Moderation and the environment here

[anon40790172]

@Team_2E16

I’ve carefully read some of the @Al_Kafir exchanges and I’ve got to say:1) He has some important points

Yes I agree. Here’s a topic where me and another mod agreed on several points with his ideas. Again, it’s not black or white. Even with certain people. I agreed with several things open and public. I even had some nice PM’s with AK before this story started.

@Team_2E16

I’m only pointing out here that you are kind of falling into a public-perception trap when you ban someone for doggedly pushing an opinion. (I believe you guys call this ‘opinion spamming’) Again, I’m not sure I entirely disagree with you here anyway, because in a general conversation in real-life, I would walk away from them at this point.

Making a topic about moderation in META and update it on a daily basis with the same and/or new points and insights is really not a problem. The problem lies when people (talking general here) use a topic about self_encryption to criticize moderation while these same points were made in different topics by that same person already. I think you indeed would agree if you could see some “incidents” come by on our Slack channel. As a user of this forum you miss like 75% of that. And that’s ok. But a lot of people their opinion would change if they would know all the details I think. Although we have a lot of easy time as well. Weeks go by without big interventions.

@Team_2E16

A ban, I’m not so sure is the right path, though. Conversations need to go both ways in order to even be regarded as a conversation, and parties sometimes have to ‘agree to disagree’. But he was indeed making some important points, also.

I agree, and we never banned someone for just spamming opinion, a little trolling, cursing in a topic, or just starting a personal fight here on the forum. There need to be a lot of incidents like that. Not just 1.

@Team_2E16

I also see that perhaps other people (non-mods) need to be approaching him and trying to help him learn to communicate in other ways that are more conducive to getting him to where he wants to go.

I don’t know. That’s like pointing a finger saying, you are not good at something and we can help you to learn. Even if it was someone from the community I would be surprised if he would listen. I think I wouldn’t!

@Team_2E16

His argument amounts to: “Unaccountable authority is unacceptable”.Your argument amounts to: “We make ourselves accountable”. I don’t think this is a satisfactory counter-argument, however true it actually is. It’s basically saying “Just trust us”.

Yes, this is what happend in a sentence. I see us (mods) just like the volunteers at your local tennis club. 1 is behind the bar, another is cleaning up some terrain, another one takes care of accounting. There’s no democracy at these places, no voting for new members, no clear protocols for everything they do. It’s more like; this is one of my friends and he would like to be a volunteer as well. The others talk to him, take him/her in and he/she becomes part of the team. If you really want things to be accountable with all protocols for all possible situations, we as a team would have to spend hours a day on this forum. So I was asked to join, I did and saw we didn’t had Forum Guidelines or anything. So I made a draft, others joined in a Google Drive document and after a few days we put it on the forum and finalized it. Was that democratic? No, but we made it public, wrote about it in the Forum Updates and we also talked about new mods being added. We didn’t have any objection (not a single PM to moderators or a reply in these topics) to these at all. That’s why I always make the point that we indeed represent the community and that we have their support. But I can really understand when people want to see things different. I really do. But we really need to see a proposal or anything, otherwise what should we do?

@Team_2E16

I think in that particular case, heck, it might have looked better if you had simply listed the reasons he was banned and then had a sequential list of links to the full threads these issues occurred in, so people can make up their own mind.

The links were there, but maybe we indeed should just point to the FG and say, wasn’t in line because of this and that. But I think we actually did it almost in that way. And when we just made the points, then we might have questions about what exact part of the post was not in line with the FG. We made that quite clear in this way I think. And cherry picking, I don’t know. I can’t image if people look at the discussions and think woow, that’s 1 side just bashing the others. 2 parties clearly involved here. But as I said earlier, I think after a certain amount of time, just start at 0 and maybe remove posts like that. But that’s just my opinion so far and before we know it there’s a storm about why we are removing topics and replies out of META .

@Team_2E16

Solutions?1) I don’t think adding another layer of bureaucracy is either practical, or helpful (like an ‘Internal Affairs’ department for the forum). Anyway, who watches the watchers? So perhaps we could have representatives drawn from among the membership, who could mediate between members with grievances and the moderators. They would have to be respected, trusted, and commit to taking an impartial stance at the outset.

Ohw you just made my day. Ross from Maidsafe joined the mods on Slack today as he’s trying to have one feet in the community and one at Troon. we talked about creating new topics for bug-report etc. I was thinking the same thing after the discussion we had. I would personally love to have one member added to mods on the forum and Slack without being a mod. Just to watch what we do, what issues we have to solve and whether or not we are modding the right way. It would also satisfy the needs of a number of folks that want more transparency and insight in our little club. I’ll write a proposal for that and sent it to moderators. I will copy you in if you like. Same for having a mediator as you say, this person could do both. Would probably fill the request from @Safety1st as well. One could just PM the intermediate instead of flagging a mod directly. Although Flagging is still possible as well.

Thanks for the reply again. I’ll give it a thought and maybe put it out here without asking other mods as well. If I leave my color away I’m just a community member isn’t it ;-)?

Edit: I send you a PM. Maybe we can come up with something together and see if people like it.