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Why must our edits be approved?

20:42 / 22.01.03

Stop me if this has alreay been done, but I'm someone who's prone to a lot of typos. My chaotic personality tends to reflect my posting style, which is one of my mismakes and whoopsies.

It must be annoying that I'm constantly correcting my posts and sending them in for moderator approval. Why all the extra work? Why can't we edit our posts without permission?

I see the possibility of "people taking back what they said or adding something new so they can cover their own ass" scenario's (high school fun) or even "people fucking around and causing this place to experinece a major uproar or at the least a minor confusion" (we, as chaotes, wouldn't want that now) scenario's- but I think that if you truly measured the pro's and the con's it would be better for us to have Freedom of the Edit.

21:04 / 22.01.03

Well, there was trouble in the past when people edited their own posts halfway through an argument to make it look like they had been saying something other than what they had said. It led to lots of frustration. Now, every moderation decision gets vetted by a committee of mods.

ONLY NICE THINGS

21:15 / 22.01.03

Essentially, I used it to take the piss out of somebody so mercilessly that the whole edifice became unworkable. It's my fault. Sorry.

Or, to look at it another way, the abuse of modding as described above by Grant, along with the vogue for selfdeletion that was ruining a fair few threads when peope, realising they had been backed into corners, deleted all their posts to a thread. Also, Tom wanted to make everyone a stakeholder in Barbelith communally, and this was a way to do that - every decision involves agreement. It's actually sort of beautiful.

As long as you put something in the "reason" section explaining what the changes you have made are ("superficial typos" should do the trick), thus asaving the moderator the hassle of trying to work out by comparing the two posts exactly what has changed, I'm sure they won't mind at all.

Incidentally, we're not all "chaotes", just as we're not all here because of the Invisibles or all Magick enthusiasts. This kind of generalisation causes all sorts of trouble. Nor does being a chaote mean wanting to rot and confuse - chaos has patterns, remember, just infinitely complex ones -
that's why the Invisibles, for example, didn't suddenly become a partwork on successful needlepoint with a free set of yarns in the middle.

Also also, could you please try to remember to use topic abstracts? Otherwise you are, ironically, just making more work for the moderators.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

21:30 / 22.01.03

Requests for small changes take up the same amount of time as requests for large ones: the moderator clicks the Agree or the Disagree button, et voila. The only real difficulty arises when someone doesn't use the Reason: box. And that's not a problem anymore since we all got fed up and decided to reject any moderation request that didn't have a reason attached.

Yeah, it seems a little clunky to have to have someone okay a simple typo fix, but it saves much unravelling of threads (and unwise self-deletion by weary or narked posters). And in the grand scheme of things, it's only a small clunk.

09:33 / 23.01.03

Ok, as long as you guys don't get annoyed when I send in 30 edits per day. I'll try to use the spell checker more often, though. I do see the beauty in this, very similar to the way I see the beauty in right wing anarchy.

So calling everyone a "chaote" here causes chaos? I think I'm starting to understand this place a little better. You guys are more than fractals! Major revelation.

Ok, I'll face it. Using topic abstracts makes things easier for this place, and has nothing to do with conforming to the barbelith government. This is not submission.

I stopped wanting to rot when I turned 16. Got yarn? It has little patterns of meta-yarn in it.

(Haus: am I rebelling against you by being nice? Hehe.)

10:48 / 23.01.03

Tom Chaotes?

13:36 / 23.01.03

Tom's Chaotes - a ragtag bag of raggedy baggers, the toughest unit to scour the North African desert in pursuit of the Nazi menace! No one knew their pasts! No one knew their futures! All they had was the present... and a collection of gung-ho fighting skills unlike any seen before!

17:35 / 29.01.03

I also post on another board which has a complete abscence of moderation. I wrote to the owner of that board once regarding a patently offensive post (a graphic description of animal abuse) that had disgusted many board members. I was told that though my feelings of repugnancy were shared, he did not want to moderate, he wanted any policing action to come from the boards themselves.

And I found that this worked fairly well within the culture of that board, a series of tenacious would-be despoilers were first attacked and then massively ignored until they left.

When I first began reading Barbelith some months ago it seemed a haven of sorts. Everyone was so bright and thoughtful. Though I still read it with interest, I have little motivation to post in what has begun to feel cliqueish and stifling. Perhaps this results in a tighter community, but please at least consider that some new blood may be lost as well, and that not all of it is bad blood.

Perhaps there is some middle ground.

17:36 / 29.01.03

Repugnance, not repugnancy.

