BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Policy & Help >

The once and future board...

  
  

Page: (1)2

 
 
Tom Coates
19:48 / 19.09.03
I'm going to start with a bit of clarification about user 992 aka Dr Doom, who has been 'helping' across the board recently. This is why I don't give a damn about his opinions - and why you shouldn't either.

We start off very positively with four poems in a row in February 2002:

Post
Post
Post
Post

A double post from February 2002:

Post
Post

A few one-liners and brief posts (also from February 2002):

Post
Post
Post
Post
Post
Post

There a few more poems and the like in there and a couple of similar posts... All - again - from February 2002 (are you seeing a trend?) The very last one was in 16th February 2002.

And then suddenly nothing at all... Until yesterday, that is... At which point (twenty months later and several months after we instituted the no new member policy again) the user in question rises up to defend the board against itself using an NTL account with an IP address based in Swansea rather than their previous IP address at BELL CANADA.

Now if this does anything, it should make one thing clear:: The reason this place feels uncomfortable and tense is not because the moderators are occasionally clumsy and do stupid things, which is no doubt true, but because everyone - particularly the moderators - is worn to the bone by having to deal with THREE YEARS of systematic attempts to fuck us all around in the most disrepectful, self-obsessed, arrogant, rude, abrasive, destructive, irrelevant and pointless way.

I don't normally say this kind of stuff, but I want to make it clear now to everyone. This board can be changed, this board can evolve, this board can be improved and if there are things wrong with it we can fix them. We will do it in the appropriate way - people will have reasonable discussions calmly and reasonably (wherever possible). They will do it in the Policy. People will remain as free to complain about behaviour, harrassment, moderator actions as they like in the Policy as they always have been, but they will do everyone the courtesy of trying not to be shitty and personal about it. If you think someone has done something particularly bad and you want me to check the facts, then let me know and I'll look into it personally. If you feel you've been treated excessively harshly, then (i) CHECK YOUR FACTS, (ii) ASK FOR ADVICE ON THE BOARD, (iii) BE PREPARED TO BE WRONG and if necessary (iv) COME TO ME AND ASK ME TO LOOK INTO IT.

Alongside that I'm going to TRY and look into technical improvements around the place. I can't let that stuff be completely open for democratic debate, of course, because it depends on what Cal's able to build for us, how much time we can spare from our jobs and the like - but we'll do our best to be open and responsive to needs that people express around the place. So far, we have already turned the administrators into moderators so that people know who has janatorial rights around the place. I've also started looking into different ways that we might deal with the problem of people not having stable user-names. I wish I had more time to do all this stuff properly, but we're working in the right direction.

Now here's one thing that WON'T happen. This board will NOT be held hostage to threats of bad behaviour, acting up or to individuals who think that the only reason this place is here is to service their personal needs (win a fight, get some kicks) at the cost of everyone else's. And I'm going to ask all of you not to let inconsiderate fuckwits who only enjoy stirring up dissent fuck this place up any more than they have done already. If someone thinks they can change the way this board runs by spamming it, shouting at people, causing fights, having multiple user names or demonising the moderators and the moderator actions then they're just plain wrong.

Ladies and Gentlemen, are we clear?
 
 
w1rebaby
22:38 / 19.09.03
Tom, can I ask, have you talked to people who run other boards about how they deal with these problems? How useful has that input been?

I say this because I'm an admin at Urban75 which has an awful lot of trolls, as well as just unbalanced disruptive people.
 
 
Mazarine
00:00 / 20.09.03
I'm clear. Thanks Tom.

(ps. hugs.)
 
 
bitchiekittie
04:49 / 20.09.03
crikey. I'm responding because you said you'd like us to, and to be honest I'm feeling a bit cowed by the whole thing so I'm a bit scared not to.

I read you.
 
 
Bill Posters
08:56 / 20.09.03
point taken Tom, and yeah, hugs man.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
09:48 / 20.09.03
Yup. Well said. And well done.
 
 
rizla mission
11:37 / 20.09.03
ditto.

Thanks for a perfectly executed example of Telling It Like It Is and Laying Down The Law, Tom.
 
 
Olulabelle
12:13 / 20.09.03
I think I feel a bit like hello kittie. Yes it's clear. Thank you and hugs from me too.
 
 
Baz Auckland
15:33 / 20.09.03
Yep.
 
 
Baz Auckland
15:53 / 20.09.03
...and hugs and thanks too...
 
 
Papess
20:15 / 20.09.03
Clear.

Mr. Coates, you must be an astonishingly patient person. Thank you for this space and for putting up with the lot of us. I would give you huggles, but I am afraid we are not that well aquainted.

*gives firm handshake*
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
06:15 / 21.09.03
I second that emotion.
 
