Let it go, we are trying to discuss stuff, we shouldn’t constantly be worried about pleasing some mod with topic consistancy.
I’d be in favor of a machine modded forum. Adults don’t need babysitters. For technical purity there is githhub. But what’s happening right now is ideology policing. Mods attract trolls.
If its not grafitti or spam let it go. This isn’t a peer reviewed journal, it something much better.
If they behave as such yes.
But no – Most topics on this forum start out on topic then ramble off into the same useless pointless arguement where nobody actually reads or responds intelligently to anything anyone else says. People like to hear themselves talk.
And that comes at great expense to new users… As a reasonably relevant topic where they could learn some actual technical details about SAFE and how it is going to work descends into a pissing match that is more about the egos and irrelevant politics than anything SAFE related.
It’s not about pleasing mods, it’s about keeping the forum as clean and clear for the entire community as possible. It’s not convenient to read about Farming while I’m looking for technology behind self encryption.
Everyone is free to start a new topic for every subject they want to, there is no censoring on opinions and I haven’t heard any negative feedback on our moderating from others yet.
I kinda agree with @Warren I hate to say but I’ve been holding my tongue alot about this exact issue and just wanna say.
It goes against many principles of SAFE in my opinion, we’re all about not being able to be controlled or censored or influenced by the govts / corporations etc, but we let the mods control so much of our convos on here?
I’ve always struggled alot with it
Sorry to hear if you’re experiencing it this way but we aren’t moderating to censor or control what people are saying, but to give the entire community the best forum experience. Like I said before, say what you want (as long as it’s in line with the guidelines of course (which is just normal behavior) and keep the discussions in the right topics and categories.
Agree with Warren, are you out of your mind… but yeah I agree, until we can have a fully decentralized SAFE forum there will be mods to control us.
Lol ikr
…Just kidding @Warren!!
@Warren we love you dude.
To be honest I had a moment where the mod said my comment was FUD on speculation of price of safe, which my comment may have been extreme because of an issue of having a forum member trolling my comments or post I make in the last couple of weeks. I see if people have a different point of view that some people have the need to feel to make people feel small.
At times I disagree with warren here because i have different culture and values and I do not go out my away to attack and to impose my world views to say I am right and you are wrong, this goes against freedom of speech to impose your individual thought policing.
I thought the role of the mod is not to police dangerous idea’s on a forum like this but to moderate and step in where it is needed when they see victimization and bad behavior…
@Warren while I agree we should be treated as adults, it does become difficult though when I want to read up on a particular topic only to find it ran off into a 50-200 post discussion about something different to the actual topic which I was trying to read about. Often this “sidetrack” occurs early in the discussion and the topic never gets the opportunity to be properly discussed.
There is no need to highlight any of the threads where it has happened and many of us including myself are guilty of being a part of that.
In essence I agree with the requests to remain on topic and lets all take the sidetracked discussions in to a linked thread where we can discuss the life out of the side issues.
Now imagine newbies to SAFE and they wish to learn about it…
Maybe if we had a way to self flag ot in a thread, because there are times where the tangent is related. This flagging might allow a quick skip mechanism within in the thread. Normal face to face discussions alway meander, its part of the creative process.
If this was a threaded discussion board it wouldn’t be as big of an issue.
There is a Reply as linked topic button. It works.
I disagree. When someone comes to this forum and starts to search for a topic like “How to build Apps” and he ends up with 3 replies about building apps and the rest about how capitalism is killing the experience on our smartphones, because Apps on our smartphones are created to make money (just an example, please don’t bite ;-)) something is wrong. One might say, well, it’s still about Apps. But that’s not how this forum should work IMHO. The great thing about this forum is we can have it both ways. We stay on-topic about How to build Apps, and we can have a very broad discussion about the Apps on smartphones in another topic.
@moderators is the place to go. If we get a message we always look at it. We’re not online all at the same time, but we always read all PM’s. We also have a discussion about it and decide what to do. It happened a number of times in the past that we decided that we where to strict, and set a topic back, or even apologized to a user. We’re just a group of volunteers, we sometimes make mistakes. And if we don’t know for sure we’ll just vote and reach consensus.
Feel free to Flag a topic when you think it’s going off-topic to much. It’s not a bad thing, we always look at it. Always discuss it.
It is not about pleasing mods, it is about respecting other users, it is about staying on-topic within the category that has been selected. It helps current and new users easily find and read about what they are interested in.
Sorry you feel this way but imo I don’t feel that is the case and I am not sure why you feel this way.
I guess your dream is a forum where topic only have numbers and you can discuss whatever you please. I think you should create that forum and find people to join. I can already tell you with whom you´ll end up with.
I am father of a beautiful daughter an can say that in many senses she´s more adult than some individuals that I´ve read on this forum (including me). Being old doesn´t save you from being a pain in the ass. This isn´t just a place where you can write stuff and get read by people, it´s a place where people exchange. I had my own struggles with moderators but same as joining a community elsewhere I am free to leave once I decide that community rules are inacceptable to me - or challenge them.
In this sense your challenge of the forum rules is valid, same as people disagreeing with it.
On the web there are already forums that are much less moderated (4chan etc) and they are not really a pleasant place.
Also I´d like to mention that to me it seems that some people are living in the ivory tower when they believe that there are or will ever be community without guidelines. The definition of a community is precisely rules and habits based on common relations. That implies measures to maintain those rules. If that´s anything for you, you probably don´t want to be in a community.
