

This thread is for public discussion on reforming the PDMA rules and increasing moderator accountability to the community.

Current PDMA Rules said:
Public discussion of moderator actions (PDMA)
Public discussion of actions taken or not taken by moderators or admins is not permitted. If you have a problem with something a moderator has done, then PM the moderator concerned. If you are not aware of which moderator made the action, then PM one of the moderators of that particular forum. Moderators are required to answer you and justify their actions, but they are not necessarily required to agree with you. Please give any mod pmed at least 24 hours to respond. If you do not get a response to the PM within that time frame or are not happy with the response you did get, then you can request a review (see details below). In your PMs, it is highly recommended that you be polite. There are occasions where moderators get something wrong, but generally this is a perception issue, and they may not have seen something in the same way that you have. Remember this if you want to have a constructive discussion with the moderators.

General discussion of how and why moderators do what they do are permitted in the Site Feedback forum when the discussion is in the spirit of improving the forum. Discussing specific incidents of warnings, infractions, bans, specific posters or moderators is not allowed. A statement of a fact of a warning, infraction or ban you yourself have received without value judgements is allowed. Publicly discussing a specific instance as a "hypothetical" is not allowed.

Proposed PDMA Rules said:
Public discussion of moderator actions (PDMA)
Public discussion of actions taken or not taken by moderators or admins is permitted under certain circumstances. If you have a problem with something a moderator has done, the first resort should be to PM the moderator concerned. If you are not aware of which moderator made the action, then PM one of the moderators of that particular forum. Moderators are required to answer you and justify their actions, but they are not necessarily required to agree with you. Please give any mod pmed at least 24 hours to respond. If you do not get a response to the PM within that time frame or are not happy with the response you did get, then you can request a review (see details below) or post in the moderator feedback and appeals thread in Site Feedback. In your PMs and the appeal thread, it is highly recommended that you be polite. There are occasions where moderators get something wrong, but generally this is a perception issue, and they may not have seen something in the same way that you have. Remember this if you want to have a constructive discussion with the moderators.

Specific concerns with moderator behavior and enforcement are permitted in the designated moderator feedback and appeals thread in the Site Feedback forum. Please avoid flaming or trolling moderators when you express your concerns publicly, as the opportunity to discuss moderator actions is a privilege afforded to CFC members as members of a mature community. Please try not to abuse this privilege.

Outside of the appeals process, mentions of specific incidents of warnings, infractions, bans, specific posters or moderators are allowed, but are discouraged outside of Site Feedback. Posters discussing moderator action in other forums will be forwarded to the appeals thread, or to the appeals process listed below.

My proposed changes are listed in bold. Please consider them and offer ideas for improvements of your own.
 
I think the reason for banning PDMA is to diminish the amount of tangential spam and ranting in one thread, also to serve to lessen tension. I do think that allowing PDMA in some transparent way is superior to the current one where problems with moderator actions are served through opaque bottlenecks of information.
 
Moderator actions, such as infractions, banning, and the like, do not affect only the target of the ban; it targets entire communities inside this forum that the infractee is a part of.

While we would like to believe that the site moderation as a whole have best interests at their heart-not all moderators were created equally.

There must be more accountability in the part of the moderators. Moderators must be able to defend their actions and explain themselves when placed under public scrutiny by the community.

While I admit that moderator actions can and should be taken even against the wishes of the community for the sake of fair play and justice, problem arises when moderators take actions to follow the forum rules without heed to the circumstances and grievances shared by the community.

Our current PDMA bans the public discussion of moderator actions. This has proven to be devastating to the community, both for the moderation and the posters, as rumors of moderator abuse and doubt was allowed to be spread rapidly throughout the community who was able to connect and communicate each other through means other than this forum.

Much of the depiction of the moderation outside this forum was less than favorable.

All attempts to explain the situation that led to the core of our grievance against the moderation: a discussion in which one poster, who shall remain anonymous, was accused of a criminal intentions by vocal members of the community and ended with many respected members of the NESing community being banned, was barred from public discussion.

In fact, one poster's attempt to explain the situation ended with said poster being banned as well, leaving me uncomfortable and frightened as to the true intentions of the moderation.

