Just leave bad posts as they are. when you state moderation action that is enough, the posts do the damage they do already and just deleting posts will remove the context of why action was taken. deleting posts should be reserved for posts that full of blatant things like shock images

So, just to jump in and play a bit of Devil's Advocate. These two sentences are mutually exclusive. Either you leave the bad posts (first thought), or you delete some things but not others (second thought).

If you subscribe to the idea of the second thought - that some things can be deleted - then the question really is, "Where is the line that determines the Yes/No condition?" For you, that line is goatse. That's fine - it's an opinion question, and that's a completely reasonable opinion. For us, the line is further than that. We don't want hate speech; we don't want profanity that should be caught by the censers; we don't want long chains of off-topic posts that actually derail the thread form it's intended topic or even within reasonable "topic drift."

Both your line and our line are reasoable answers. Other message boards move that line even further, for example removing anything having to do with politics or religion. Again, that's fine too; it's their forum and so they get to define the line.

Our goal - and we're still working to get better at it - is to excise as little information as possible. If somebody writes a paragraph and bypasses the filter once in that paragraph, we're not going to delete the whole post; we're going to edit the filter-dodge so that the filters can catch it and leave everything else as-is. Just as an easy example to make. On the other end of that, if John Doe makes a post that is nothing but hate speech, well.. we're going to remove the whole post, because editing it out the hate speech leaves no practical content. And it's not something we want to leave up as a lesson for others - that's something we don't want to be associated with at all. Those are the two obvious extremes of editing/deleting. Everything else is somewhere between those two.

Now, that said... I do agree that a spammy topic drift can be left in the thread if it's caught early and things can get steered back quickly. Ideally, a regular community member does that my making on-topic posts. Less ideally one of us has to come and nudge the thread. (And note that this is purely about spammy, no-content replies. If a full side conversation breaks out, we're more likely to take those posts and make a new thread out of them.) Deletion of spammy posts happens when neither of those two occur quickly, and the spam has threatened to take over the thread, even if a mod nudge does come along. What's the threshold for that? Good question. It's somewhere more than one and less than fifty. We're still finding the comfort zone and working to get the staff to the point where mods respond in roughly the same basic way.

And... this became a much bigger wall of text than I expected. So I'll stop there, except to say two more things: 1) We're trying to improve. Hopefully that's obvious. 2) Constructive feedback is welcome.

I don't think "don't delete posts unless it's absolutely necessarily" is mutually exclusive with anything. if something gets off-topic it's better to just lay the warning and then give anybody who blatantly ignores it a day off than to warn multiple times and then clean up the mess afterwards. don't be afraid to actually dayban people, i mean what else are they supposed to expect.

But there's a difference between, "don't delete unless absolutely necesssary" and "Just leave bad posts as they are."

The latter - your words from the post I quoted - isn't going to work. I think we all agree a "no delete, ever" policy would suck hard. So that means the question really is - as I said above - where's the line. Different people have different answers to that question, and that's great. Variety is the spice of life, etc. The problem really isn't that you and I disagree where the line ought to be. I think the problem really is the fact that so far as a whole, we've been inconsistent about defining the line. And while that's understandable - we had, like, a week to put everything together - ideally the "learning curve" for all of us to get on the same page isn't all that steep and we'll be getting more consistent soon.

That all said, I'm quite certain that our line is going to be further "south" of where you want it. We all agree goatse should be removed. (At least, I hope so.) We all agree two girls, one cup should be removed. (Again, at least I hope so.) We all agree that posts with nothing but vile, filthy hate speech should be removed. (again, blah blah). The difference seems to be that you want the line to stop there, and we're going to do more than that. We're going to edit posts to fix filter-dodging. We're going to remove long spammy conversations so a thread can stay on topic. Ideally, those spammy derails are caught early and we never need to remove them. I would love that. I'm inherently a lazy person, so the less work the better.

There's certainly merit to your position. There really aren't any wrong answers to the question of where to put that line. We're still figuring out exactly where - as a group - we want that to be. And that involves working with some mods to lower their standards, and working with others to raise their standards. I really do think once we're more consistent overall, the line in the sand will be clear to everybody and acceptable to most people. As I've asked before, just give us some time to work through the growing pains.

As a crossdressing male with many transexual friends I'm offended by the implications in the anime thread made by one user that there is an agenda of genderbending lobbyists out to control the anime industry and corrupt the minds of children into accepting non-traditional gender roles. Are you going to delete his posts as well? Why not? If haikus had to be deleted surely transphobic paranoid speech should as well. I'm not honestly demanding the deletion of his posts because I don't really care that much if they are or not, but there are difficulties in establishing a loose ruling on what is and isn't allowed and what kind of content should be edited, deleted, moved, or left in place.

