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Well, it's easy to say all of this with the benefit of hindsight, obviously. At the time, there were real worries about people's safety off the board, so panicked solutions are entirely understandable. But.
I wouldn't have got rid of super-moderators and I'd have given them increased power to deal with the obvious trolls more quickly. I think it might need pointing out that even when Tom was here, we were still having to PM and email him on - at worst - a daily basis in order to get suits locked down. We've *never* had an effective troll-management solution and that's something that really isn't too difficult to come up with, in principle. We should have looked around and asked outselves why the hell we were having so much trouble keeping one person out, when every other damn board out there was managing to cope with that stuff without it ending up in stalker territory.
So I'd have kept super-moderators and allowed them to ban people based on, say, three votes. Four SMs, three votes between them for a ban. I'd have worked around the problem of those SMs becoming targets for the trolls off-board by rotating them every month or so, but only when there were real problems. Something like that. Because people were being tracked down to their home addresses and places of work - it wasn't just regular trolling, it was pure wrongbrain hurtybadlonely mentalism.
And then I'd have calmed down a bit. Which we did, to be fair, but the super-mod post was never reinstated and we still never had a proper banning mechanism, which totally fucked us over when membership reopened and we went Googletastic. Which is why we've got what we have now, with this stupid applications system.
So, super-mods would be able to ban. The people in those positions would be those who everybody trusts implicitly, but who also don't tend to allow themselves to lose it with the trolls when they do appear - I'd be saying people like grant, Stoatie, Boboss. Actually, grant was one of the SMs previously and didn't, afaik, get a huge amount of shit for it. The positions were filled based based on visibility on the board, length of service and whether or not Tom knew the people well enough, and those were clearly not the best criteria to select on.
Sorry, it's late and my head's not too clear, so I'm repeating myself and probably making no sense in the process. If you want to avoid slow death of a board, you need three things that we don't have here:
Open membership
The ability to ban immediately
Technical administration
And, given how contentious a lot of older Barbelith discussions could be in the wider context of the Internet, I'd also not have the entire board viewable by Google.
And I'd also drop the flighty notion of Barbelith being a work-in-progress towards some kind of message board utopia - the Supreme Plan for World Peace and Message Board Democracy. Nice idea, but as soon as the person who's come up with that vision loses interest in it, forgets about it or finds something better to do with their time, you're fucked, stuck in mid-development. All of the stuff that's unique to Barbelith was meant to be work-in-progress. There's not been anybody here to see whether or not it does work, let alone to do anything about it if it doesn't. |
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