Without any transparencies on the side of the Moderation, without any information that can shed light onto exactly what has transpired and what has been said, we can only believe the words of our peers: those who have been banned.

Yes, we admit that forum rules were most likely broken in the discussion even though we do not know what exactly happened as all posts regarding the discussion was deleted by the Moderation. Our problem is with this lack of information.

We do not understand the specifics of what happened that resulted in our community becoming so weakened. We do not understand the positions of the moderators. We do not fully understand what our peers did to deserve their infractions.

Moderators must be able to explain their actions when placed under public scrutiny by the community. It has to be better than the opaque system that we have currently.
 
I have never been happy with the PDMA rules since Thunderfall instituted them, when he was handling such in person in this Site Feedback forum, but I have never found an alternative that works for staff function. Every experiment with a controlled venue since then has crashed and burned.
 
I don't see why a controlled venue by necessity is a bad idea. Let that thread exist, continue enforcing PDMA rules in the rest of the forum and forward individuals to the Site Feedback thread for discussion. If anything it would help reduce the workload on mods in trying to censor discussion of their actions.
 
Just a flat ban on discussion of moderator activity does not mean that discussion on moderator activity does not happen.

It would be far better if there was a venue in which we could discuss our dissent where moderators could help explain their own actions.
 
and PDMA stands for?
 
Thank you my good Prince!
 
The current PDMA rules are absurd. It's part of the larger problem of how once you join the moderator staff, you're suddenly untouchable and can do no wrong. There's not enough moderator accountability.
 
I have never been happy with the PDMA rules since Thunderfall instituted them, when he was handling such in person in this Site Feedback forum, but I have never found an alternative that works for staff fuction. Every experiment with a controlled venue since then has crashed and burned.

When was a controlled venue for PDMA tried in the past? Maybe I'm getting forgetful but I can't remember the PDMA rules being relaxed within my CFC 'lifetime'.
 
I would like PDMA to be reversed as well.

Deferring discussions on moderator actions to private messaging sounds workable in theory but does not work in practice since it depends completely on the good faith of the moderators in question.

Recently, I had an encounter with a couple of moderators who were not only incompetent but also gaming the system to send out infractions. In the process, they did a little witchhunt for perceived PDMA's and I got burned in the process.

What's most remarkable to me in this ordeal is this zeal that the moderators have for PDMA. It is as if they want to treat us as some Soviet peasants to be ruled and patronized, which is a very insulting attitude.

As it stands, PDMA only serves bad moderators by enabling their bad behaviour without repercussions. If the staff members are afraid that flame-wars regarding moderator actions will hijack the flow of a thread, they can easily follow the suggestions here and make all PDMA activity exclusive to this forum (with links permitted).
 
In fact, one poster's attempt to explain the situation ended with said poster being banned as well, leaving me uncomfortable and frightened as to the true intentions of the moderation.

Without any transparencies on the side of the Moderation, without any information that can shed light onto exactly what has transpired and what has been said, we can only believe the words of our peers: those who have been banned.
Thanks. I thought I was alone in this until reading this thread.

I'd go further and say that moderators are often very undiplomatic in their dealings. Instead of gently giving out a warning or private message, they tend to write red texts to scold and infract at the slightest perceived offense. It is as if their objective is to rub things in other people's faces rather than to moderate the flow of discussions.

In fact, I'd say that the way some moderators operate would be perceived as outlandish and jaw-dropping if done in real life. But again, this can't be directly pointed out because of PDMA.
 
I have never been happy with the PDMA rules since Thunderfall instituted them, when he was handling such in person in this Site Feedback forum, but I have never found an alternative that works for staff function. Every experiment with a controlled venue since then has crashed and burned.

Can you give specific examples of what were done and how they failed?
 
They will be threads in site feedback. Your guess on search terms is as good as mine. They failed on a terrible noise to signal ratio. The ones I recall started as a member posted threads that were then given some leeway
 
It seems like I have experienced some sort of technical difficulty in a thread I posted a couple hour ago. I do hope that didn't get classified as PDMA though since it was not talking about moderator actions..

All I did was to provide a link to the Never Ending Story thread and my thread in itself was not a PDMA.

So Lefty Scaevola, do you feel we are uneducated inferior beings that need to be guided and governed by superior overlords?
 
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