Moderators

Your post was not removed, so referring to a warning as "censorship" is inaccurate and unnecessarily inflammatory. 

Our moderators are working directly with Carmen Werder, who teaches civil dialogue, and some have been enrolled in her "Civil Dialogue" course as well.  The moderators intent in stating that they are "watching" a thread is to remind  you that this is not the open / anonymous web, and that the guidelines are setting the tone we wish to see on Viking Village.

The goal of moderating this forum is to help people maintain civil dialogue about ideas, so that we don't have to remove / censor posts.   Referring to Christianity as "disgusting" and Christians as "foolish" is not civil and does not encourage positive dialogue, and it certainly does not fit with our guidelines, which ask you to be open and to be humane (they are on the left if you'd like to read through them again).  

I have yet to lock any threads or delete any content of any post. The most I've done is tell people that what they said was offensive or mean or they should tone it down or something along those lines. And occasionally I've moved something that belonged in the 'Lost and Found' or 'Trade' forum. Otherwise I've posted as a regular user.

That said, we're not paid for this position. In fact, since we're getting credit, you can even see it as us paying the school for the position. Budget cuts have nothing to do with any of it.

On any board with real mods you're going to get stuff like that. It gets to be a power trip for a lot of people... Particularly since this is an official, university run forum there will be some moderators who are a little too zealous in their interpretation and enforcement of the rules. It's important to the mods and the school that people are very 'proper' in their posting - look at the guidelines up on the side - so you've really just got to accept it for what it is. If you want something where you can get rowdy and unregulated go to 4chan or the like.

Honestly, I think the moderators have been doing a great job so far with this forum.  I don't envy their job, they have to constantly walk a tightrope between being too hard and too lenient.  They want to encourage open, thought-provoking dialogue while at the same time not deterring people from saying what they want to say.  It would be a tough job to be the person having to make those decisions about what is ok and what's not. 

And I'm pretty sure being a moderator was a volunteer thing, at least at first.  They chose to give up their time to help manage this, I don't see how voting would work, forums aren't really supposed to be a democratically operated system...

I don't feel like the moderators do a good job directing people who ask common questions to a common thread when it exists.

(referring to the most recent case of the topics about the email migration)

If we're just going to let everyone ask the same questions over and over then we should just get rid of the search function and be done with this problem.

Designating a thread as the 'Official' thread eliminates the need for the original poster to watch for all new threads relating to their own. (Especially when the original poster is offering help.) Also it is good for creating a nice list of frequent questions and answers.

I don't believe that this is unreasonable at all. Push the use of the search function. Seriously.

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I think the big thing to remember here is that this forum is NOT an area for totally unmonitored free speech. When I read through (every single one of) the posts users make on the forum I make sure that people are able to (1) express their opinions while (2) not infringing upon the rights of others to do the same. This means personal attacks or attacks on groups are NOT acceptable based on the forum guidelines, which appear on every single page of the forum.

Gangsta4Life, it is totally fine to express your opinion that you do not respect a certain religion. But when you express that opinion by telling them they need to get their "heads checked" and comparing their beliefs to blindly following a "cockroach" that is when it crosses from an opinion to an attack.

A few hours after I PM'ed you about following the forum guidelines your post was 'flagged as offensive' by another user on the forum. Obviously I was not the only one that felt that your post violated guidelines.

As far as getting administrative due process: We do not have a board of students that oversees the forum because the forum is not only provided for students. We have an advisory committee that seats students, staff, faculty, and administrative representatives. I am sure you would be welcome to express your concerns at one of these meetings.

And to clear things up: The moderation team is composed of student volunteers (the position was open to students, staff, and faculty). We were able to tie moderation in with communication practicum credits so the moderators are receiving a variable number of credits for moderation depending on how much time they put into it.

I am late for class so I can't go into more detail about everything or proof-read this but please reply if you have questions.

Relevance? Keep it in that thread.

That's kind of the thing about being in charge. The mods use their judgement, just like you use your judgement every time you start thinking and typing.

Are you serious? You should get your head checked if you think that there are actually a group of people waiting to review punishments on the forum.

So come on and chickity-check yo self before you wreck yo self.

Just a little reminder that comments like "get your head checked" tend towards the side of offensive and insulting. You are more than welcome to share your opinion, but please keep it humane.

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Sure thing!
However, I see that not all of the moderation team has a sarcasm detector or a sense of humor given the blantant use of my comment despite Jamin's post minutes before mine but that's alright, the stiff authoritative type works too...

Will do. Keep up the good work being a gangster for life. Damn, I hear it feels good to be one too.