 
Morlock - groupie for hire
10:52 / 21.09.03
Vive le Roi. Well said, clear as crystal.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
13:47 / 21.09.03
User 2302, by the way, is (also) the sexless backpacker, and should be treated accordingly until such time as the suit is closed down.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
19:41 / 21.09.03
Thanks Tom. You rule. In the young people's slang sense.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
19:49 / 21.09.03
(Hey Tom, you're way cooler than Christopher Plummer in The Sound of Music)
 
 
Unencumbered
08:10 / 22.09.03
I think the message is clear. Nice one, Tom. Your patience and good sense are exemplary.
 
 
grant
21:19 / 22.09.03
From the abstract: what we now have to do to get it back on track

I wonder -- I should probably suggest this elsewhere, but -- instead of fiddling with moderation structures, what if we made Distributed Moderation even more distributed?

By which I mean a plan that would involve this:

1. Fixing people to one suit only in a firm way - making that suit identifiable as a specific person.

2. Making anyone -- anyone -- who posted more than, say, 200 times a moderator.

3. Making all moderation decisions require more votes. Instead of three, 10. Or 15. Or even more.

Numbers 2 and 3 would devolve power even more radically to every member of the board, making them automatically enfranchised, and eliminating concerns with elitism or over-powered cliques.

But Number 1 seems to be the most radical change, to me, because it would involve erasing the idea of the fiction suit on Barbelith, pretty much.

However, there might be two ways around that problem, by:

a. using the flexible naming conventions (suffixes, etc) mentioned in other threads, or

b. creating an underclass of suits -- free user IDs that are exempt from above Number 2 (they will never, ever be moderators), and perhaps are limited in the fora to which they can contribute... only in the Conversation, maybe. This might be interesting... limiting spam and over-posting-limit freakouts to the Conversation, but giving a public forum to anyone who didn't particularly feel like being themselves at the moment.

Could that be done? And would it help if it *were* done?
 
 
Tom Coates
21:28 / 22.09.03
The first one - as far as I'm concerned - is the holy grail of community management, but short of asking people for a credit card payment is pretty much impossible.
 
 
grant
21:43 / 22.09.03
What if it was done in a more social way, as we're currently seeing -- any extra suits, once found, will be ruthlessly and quickly deleted? Less hardware-y, more social rules-y... and, admittedly, a bit after the fact.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
22:05 / 22.09.03
I've noticed that the boards at GameFAQs have the following requirements of new members:

Depending on how other users of your ISP have used GameFAQs in the past, you may be required to use an ISP-assigned [email] address and/or have your activation reviewed by an administrator before posting messages.

Would a similar system be practical here?
 
 
grant
23:26 / 22.09.03
Actually, I think something very similar to that *is* the current system.

The problem is, some people only access at libraries, net cafes and other public places... they don't have ISP email, and are thus excluded from the dialogue.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
10:35 / 23.09.03
I've always been shy of writing down the 'Barbelith Ethos', but perhaps that was lazy or mistaken. In the endless 'The Good, the Banned...', I have just asserted the following:

Barbelith is not a place where being a terrible asshole to people will get you what you want.

Part of me wants to write that on the gate instead of 'Enter freely and of your own will'.

(I probably should have put 'terrible asshole' in quotes, but I didn't. In fact, I'm going back there do do it now.)

So - do we need a statement of intent?

(By the way, I'm also going to have to monitor myself from now on for 'being a terrible asshole-ness' - because I'm no more immune than anyone else. Damn.)
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
22:01 / 23.09.03
Quick update:

User 1038 is allegedly the property of Modzero's financée, a real girl with limbs and everything, who as a devoted partner has given it to him as a way to continue his crusade aginst Modzero not being allowed to do whatever he wants.

User 403 is either an imaginary friend or honestly a casual acquaintance who just, you know, decided to spend a lot of time and energy to defending utterly without bias the right of Modzero to behave as he wishes.

User 947 (Icdu2) is formerly Fenris, a companion of Modzero who is currently demonstrating frenetically that they are best friends honest by carrying on his good work.

Now, on making a better board - I was wondering about Wikis and the way that, although everyone can theoretically overwrite and delete, but few people do. How could that inform us?

Maybe if everyone had the power to moderate or delete posts (not topics), to a maximum of, say, 10 a day, and when they did their reason was left on the site. If somebody challenged a decision, that would go to Tom or one of a group of prytanids, who would act as arbiter on whether it was a responsible action. If not, the maker of the action is held accoutnable by a preset and non-debatable process, say being locked out for a day, with escalating removals for continuing offences. That way, everyone is able to change posts, but everyone is also accountable for it.

Problem being, you'd need a mechanism to ensure that people only had one suit, and even then theoretically somebody could invite a bunch of friends in to fuck shit up...which brings us back to the proce of freedom.
 