I'm going to caveat my own points and say that I could very well be wrong in criticizing this moderation policy. Most of my forums experience in the last few years has been on SomethingAwful, which uses a very very different model of controlling and regulating content. NSFW content is purged but words are kept mostly in place, and if a post is bad enough a user is banned/probated along with a message stating so in the post they were banned for. Click on their rap sheet and you can see why they were banned and for how long. Posts are extremely rarely actually deleted. NGA is by nature a spinoff from WotC, and it is perfectly reasonable to try to adhere to their brand of forums moderation first and foremost. But most of us here are also refugees from WotC, specifically because we disagreed with that moderation policy as a corporate forum did not allow the freedom desired for some of its users. "Like WotC but more chill" is a noble goal but it may require changes in thinking about how forums should be run and how internet communication works.

I am not trying to attack the moderation staff or its policies as incorrect. This is a new forum and you guys really are doing your best, and its hard, especially when you have smartasses like myself pushing boundaries all the time. but in 10 years of looking at forums I've still never seen anyone happy with deleted, merged, or split threads/posts. My very last point, I was told that this would be a forum that ultimately would grow into a community for creators of content of any sort. Destruction opposes creation and moderation and rules policy sets the tone for the rest of the forum. I'd take 1000 threads locked over a single deleted post, but this is my personal view of course.

As I said in the red text post, there will be a cleanup coming once I have 15 or so minutes straight that I can sit and look at stuff.

Fair enough, I missed that.

I'm the type of person who always prefers less moderation over more, letting the posters control the content and decide what the purpose of the forum is and how it should be used. I understand that the more common opinion here is that a specific environment should be supported though, and I don't really have any reason for why the former should be the case rather than the latter. Just thought I'd throw my opinion out there.

same and this works reasonably well. a lot of mods on SA might be awful and do things like kill parrots but the policy works

But isn't the entire forum / website for Something Awful supposed to be focused on adult humor and mature content? I mean, I know it's not 100%, but it's not exactly the kind of place I'd like to see NGA become.

~SE++

Depends the subforum. I also think that is irrelevant towards the policy; it could be applied to any forum and work exactly the same way.

SA is a humor-focused site with much more lax policy with regards to language and some areas that are almost not moderated at all, but it doesn't interfere with any other discussions the forum has, including its own Magic and D&D threads. I will say its a very different culture there compared to the one the owners of this site are trying to create.

Well, you clearly have an outlet for your acting out then.

Everyone has been made more than aware of the policies here, and yet a select few users insist on running the Rec Room over the line on a daily basis. There are other places out there where you can act like fools all you want, and spew off whatever profanity and hate speech you feel you must. But you know the rules here, you know what type of environment the admins are pushing for, so grow up and follow the rules.

The rules here are still quite lax, considering that most forums of this sort wouldnt allow for talk of sex, drugs, politics, or religion and yet here we're allow to in a mature manner.

Congratulations on taking a condescending attitude and then entirely missing the point of the latest discussion. I've been warned once for trolling which I believe was handed out fairly. I backed off and I'm trying to be a good shibe while helping the community grow (which is why I created the 30 day challenge thread in the first place). No where did I mention I want the ability to spread hate speech or profanity. I don't even approve of a mature forum yet because I don't think we've grown enough as a community to really justify to the moderators that we could handle such a place. I don't have an issue with the rules I just don't like it when posts are deleted or threads excessively tampered with because it ruins the continuity and community of discussion. Don't you get annoyed looking for a thread only to find that its mysteriously disappeared and have to ask to find out half the posts were deleted and its now two threads but one of them was also deleted or some other such complicated revision? Telling me to get out and post elsewhere is really a rather weird and rude response to such a proposition.

Rowdy userbase isn't an excuse for poorly implemented or inconsistently implemented rules. Otherwise I am not entirely sure what point you are trying to make.



the threads about all of these have been very awful so its rather self-evident why they are a bad idea

Oak, that post was pretty much uncalled for. Especially since you obviously missed the point of the discussion.

I don't think we're talking about what gets moderated, because as Van said, we can mostly agree with that. But how it's moderated.