I feel like you haven't been on a real forum before.  This is not a real forum.  This is not close to a real forum.  This is a place with some threads, one admin, one "super moderator" and three "moderators" e.g.: people with the ability to govern/police/insert-word-of-choice (but fail to do so).  What is a moderator suppose to do?  Keep the forum clean: stopping the trolling, the flame wars, the redundant threads, the derailed threads, etc.  This is always in the form of stepping in and saying "knock it off, guys" or locking threads when appropriate.

Let's do a quick analysis: Open Say is easily the largest section with (at time of post) 457 threads and 8257 responses.
Let's count the locked threads:

• Josh Foley for ASVP for Diversity....why?: This was an ad where someone challenged Josh Foley and became a flame war.
• Good money to be made at Rader Farms: This was an ad which became a flame war over the agriculture work topic.
• forum arguements: This was about the forum conduct of stereotypical internet citizens.
• Is parrot edible?: This thread (aside from being hilarious and witty) was a troll thread.
• 322 Inspiration?: This is a really old thread (that's tldr) and I'm not sure why it was locked.

Five.  FIVE threads out of 457 have been locked.  This either means: 1) there aren't garbage threads to be locked or 2) the moderators aren't doing anything.  For those of us who aren't new to the internet and forums, we know the answer is so blatantly obviously the latter.  I've administrated/moderated four forums (two past, two present) for free and was offered the position at no benefit to myself other than interest (much less credits, Jesus).  I probably put more work into one of those forums on a weekly basis than the entire moderating staff has put into this forum.  My personal gripes with the moderating aside, you are complaining about over-moderation and as previous posters (moderators et co) have already covered, you aren't really making any legitimate points not to mention 5/457 locked is a statistic that speaks for itself.  I think it's pretty clear I'm not a huge fan of the staff, but you're hitting the wrong points.  I will agree the handling of the religious thread has been far from ideal, but as far as I'm concerned, that's the single case of significant (though also completely arguable) over-moderation (blanketed by dozens of cases of under-moderation).

I agree that the moderators aren't properly qualified (based solely on their performance, which is arguably an appropriate indicator), but you never choose voting as your selection method for administrators for anything remotedly related to IT.  You appoint them, kind of like what you do with judges (look at Whatcom county and how we elect our judges to see why that's a bad idea).  Forums usually appoint moderators based on performance (you choose them from the user base), not the other way around, but that's another topic.  Additionally, forums tend to have some sort of security log, listing (to administrators) literally every single moderating action that has occurred.  You don't have to choose the best candidates the first time around, you hope to, but the security logs help you piece together when there's an incident questioning moderator conduct.  I'm of course making the assumption this forum has the log functionality, but oh well.  A related topic: I discuss a number of issues/suggestions I have with the moderating policies here in the Reorganization thread.  The particular paragraph you're looking for is aptly named "Moderating."

I'm confused, actually.  Why aren't the moderators locking threads?  Isn't that a key moderating procedure?  I think that ultimately it would create less works for the moderators because they won't have to read every single similar thread (Didnt Jamin said he read every post?).  The way I see it, you're creating more work for yourself, and you're doing an incredibly poor job of being a moderator. 

Also, saying that you're moderating a thread seems like it shouldn't need to be said because it should be taken as fact that you're moderating all the threads all of the time.  I think that if you have to say that you're moderating, then you're just being a poor moderator. 

Maybe I just have a different mindset than you.

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I'm sorry you feel like I am doing an extremely poor job. It is a hard thing to balance keeping the forum open to discussion while still maintaining a respectful environment. To address your question: The reason we/I don't lock threads is because it immediately kills discussion. That's not what we want. Also, the reason I posted in the 'religion' thread that the moderators are reading the thread was because I wanted certain users to be fully aware that the moderators ARE reading everything. I don't think that most users know that. There were several posts in that thread that were definitely violating guidelines. Instead of deleting the posts or editing/censoring them I felt that it was appropriate to just inform everyone that moderators will lock the thread if it gets worse.

If you have suggestions as to what the moderators can do better please let us know by posting them here.

Also, remember that this isn't a regular internet forum. We can't simply block a user, delete a posts, or lock a thread because it isn't what we want to see on the forum. We have to start with a 100% open discussion forum and then tone it down based on the guidelines to make sure that it is respectul and open to the largest number of people possible.

This basically summarizes the problem with the moderation.  All forums exist for discussion (do not attempt to disprove this with things such as warez boards that use forumsoft to facilitate illegal activities).  You are deluding yourself if you think otherwise.  The only difference in this forum and a "regular" internet forum is that this one has been poorly planned, executed, administrated, and moderated.