 
LVX23
00:40 / 24.09.03
Firstly, let me say a big, gracious Thank You to Tom for putting up with all this and continuing to keep Barb alive. I love this Forum (esp the Magick) and don't want to see it change at all.

Secondly, I appeal to the mods: Please don't delete posts. I've never had a post of my own deleted, mind you, but I feel that the very nature of Barbelith - board or entity or otherwise - should at least keep a record of this ongoing experiment, the good the bad & the ugly. In a sense, deleting posts is like trying to pretend that it never happened.

Honestly, if you don't like a post or a user, then just ignore them. And don't put any personal info in your profile. If this is adhered to, then you should never feel any real threat from a user on the board.

IMHO, things are fine the way they are. The spammers, trolls, and recruiters are just another aspect of an open culture and they really only have as much power as we give to them.


My two bits. Thanks for your time.
 
 
grant
01:34 / 24.09.03
Maybe if everyone had the power to moderate or delete posts (not topics), to a maximum of, say, 10 a day, and when they did their reason was left on the site. If somebody challenged a decision, that would go to Tom or one of a group of prytanids, who would act as arbiter on whether it was a responsible action. If not, the maker of the action is held accoutnable by a preset and non-debatable process, say being locked out for a day, with escalating removals for continuing offences. That way, everyone is able to change posts, but everyone is also accountable for it.


I suggested something similar to this in another thread -- I think finding a way to devolve as much power as possible to as many users as possible is a good thing. The comparison to wikis is right along the lines of my thinking.

I hadn't thought of punitive measures for bad decisions. I'd far rather it be in the hands of Tom (or some kind of singular, mechanical Tom-surrogate) than a High Council.

-----

Secondly, I appeal to the mods: Please don't delete posts. I've never had a post of my own deleted, mind you, but I feel that the very nature of Barbelith - board or entity or otherwise - should at least keep a record of this ongoing experiment, the good the bad & the ugly. In a sense, deleting posts is like trying to pretend that it never happened.

I suppose that's true. If it's any reassurance, though, something like 95% of the deletion requests I see are for duplicate posts. It's a vast majority. Within the minority, most are either "off-topic" posts, which are kind of a shady area, or else actual responses to spam/trolling/yadda.
 
 
Lurid Archive
03:32 / 24.09.03
I think the Haus and Grant idea of everyone moderating (or anyone with a certain moderate number of posts) is a not a terribly good idea. Why?

Well, how do you do it? Do you have a system based on the current one where a certain number of votes are required and everyone has a veto? If so, then any difficult member with spare suits and/or a few mates can veto pretty much anything. 10 votes a day means that being able to veto a hundred actions or so is conceivable. You might get round this by starting threads proposing repeated deletions, but more realistically you have to give up on deleting spam or offensive material.

OK. So vetos don't work well in large voting systems. So maybe you just work on proportions? Thing is, if you choose a low proportion then very unpopular votes get passed. Also, a troll with suits and mates gets to have all sorts of fun. So instead you go for a large proportion. It all depends on how it goes, of course, but I suspect that it'll be hard to get enough people to vote to pass anything, though this may be different for those *special* moderation decisions. Some balance might be struck, but I think it would be an exceptionally tricky problem.

The idea that Tom and others would be able to police such a system is also fanciful, IMO. Its a system that would work well most of the time and would be ineffective in the presence of a troll. Essentially, what you are proposing has a greater potential for abuse in which that abuse is harder to deal with than presently.

Actually, I think there are two competing objectives here. One is to have a democratic, leaderless organisation where people are responsible and the other is to have a safe space where certain behaviours are forbidden. I don't think we can have both. There are trolls and any system that operates under the assumption that we won't have to deal with them is asking for a meltdown.

I think that a good few people want a moderator free zone. Given the distrust of any power here, I think it is an option worth seriously considering. The price is that you will not be able to exclude certain behaviour, but I think that that would still be reasonably popular with a fair slice of barbelith.

The other option is to preserve the safe space aspect of barbelith. But, as I said, you *have* to expect to deal with trolls. The current situation, where one person on a bad day can shut down Barbelith is...undesirable.

Either allow the behaviour or set up the board so that it deals more automatically with disruption. Banning, locking and deleting where appropriate. Have rules and enforce them. Let people debate and change what the rules are. Consider allowing moderators ban people - and remember, that banning is actually only a minor inconvenience to the poster, not a death sentence. We will never get rid of the Knowledge and his clones. Don't expect to. Instead, plan how to deal with an unfortunate but ongoing problem.
 
 
Seth
04:33 / 24.09.03
I wonder if it's possible to have the board software detect the kind fo things that form most of the day to day work around the place? I imagine that it'd be very easy for the board to know when there had been a double post, for example, or to be able to flag to a moderator when an abstract has been ommitted. Would it even be possible for it to pick up on poorly constructed HTML?

