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Okay. I feel a bit responsible since it was sort of me who set the thing up in the first place (in an extremely unusual fit of energy) based on what people were saying, it's clearly a bit too complicated and slow a process, and I've been pretty absent from both it and Barbelith myself over the last few months. The idea was that it was supposed to be a distributed system but those have to be easy if they're going to work - some sort of web app would have been good, all of the tables that exist in the group in SQL and popping up so you can just log in and see what needs doing and tick people off and the names get sent automatically every week or something, but I didn't have the time and energy to make one of those I'm afraid. Sorry. It was only meant to be a stop-gap.
There's a basic problem though of expectations here I think. Barbelith is no longer a small group, there are clearly an enormous number of wannabe members, if there weren't there wouldn't be a problem. Properly securing a sign-up process is very tricky even if there are enough people to do it, and I think the independent check system just doesn't scale; it's exhausting, it would be exhausting even if there was some sort of lovely web app with rounded corners to do it in. Checking dozens of people a week to see if their email address actually does correspond to their livejournal, wearing.
I appreciate the work that Haus is doing with the backlog but it doesn't solve the long-term problem, which is that we set too high a bar for entry (a bar which still doesn't stop trolls and wankers, just reduces their numbers) because we can't really do anything about it once they're here.
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I'll tell you what finally turned me off: I found that I was coming to Barbelith less and less, and one day I realised that I'd not actually logged in for weeks, so I decided to do so for old times' sake. I looked around for a bit and ended up in the Policy reading another ten-page thread about whether to ban somebody, and I just thought "okay, this is it, there's no bloody point any more - I've seen this so many times, it's procedural wanking, it doesn't do anything anyway, all it does is suck energy from all the other parts of the board, sod it". And I decided that I wouldn't bother any more. I've recently come back a bit after accidentally finding a thread relating to Second Life, which I spend much more time in these days, and felt a bit guilty about abandoning the 'lith, so I look in more often these days.
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Anyway... three possible things I'm thinking of.
1. Reduce the qualification level. Have it just "you sent an email, you sound like a real person, okay, you're in". All this would mean is that people looked at application emails and forwarded them to Tom. Doing dozens of these in half an hour isn't hard. At least it would block some spammers. It wouldn't restrict the ability of real people to come in though, so you have to wonder whether it's worth it compared to the time.
2. Eliminate the qualification level. Have open enrolment. Nobody needs to check that. This increases the need for moderators who have actual powers over other members, as there will be more trolls and wankers, and it's clear that Tom doesn't have the time to scan the boards for them, even if something like a "report post" button was added (the latter might help though).
2a. Open enrolment without banning. Okay for a bit, until someone comes in with the intention of Fucking Shit Up, and they will; it's then hard to stop them. Some people might like that sort of TAZ type thing, I don't.
3. Close enrolment. Doesn't reduce the need for moderators with powers, but means that slowly, what trolls and wankers there are will be weeded out and none will replace them. Removes any chance of new and interesting people arriving though, which I don't think is a good thing.
I tend towards 2, but I'm a little biased as I've been modding Urban75 for years now, and have seen various splinter boards appear and fail under pressure. I'm thinking particularly of one which was set up reasonably well-meaningly and had a "distributed moderation" policy which simply collapsed into bitter infighting. (It doesn't help that each of these boards tends to take with them various embittered trolls as well, but that's not the whole of it.)
Being a moderator with powers, and having to use them, is a thankless task. You lose friends, some people are scared to debate you, others deliberately try to goad you, you have to try to arbitrate between two groups of posters engaged in a war, neither of whom are angels and neither are devils. Unfortunately I've not seen a better method than autocracy in an open board setting. In a confederation of loosely-allied independent states (like the bl*g*sphere, say) nobody has to have overall control, but this isn't one.
Given that we already have moderator powers which are fairly serious - editing people's posts is serious, and I've seen some requests that I thought were actively bad for post edits - I would strongly suggest adding options for both temporary and permanent bans to the mod request queue system, the latter requiring more votes than the former obviously, and perhaps with a veto option. I'd also support the idea of "supermods" with the power to temp ban people on their own, in case somebody starts crapflooding the place in the wee hours. Yes, all the "clique" charges will come up, but they do anyway, and I can't see the topic not being actively debated if it does become something real. |
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