Welcome to a new school year on Viking Village! We’ve made some changes over the summer that we hope will make this a more useful and fun resource for you this year. One of the changes is a new focus on moderation of the forum. Last year, we adopted a philosophy of letting the forum self-regulate and encouraged people to follow our Guidelines for Participation. This was mostly successful, but as can often happen, a small number of people were not able to follow our guidelines, thereby ruining the experience for others. The Viking Village Advisory Board had many discussions last year about these issues and considered the best way to encourage better forum participation. The upshot is that we think our guidelines are good rules for posting on the forum, and that most deviations were the result of not following suggestions for civil dialogue. As a result we will take these steps:
- We will attempt to act swiftly to remove posts and lock and delete threads with an eye towards keeping dialogue within the bounds required for civil discussion.
- We will be increasing the number of moderators on the forum so that we can more effectively monitor posts.
- Although this is not a change, please remember that multiple offenses can result in a user being banned.
There will be some who will see these steps as censorship; others will judge that we are not doing enough. We certainly don’t want to limit discussion of ideas, but it has become clear that even mildly insulting language can quickly cause a thread to spiral out of control, and so we will err on the side of encouraging civility. Not only will we encourage civility towards others on the forum, but for everyone, including others on campus and people in the public eye; it won’t be okay to trash someone on the forum. Also, we want to make it clear that it will be the moderator’s call (supported by the Advisory Board) on deciding if posts violate our guidelines. People will still be able to flag posts, and the Advisory Board always welcomes comments on the forum. We hope that we can foster the many positive ways that Viking Village has become an indispensable resource for campus communication and dialogue while minimizing the bad behavior that caused some problems in the past.
--- Viking Village Advisory Board