@warren we created the off-topic category so people could have the freedom to discuss anything, and we also leave it effectively unmoderated. Certainly there’s no constraints regarding staying with the OP, so you are always free to post there or “reply on new topic” there. And I know you have done that quite a lot in the past. It has less visibility though, and I suspect that is at least partly why you aren’t happy with using it and are now asking for less moderation on the other categories. But we made it hidden because the front page of the forum was often full of off-topic posts that pushed all the more relevant topics off the page! Before that change was made, I argued against it for some time, but I had to confess I was wrong and it was the only thing to do. I hoped it was temporary, but it was far too frequent to be acceptable.
I think that you want a place to discuss things that are loosely related or unrelated to the project - just go compare what you post to what most people here post. You also want to be able to diverge in discussion in any existing topic when you choose. I’ll say more about why we moderate this in a mo.
@Warren I’m sorry you don’t value the work of myself and the other mods. But I think we do a good job, and without us I think the forum would be much less useful. It is up to the community though, and it is all your voices that determine the guidelines we follow, how we operate, and whether we are here at all.
So it is up to you all. I encourage everyone to consider the value of moderation and to say what you think works, is not working, and how it could be improved, and even how fantastic you think it is right now! 
Lately we’ve been stricter regarding being on topic and that is something I thought was important to try, because so many topics started off with a good heading, some valuable q & a, or on the money discussion, and then were filled with a bunch, or often a deluge, of posts that were not adding value at all. Often petty squabbles.
It’s still happening, so we keep reminding people to stay on topic, reply on linked topic, or go to PM. We don’t enjoy this, it’s far nicer for us to just read and enjoy this vibrant, interesting community, but we do it because we believe it improves the value of the forum for most people.
Even with the effort to encourage more disciplined posting, we still end up with lots of topics that are very long and just not practical to re-read for those nuggets buried within which reduces the value of the forum a lot for me. Most times that I search for something I know was posted not that long ago, I don’t find it, because of this. We do tidy some of them up, but we get too many threads like that to be able to tidy them all up, because it is time consuming.
The forum caters for many different needs. For people discovering it for the first time (particularly them - because we want the project to grow), people of all abilities, people wanting a quick answer, people wanting to get into detailed technical stuff, or economics, or etc etc. And people who’ve been here forever (or at least look as if they have ) and seen it all.
That’s a tall order, and obviously we can’t please everyone no matter how hard we work, and it is hard work, but we are always ready to hear from the community and learn.
In fact, the best thing about moderation for me is not the ego trip, which I do like a bit (so thanks is a great thing to receive I’ll tell you ;-)) but really it’s the learning. Not about SAFE, that too of course, but about people and myself in particular. So for me, although moderation is hard work (like you would not believe) and I put a lot of time into it, it is a privilege that I also enjoy, so long as I’m able to feel I do it with the support of the community. Without that I wouldn’t do it at all.
More views please - chip in without fear - all opinions are welcome because it is you who lead
There seems to be two distinct streams of thought concerning moderation:
#Stream of Consciousness
In the first camp you’ll have what could be called a group that advocates stream of consciousness. That is they create a topic and then just discuss it and let input and discussion take them where it may. Staying “on topic” is not a dire concern but rather discussing and exploring ideas that develop in the moment is more pressing. Being interrupted or having the topic split is aggrivating to say the least as it interrupts the flow of thought and conversation. Discussions about politics or philosophy often (but not always) fall into this category.
#Topic Based Discussion
The second camp is more focused on specific goals and wants to get things done. They start a topic with a specific goal or topic in mind and want that specific issue to be discussed. Deviations from that topic are irritating because they distract from the topic at hand and create conversational clutter in the thread. Tutorials, technical conversations and many “rational” debates often fall into this category.
Also there seems to be a distinct division between how people feel about content and freedom of speech. On the one hand some feel freedom of speech and what people talk about should be reigned in and given limits for the sake of not offending people (or posting “illegal” stuff). On the other you have your hardcore freedom of speech advocates that basically believe you should be able to say or post whatever. For reasons of legality and not getting the forum shut down by the department of homeland security I can see the point of having SOME moderation, unless we want to move the whole operation onto tor or something. (C’mon let’s get the SAFE network up!) But otherwise this issue is merely a matter of philosophical preference. Be that as it may I think the above two camps are quite justified.
Here’s a radical idea: Since the “Off topic” catagory seems rather cramped and people seem to want an unmoderated maidsafe forum why not create a spinoff unmoderated (or severely less moderated) SAFE forum. We’d still keep the main forum for everything but when we wanted to take a topic to the “next level” we’d go to the unmoderated forum. The only problem I can see with all this is that having a completely separate forum would make moving topics that go off topic difficult. So baiscally if you knew your discussion was going to ramble the better course would be to start it in the unmodded forum and perhaps link to the thread in the off topic section here, or in whatever thread. This way the Stream of Consciousness camp could freely express and get airtime on their own mainpage while the “Topic Based” discussions wouldn’t get as cluttered up.
Oh and 4chan is awesome.
How about a new forum category “jamesjoyce” where anyone can write posts that are confusing, incoherent, disorganized, and rambling without any moderator action?
I like it. Nice. But now for some imbalance and soc - SAFE itself is stream of consciousness enabling in its ultimate aims. Agreeing. its not like SAFE is there to enable the getting of TPS reports or the setting up of Great Wall of China Type Firewalls. SAFE is more Onion Chan than CNN.
And speaking of the media I just heard that Forbes and Wired are doing automated computer written articles, and that the publisher of (if I heard correctly) Wired thought 90% of magazine articles in 15 years would be machine authored. Machines will be driving the narrative with their master’s spin. I knew that trading programs put out shill articles to influence trades. But this suggests the possibility of bot mods to go with bot members and bot reviews.
This is a pretty good idea, I think.
I don’t know if any of the current forum mods, admins, etc., would be into forming such, but I think you and/or anyone else who wants to would be welcome to do so. I think everyone here would be happy to promote its existence, as well. I might even find myself using it from time to time.