Sigh.

18:20 / 29.01.03

When I first began reading Barbelith some months ago it seemed a haven of sorts. Everyone was so bright and thoughtful. Though I still read it with interest, I have little motivation to post in what has begun to feel cliqueish and stifling. – fred

I'm sorry...could you unpack this for me? I don't at all see the correlation between the use of moderation on this board and any sort of "cliqueshness" (if such a word exists).

Matthew Fluxington

02:03 / 30.01.03

I'm with Badbh on this - I really don't see the connection between Barbelith's style of moderation; the fact that people here generally behave themselves; and Fred's insecurity about posting here, which is obviously more to do with his own neuroses than the fact that edits here are screened through moderators to discourage the abuse of the privilege to edit one's own posts.

I wish that some people would quit it with this reactionary feeling that moderation is infringing upon them in some kind of sinister and stifling way. The overwhelming majority of edits are allowed by the moderators, and it is no big deal. Has there been any instance in which a Barbelith moderator has abused their privileges as a moderator? What exactly is the source of this paranoia about the moderation here, unless you happen to be one of the very, very few people who are making themselves a nuisance through trolling?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

06:59 / 30.01.03

I can't think of an instance of bad modding off-hand (although I personally may have been a little heavy-handed with the deletion of the Australian Shark thread) and if such a thing occurs, everyone's got equal access to this forum to chuck a complaint in.

Mods aren't like cops; more park attendants, keeping things nice and making sure the flowers are growing.

And the only time anyone seems to use their *power* actually against anyone else, is, as Flux pretty much said, in instances of trolling.

I could be missing something here, but I think the system as it stands works pretty fucking well. There's always room for imrpovement (well, when isn't there?), but I think the "light-handed" moderation system we've got here is well suited to both the nature and the complexity of the board.

And of course, the more mods, the less *power* any have, but the more efficiently shit gets done.

18:40 / 31.01.03

DO NOT "DO SHIT" ON THE GRASS. BY ORDER.

14:48 / 03.02.03

Badbh, I don't think that moderation is a direct cause of the other things I've observed. I think it's a corollary -- corollary might not be quite the right word -- an attendant ill? It seems I've insulted a few people, so let me stress again that I continue to read Barbelith and to find the discussions here to be of consistently high quality. However, I also find it to be a bit uptight -- not without reason, as Flux mentioned there have been trolls here -- but uptight just the same.

Flux, please stop frothing at the mouth. You're insulting me and I haven't done anything to warrant it. I am not a he, by the way -- I picked 'Fred' because it struck me a sort of neutral name devoid of hysteria.

14:50 / 03.02.03

I do see in re-reading that I didn't make what I was trying to say very clear.

Go ahead and burn me in hell for it.

14:52 / 03.02.03

Cliqueulousness? Cliqueosity? Bearing resemblance to a clique? Cliquelike?

Cliqueabesque?

It's more useful to supply the correct word than to simply point out I've used the wrong one.

ONLY NICE THINGS

15:01 / 03.02.03

I'm going to plump for "Clicquadelica", here.

Barbelith is, as we all know, run by the queer lizards. anyone "doing shit" on the grass for any purpose not considered primarily naughty will be expelled, and then phoned up at midnight (their time) to cries of "dude!"

It's tough love, but it's still love.

fred, could I ask what you mean by "uptight"?

Matthew Fluxington

18:08 / 03.02.03

Fred, I didn't mean to insult you. I'm sorry.

It's all right, what I can't do; out of sight because my heart is true.
Baby, everything is alright, uptight, clean out of sight!

19:48 / 03.02.03

I apologize for being uptight myself. I'll try to think things through more carefully before I post.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

07:14 / 04.02.03

That's so ace. I'm bookmarking this thread as an example of a Barbe-argument that, just for once, resolved itself nicely for both sides. There's not enough of that sort of thing.

14:24 / 11.02.03

Right. Here you go. The way Barbelith is moderated is supposed to stop any individual moderator having absolute power over anything - and as such represents a kind of weird oligarchy or sharing of power rather than the kind of beneficient despotism of most other boards. The paradigm is a new one though - even though we've been using it for over a year now, it's not well-known outside these walls (at least not yet) so I appreciate that it's probably a shock for newcomers. At the moment - yes - there is the slight risk of cliques arising in moderators who can then do what they want around the board. I don't think it happens that much - if at all - but I appreciate that it could.

In the future (at some point) people may start to be able to vote in moderators in an actually democratic fashion, which should make things slightly more interesting and should stop that cliquiness emerging...