You aren't a moderator to be my damn friend (similar to a drill instructor in that respect).  You are here to MODERATE, do your damn job.  When things are getting out of hand, try saying so, instead of standing around like an insignificant hall monitor announcing that "you're watching" while some kid is getting his head shoved through a locker door.  Try telling people, "knock it off or this will be locked/you'll be tbanned/you'll be warned."  Case in point: "I'm pretty sure you're just being a smart alec." No offense to Jon Bash and actually sorry he's the one who said it, as I think of him as a worthy contribution to the forum due to his participation in discussions, but the poster in reference's subject says, "I eat JC for breakfast."  Yeah.  The poster is trolling.  Step in.  While Jon Bash made a good response, as far as I can tell, no action was taken (again, this seems to be a problem with moderating policy and not Jon Bash himself).  A poster can say, "I eat JC for breakfast" and make fun of God in a religious thread and he's not even warned (ironically, he's the OP in this thread, lol)?  Way to go, team.  More below.

Yeah, actually, you can.  And more importantly, you should.  Whoever came up with the policy dictating otherwise is just being naive and constraining what constitutes "what you want."  You want a viable, community-supported discussion board.  All your "Guidelines for Participation" can be summed with "be civil."  Of the three things you listed, deleting posts and blocking users is rather extreme, but you should be locking threads a hell of a lot more than 1% of the time.  If someone isn't being civil, you do the internet equivalent of grabbing their arm and saying, "hey, knock it off."  They're called time-bans.  Learn to use them.  Trying to be "respectful" to literally everyone, including the people who are just here to troll, by just telling people you're "watching" without you actually doing anything just makes you ineffective, not respectful.  I don't know how else I can say this; the nature of your position is to moderate.  "Less is more" is not to be applied in this manner; not-moderating is not moderating.  Out of curiosity, how many posters have had their posts ever deleted or edited and how many people have been banned (time or otherwise)?

Endnotes/suggestions:
Personally, I think you should try to promote an environment where people aren't so damn worked up.  You can start with your "report as offensive" button.  The most conservative person in the world would probably be using that button every three seconds.  That's not what it's there for.  Try removing the incredibly subjective term "offensive" and just have it say "report this post."  Secondly, get a system in place to deal with rule/"Guideline" breakers (I'm going to assume you don't have such a system in place since the "moderating system" wasn't included in the initial release.  Whoops).  Rules are meant to be broken so you should have an appropriate set of standard responses (warns, tbans, bans, etc).  Thirdly, I would say to fix the infrastructure but I've griped about the issues here many a time with no real response save "we're working on it, ish".

You aren't the only moderator, lol.

Sounds like a lose-lose situation.

You moderate too much, people call you the police...
You moderate too little and people don't think you're doing job...

This is Western.  Everyone in authority is called the police.  Hell, the RAs are apparently police.  Moderating, on the other hand, actually requires moderation.  Every other forum ever has a common set of practices that for some reason aren't practiced on this forum despite there being no relevant differences.

You can start by locking and linking all of the email migration threads that seem to be flooding the forum.  Also, like Jasper pointed out, you aren't here to be their friend.  You're here to moderate. 

My best example is like having incapable parents trying to control their spawn-devil children.  The parents are trying to make it so that all of their kids are happy, but because they can't properly control their kids, the kids just get worse and worse and spiral out of control AND the parents end up looking like complete tools who have no idea what they're doing.

Let me just admit that moderating these forums is not my number one priority [*gasp*]. I have a lot to do; I'm in 3 different clubs that I actively participate in, I'm a volunteer at KUGS, I'm working hard on getting into the music program, I have other classes I'm taking, and yes, I like to socialize and have leisure time. As far as amount of time I've put in vs. how much time is required of me for credit, I've gone above and beyond my call of duty. However, I do take the position seriously and try to do as good a job as I can with what I see. Pointing to other forums and pointing at our own statistics isn't really sufficient evidence to say we're not doing a good job. I used to be part of another forum, as well, and there wasn't near as much moderation as there is here. Moderators were virtually nonexistent unless they wanted to shut someone up that they didn't like. Some might say what we've been doing is too much (in fact, some have said it, as you know). Were I not a moderator, I wouldn't want more moderation than we have.

The truth is, most posters on the forum have been doing a great job of just ignoring offensive or troll-like posting and continuing with serious, civil discussion. Ergo, there is no need to close threads, because as Jamin mentioned, this totally shuts off any positive discussion that might have continued to have been had.

Also, the poster of the inflammatory comment you mentioned was issued a warning via private message. I'm not sure if this was already said, but in case not, I'm saying it again.

[edit:] There is a reason why we haven't been locking multiple email migration threads, and I tried typing it out to explain it, but it's late and I can't think straight right now, let alone explain the concept, so I'll let Jamin or Andy explain if they'd be so kind.

So what's to stop me from making a thread once a week about the email migration?  Are you going to tell me intent because that would be lobbing up warm-up balls.

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