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And I would say again that I don't believe it's a moderator's role to correct spelling, unless possibly it is so bad as to make a post incomprehensible, and even then it would hardly be unique. I realise people do this according to their individual conscience...
I think, and speaking as somebody who does feel right now as if Barbelith can be a pretty oppressive place, but only as a result of very small numbers abusing the board's ideals in the pursuit of personal gain, that a key point here is:
Barbelith is just fine for the overwhelming majority of us - I can't see any good reason for us to bend over backwards to accomodate a very small minority of people.
Is that true? The point is, a) if there is a 'silent majority' that is feeling unease, or even a statistically significant silent minority, we should be trying to find out why and dealing with it. Also, some of this majority or minority is not silent. Non-troll members of the board have come out and expressed that it feels weird to them to have posts deleted without explanation, or threads disappear. So, we are working on ways to maybe make that not happen, because the desire to obliterate he presence of the sexless backpacker is having unanticipated side effects. The ability of administrators to...well, actually, administrators couldn't do much, apart from warn users, which I don't think ever happened, but there weren't many of them and maybe that made them a target for accusations of Star Chamberiness. There was a "ban user" button, but it didn't actually do anything. So, no more administrators (except Cal, who is technical, and Tom, who is realistically entitled, and has far greater power *anyway*) and a discussion about better practice on moderation and deletion. May's comment about Set PMing people with the text of their deleted posts is also a good one - it's been very rare that I have had to delete a post that is not either trolling or a few words of threadrot, but where I have I have tried to keep this in mind. If we are feeling indulgent, we could have a Policy thread where deleted thread URLs are kept, so threads can be kept alive by devoted people if they want to... they are just kept off the beaten track. As long as we are good about killing trollsuits, that needn't be impossible...
But we do need feedback. There is a tendency for people who want to impose their agenda onto Barbelith to claim popular support. The sexless backpacker claimed the support of the people, long after it became clear that only a *very* small number (like, leprous hand) was actually interested in trying to get him reaccepted. I think it's important to distinguish the 'silent majority' who are whistled up to support one person's view of how Barbelith should accommodate them from the simple majority of people on Barbelith who don't post. Many of those are multiple suits, many others are abandoned suits, but presumably there are some people out there who might contribute to Barbelith but feel, for some reason, that they cannot, should not or do not want to. Some of the reasons for that are probably intrinsic to Barbelith being what Barbelith is, but others are probably amendable and deserve our attention. While Flux is right that we should not be messing around with what Barbelith is or pressing one of many possible self-destruct buttons to satisfy a handful of people, I don't think that describes Nick's aim in this thread; the few people who want Barbelith to bend over backwards are, if anything, very vocal about it. There may be a fair few people who would just like to see Barbelith flex a bit.
All of which is a rather long-winded (yeah, I know, should we alert the national media?) way to say that I think this thread is a valuable and useful one. If you're sick of posting on Barbelith, you may want to take a break. If you would like to get the chance to be sick of posting on Barbelith, this could be a good place to start... |
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