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I see the problem - I generally ask people in the thread if they'd mind a *thread* being moderated - locked or moved or deleted, which seems less personal than giving advance warning before moderating a person.. that's a tricky one.
More generally:
Specifically, given that deletion is a very big deal, I would have liked a public warning directed at the poster. The purpose of this would be to give the poster some idea that they are bumping up against boundaries, because I believe that some people might respond to that, but more importantly to let general members know what is happening. That way, if moderators are being overzealous, by the standards of the general 'lither, they can be told.
This is avery good point. I think the other thing here is that we are not necessarily aiming to censure, per se, just create an environment where everyone is making each other feel OK. In which terms, is it OK, for example, to say something like:
Hey, (name). It seems that (party of the second part) is being upset by these references you are making to hir life outside Barbelith. To be honest, we just dont quite get why they are happening, but we guess that you are upset about something. Which is gravy, but we have got a bit of an isue here, and it is being caused by your actions rather than anyone else's actions, so we thought you'd be the best person to talk to.
One of the accusatons currently levelled against you is that you are not really interested in Barbelith as a group, but only as a way to get to (Pot2ndP). If this is untrue, hopefully your good opinion of the board and its members means that, faced with the possibility that further actions of this kind are goign to piss a lot of people off and potentially ruin your good relationship with Barbelith, you'll find it advisable to think about how you are behaving. If not, then we might think that there is some truth in this suggestion.
In any case, please understand that we are not judging the situation, only the very few rules we try to keep on Barbelith. One of those rules is that if somebody feels harrassed, makes clear that they are feeling harrassed and are agreed with by a reasonable number of people re: that harrassment, we have to ask the person perceived as the harrasser to look very carefully at what they are doing. We woud ask you to do that now, to avoid unpleasantness further down the line that may damage your enjoyment of Barbelith.
It's a bit Pollyannaish, I know - the idea that people who are vitriolically opposed to each other in the flesh are expected to behave nicely on Barbelith, but actually I don't think it's as bad as all that - after all, people are rude to each other all the time on Barbelith; I often find myself in fights of varying politeness with people I happily hang out with outside the sphere of the Barbe. One has to fuflil the three criteria - a feeling of harrassment, a complaint of harrassment, a reasonable degree of assent in the identification of harrassment - to make the case.
So, to address Deva's question, I agree entirely that what has to count is the actual behaviour on the board - as you say, we can't really judge what is going on outside it. But that uncertainty shouldn't be a cause of hesitancy in what is basically the normal business of moderation. |
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