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Underground > Policy & Help >

How should we select moderators?

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ONLY NICE THINGS

00:51 / 24.06.06

On topic, please, Stoatie.

02:02 / 24.06.06

there’s not necessarily any tie to your barbelith login. I think it’d be dead easy to pretend to be someone else or to make changes entirely anonymously.

Actually, I was under the impressions that...
1. barbelith logins are automatically carried over to the wiki (which means that you couldn't create a fake login for any barbelith user -- even if, say, Saveloy never logs into the wiki, I couldn't create a "Saveloy" wiki account since there's already one there for hir with the same login & pword as over here).
2. Even if you have a username, the system automatically logs your IP. Thus, your location is tied to your changes.

Lemme check on 2. right now.... initial look, I can't find IP addresses, only names.
Reading MediaWiki's site, I found these instructions on how to set up an area within a wiki that only a select group can edit. Presumably, it's possible to set that to the group of current-messageboard-members, current-moderators, or current-users-whose-names-begin-with-"gr". (gridley! grime! to me! to me!)
It does say that Wikipedia (which is what the software was written for) logs all users' IP addresses. I suspect it just doesn't display them unless the user makes changes without logging in. (More on that here, for those unfamiliar.)

ONLY NICE THINGS

02:22 / 24.06.06

Mathlete - well, depends who you talk to, really. Last time you were listing examples of intrusive moderation, you listed that thread and the thread on Allen Ginsberg's "Howl". In other cases, people have complained of intrusive moderation when threads have been locked, when titles have been changed... recently, furioso got quite exercised about a change in the topic abstract of a thread discussing the return of Seaguy to reflect the likelihood that it will not happen. People often have strong ideas about what should be done to their threads, and likewise people who feel that they are being treated disrespectfully by a moderator, even if that treatment does not involve moderator actions, often say something to the effect that this is not suitable behaviour for a moderator.

The only proper rogue moderator we have had that I can think of was Modzero, who used his moderator status to propose small changes to the posts of people he was arguing with. However, other moderators have at times used their veto to prevent the functioning of the board according to established policy, or have proposed moderator actions apparently at odds with the stated role of the moderators, or without a level of thought that seemed to me, subjectively, to be appropriate to the size of the change. Distributed moderation helps to smooth this out, as long as people pay attention and think about requests carefully.

02:44 / 24.06.06

Most of the instances of what I felt to be bad moderation were down to the personal judgement call of a minority turning out to be unrepresentative of the majority. In the last example I can think of, it wouldn't have become a problem if the number of agreements required was higher. One of the reasons I'd like to see more mods is that it would allow us to raise the vote threasholds.
It also helps on the rogue mod front if we can take away the absolute individual veto.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:28 / 24.06.06

On topic, please, Stoatie.

Apologies. I don't even remember posting that!

Jawsus-son Starship

16:06 / 24.06.06

Last time you were listing examples of intrusive moderation, you listed that thread and the thread on Allen Ginsberg's "Howl".

Yeah, but the Ginsberg thing was pretty much fair do's. Taking a thread sooo of topic was unforgivable on my part, so it didn't make much sense for me to bring that one up.

Most of the instances of what I felt to be bad moderation were down to the personal judgement call of a minority turning out to be unrepresentative of the majority. In the last example I can think of, it wouldn't have become a problem if the number of agreements required was higher.

This is a great idea for the larger moderation requests, things like post/thread deletion. But for everything else, like spelling changes, or HTML fixing, won't this just clog the system?

Maybe a good idea would be rating the importance of a moderation request - the standard park warden stuff would only take the usual amount of agreements, but perhaps the larger things would need more agreements. Would this idea be especially hard to implement.

ONLY NICE THINGS

16:53 / 24.06.06

This is a great idea for the larger moderation requests, things like post/thread deletion. But for everything else, like spelling changes, or HTML fixing, won't this just clog the system?

I think the idea would be that you'd scale up the number of moderators as you scale up the number of agreements required, so the time delay remains constant. It's worth noting, incidentally, that post deletions are actually quite a common request, for tidying up double posts. Barring thread locks/unlocks and deletions, there aren't really any large moderation requests - I imagine these would scale up also, though.

In principle, increasing the number of moderators and the number of required votes, and removing the absolute veto (perhaps replacing it with an incremental veto?) seems to make good sense. On the other hand, I'm not sure there would be ebough able potential moderators in the system necessarily to swell the numbers too much. Hmmm.

*

21:33 / 24.06.06

Sorry, Haus and Math. Was trying to turn the herd after they were already in the pen, it seems.

17:03 / 06.07.06

grant: I'm not sure I understand this.

Sorry, I intended to reply to this a while back. I'm less about how an increase in tthe number of moderators affects practicalities here and more about the theory behind the idea. It seems that the ideal that Tom's aiming for is a board where any member has the same power as any other - message board socialism, as somebody touched on previously - but you have that when you remove all moderation and allow each member to edit their own posts, but nobody else's.

I know that there are significant differences between the idea of having everybody be a moderator and having nobody be a moderator, but I think when you strip the two notions down to their most basic principles they're indistinguishable.

17:44 / 06.07.06

But it's about distribution isn't it, Randy? I mean if everyone was a moderator then edits would still have to be ratified, but everyone would have an equal say in that ratification. That's fundamentally different from having no moderators (ie. unilateral power to make any edit to one's posts), isn't it? Or am I missing something?

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