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And, if accidentally, we're back on topic. Marvellous.
Toksik, you said:
without getting into exactly what the correct complaints-to-'proper'-posting ratio is or should be, i think this illustrates exactly my point.
while it may be that he isnt the biggest net positive to the board(i have no idea who is...grant?)i dont feel that math's conduct, short of being abusive or vindictively trollsome, should be enough to erect a barrier to his being considered.
only if he has proven himself to be out to fuck the board up would i say we had enough reason.
he hasnt, as far as i am aware, proven anything of the sort.
Now, if this simply means that no application not from somebody abusive or vindictively trollsome should be barred from consideration... before being laughed out of court by the gasping-for-breath members of the selection panel, then fair enough, but I don't think it did, as in that case Bed Head would not actually have said anything to justify the telling-off. As far as I can make out, it means that the only things to bar somebody from being a moderator should be being abusive (whether personally or of the mechanisms of the board I know not) or being vindictively trollsome.
From the wiki:
Janitorial, mainly. They're park rangers, not policemen -- keeping the paths clear and making sure hikers don't get lost. Moderators correct HTML mistakes, delete multiple posts, and so on. They won’t change the content of your post, except in extraordinary circumstances (and bear in mind that Barbelith is not a censorious environment, so uninvited mod changes are usually due to faulty HTML), and even then, it'll take either two or three moderators to agree to the change.
When you submit a moderator request, the moderators of that forum then receive a message asking if they want to agree or disagree with that suggested change. A change to text requires only two votes (yours and a moderator), and is usually a formality. More profound changes require more votes – it takes three votes to delete a post, for example.
Moderators can also delete threads (to keep the thread numbers in the Conversation down, usually, or because two threads are asking the same question), move threads (if they are better suited to another forum), or add keywords to topic summaries (also known as Topic_Abstracts). All of these require the approval of other moderators.
A subsidiary function of moderators is to keep things in their forum moving, by introducing new topics or asking pertinent questions in existing ones. This is more important in low-traffic areas, obviously, than in somewhere like the Conversation, and is generally seem as an extension of the interest the moderator would take in their forum anyway. As such, although they may occasionally put on their “moderator hat”, to tell somebody that they are off-topic or share some bit of admin info, they are essentially just like other posters.
So, there are a number of things moderators are expected to be able to do, there, and a number of skills that we can by extension assume that moderators ought to have. For example, a moderator should be able to use basic HTML with reasonable confidence, in order to fix HTML mistakes. They should be able to discern what the topic of thread is, and be able to post to threads in an on-topic fashion, as a preliminary to helping other people to remain on-topic. They should understand what an appropriate subject is for a forum, in order to be able to start new and pertinent topic. More generally, they should understand if at all possible the role of the moderator and its limits. This is harder than it looks.
So, if somebody has given convincing evidence that they would not be able to do the basic duties of a moderator competently, it would seem, at least to me, a bit perverse to give them the tools to prove us right, and then remove them - like making Iron Lung Boy run five times around the playground. Especially if two such in a forum, or one such and somebody else agreeing without due diligence, can start to make a bit of a mess.
On the other hand, who makes that decision and how the decision is made remains opaque to me, which is neatly about where we came in. At the moment we have an ad hoc system where every so often moderators are added, taken from a list of people who have applied, by Tom. If somebody disagrees strongly with the idea that somebody who has put their name forward being a moderator, they can probably PM Tom about it, and register their disquiet with examples. Ad hoc, but, perhaps in part because member churn has been lowish, this has largely worked so far, although some fora may still be underrepresented and need more moderators. Personally, I don't see a huge amount of trouble with that method, as long as we accept that anyone who is not a vindictive troll has the right to express an opinion to Tom about another member's suitability to be a moderator, as long as they realise that that opinion may be discarded out of hand, especially if unevidenced.
Now, do we want to alter or formalise that process? |
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