The reason for these thoughts: if you can automate these processes, it makes the normal moderation requests run themselves. They'd just be flagged up to a moderator for approval automatically. That might be the first step towards a mod free board (excuse the near pun) - perhaps having a couple of active janitors in each forum to approve these requests and initiate whatever else needs doing, and call them *janitors* because it lacks the authoritarian connotation of *moderator.*

The anti-trolling side of the board could be handled like an emergency service, put together for the occasion from a long list of members who Tom trusts (they'd have to be capable objective and fair, and have time to read the board in depth and handle the problem). The trolling/spamming gets flagged to Tom by someone on the board, he sends out a PM (or something similar) to everyone on the list (could be standardised text with a paragraph pointing out the issue, and again could be automated), and the first ten people to respond to the message are those on call to sort out the problem. This ensures that the people who need to deal with any issues can deal with the issues, rather than being on holiday o have a broken PC or be overloaded with work.

Dunno how workable any of that is, I'm just thinking on the fly before I go to work. It involves updating the board software, which would probably go on a long waiting list and may not even be possible. What do people think?
 
 
Spatula Clarke
11:06 / 24.09.03
On the question about having the board check for certain things in order to cut down the number of mod actions being carried out: I know I keep harping on about this, but if the topic abstract were made a required field it'd cut down on a lot of the basic forum caretaking.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
11:32 / 24.09.03
I think with all of these moderation suggestions half the problem is the emotional time people put in to barbelith. Yes people care about the board terribly but in making decisions to ban and delete posts you really need to keep a calm, practical head and think, not only about what it's doing to the board right at that moment, but also the long term implications of deleting something. If a thread's gone up three times and people are responding to it than does it need to be deleted again at that very instant?
 
 
grant
14:23 / 24.09.03
How exactly does vetoing currently work?

I think the everyone-a-moderator system could troll-proof itself by not having absolute vetoes... by weighting each "disagree" to be equal to a negative "agree", and a veto only taking place after a negative five or negative ten total. Like a suggested moderation action starts at 0. It needs to reach 10 or something to be approved (with more moderators, the approvals will have to scale up). If, say, two people agree, it goes up to 2... but then five people disagree. Instead of vetoing outright, it would drop back to -3. The change wouldn't be made, but the action would still be visible until either 13 more people agreed or 7 more people disagreed.
Hmm. I don't think that would take a long time, if every active poster were a moderator. How many are there, like 200? 500?

It *might* be necessary to put a time limit on decisions, so ones that don't reach a clear consensus just delete themselves after three days, say. If you really care about the action, you could resuggest it then and see what happened. I'm not sure that'd be necessary, though.
 
 
LVX23
16:59 / 24.09.03
If a user wants to delete their own post, they should be able to do so without moderation. This would cut down on a lot of janitorial work for duplicates.

And my appeal to not delete posts was referring to censorship or content judgments, not simple maintenance of duplicates or withdrawals.
 
 
Lurid Archive
17:07 / 24.09.03
grant, I don't think that that is significantly different from proportional voting system I describe above and suffers from the same problems.

As an exercise, try playing with some numbers. I think that 200 hundred active posters is probably an upper limit here. Work out what proportion of people are going to vote normally/excpetionally, how many moderator actions allowed per suit per day, how many votes required to approve/reject a request and the time limit for a request. Now pretend you control ten suits and see if you could cause mayhem. Lots of things to try. Blocking requests, for instance, if the numbers are right. If blocking a request is hard, then that means passing a request probably isn't. Also, you can use one suit to spam, get lots of people to use their votes and that leaves a vulnerability. etc etc. It depends on the numbers, but I think the basic inertia of the majority of posters would leave an opening for abuse.

I think it would work ok, to correct html, insert abstracts etc. but then so does the current system.

The question to ask yourself is whether you want democracy with no police? If the answer is yes, then you can't have laws. You can have socially agreed and enforced guidelines, which may be disrupted by a highly motivated minority.
 
 
cusm
17:59 / 24.09.03
Deleting one's own post became a mod approval after there has been problems with extended arguments being rendered unreadable by one side withdrawing from the thread by deleting their posts. Maybe if its the last post in the thread it would be ok for auto-deletion, though.
 
 
w1rebaby
19:58 / 24.09.03
the last post and no-one else has read that page - otherwise, they may have already started a reply

I think moderator-approved deletions and modifications are a great idea. I think there's very few occasions when they're appropriate, apart from maintenance like multiple posts, HTML fixes, typos and so on, and user deletions/modifications are routinely abused whenever they're allowed. Do we still have the posting limit, though?
 
  

Page: (1)2

 
  
Add Your Reply