Now I haven't had a warning yet (well, one a decade ago for promoting my own forum on a competitor's ), but if I ever get one only to find that the post where I got it was deleted, so I couldn't fight it, I'd be on extremely high alert. That's why I've been asking to stop deleting posts.

most forums are about sex, drugs, politics, or religion.

not to say that there's any problem with wanting a stricter environment and saying that if people want a softer one they should go to a different site

I don't think that the people in charge of the forum are against discussion related to how the forum should be run though, so it probably isn't true that a person should leave because they don't like how things are run, though i don't imagine they would get very far asking for things to be significantly different I don't think there is a problem with them trying or at least just expressing their opinion. People might find at least some validity in their requests even if they're unaligned with the general opinion as a whole.

also most of the things that JaC have said in this thread are really good.

The first line of my post was purely sarcasm.

As far as the second line, it was the preverbal "you" and not "Van" directed. i.e. : "There are other places out there where (you: anyone reading this) can act like fools all (you: anyone reading this) want.

Im quite aware that Van has tried to "turn himself around" just as much as I'm aware of the other users who have continued on the same path of general debauchery.

As far as what/how moderation is carried forth, like I said before, if a post is so worthless that it warrants completely being edited down to the point of being a [Moderated by Gobo] the post should instead be stored somewhere for the mods records it is original state, without editing, and like the mods have made clear if you disagree with the moderation you take it up with a mod lead through appeal.

It dont want to be so blunt as saying "If you dont want your posts deleted, stop posting things you know full well will be deleted". But I think that some users need to realize that if they spend less time posting things that are clearly and blatantly over the line, that both the community and the admin team could spend more time in finding out exactly where the line lies instead of spending every day sweeping the hate-speech and flaming that continues to show up in the OTR.

There were haikus deleted out of the poem-topic. That's what spurred me to bring this up again.

OK, so... a few things. Let's do the ugly red one first...

I'd very much prefer the discussion stay on the moderation policy and the various theories about it rather than talking about individual posters. Thanks.

OK, with the ugly red text taken care of...

- With a few exceptions from the first day or two, everything that has been "deleted" is saved off in an archive. The exception to this is when a post is edited - and in those cases what has been edited is recorded by the mod in his / her "mod log" - again, to document what was there and why it was changed.

- Alth and I have access to the system-generated moderation log. That's a built-in feature of phpBB that logs moderator actions - logging into the mod control panel, issuing a warning, editing a post, moving a thread, etc. He and I basically have the expectation that we could go through the site-generated log and tie everything in there to either a thread in the archive and / or a post in the moderator's user-generated log. Not that I want to have to do that, because it would be a pain in the ass. But the option is there if we think we need to investigate a mod. (And for the mods themselves: don't worry, you'll know if we're unhappy.)

- I won't speak for the other mods, but for me... I appreciate the candor and the direction of the conversation so far (red text stuff excepted). I think it's been an overall healthy discussion with a lot of differing opinions shared in a polite manner. It's pretty much what we hope this place becomes - an open, inviting community with open and honest - but well-behaved - discussions, even on "sticky" topics like politics, sex, and religion.

- Our target model is close to what WotC was back when the WizOs ran the site, were assigned specific forums to moderate, knew their members and their personalities, etc. We're willing to accept a bunch of topics they weren't, which is a big difference. And right now we can't justify having enough mods to officially assign mods to every forum (though we unoffcially have that). As has been pointed out, our "chiefs to indians" ratio was pretty high at the start, and so bringing on even more mods wouldn't make sense.

- So the goal is WotC-esque, but something to remember is that they had years to build up their mod staff, their moderating techniques, their administration level, etc. We had a week. New WizOs had training that lasted for at least a month, where they couldn't take any action with a proverbial stamp of approval from their assigned mentor. We had about 4 hours to "train" our mods, because the decision was made that it was better to get the site opened and running sooner rather than later. And to do that, mod training was one of the things that got sacrificed. Alth and I are still playing "catch up" on that, and I think it's getting a little better each day. So as I've asked before, please give us some time to iron out the kinks as we get up to speed on running a site.

- Finally, as has also been said before, the overall moderation goal is to remove as little as possible. Once all the kinks are worked out, we won't be deleting a paragraph if deleting one or two words fixes the problem; we won't delete a post if deleting a paragraph solves it; we won't delete a thread if deleting a post or two solves it. We want to take the lightest touch possible, because as has been pointed out by somebody - I can't find it now - it's awfully ironic for a site that's built around the idea of "creation" to go ahead and destroy things by deleting them. That doesn't mean we won't delete a thread; it just means we'll try to only do that when the thread is no longer salvagable by removing specific posts.

I think that covers all the bases for stuff that has come up recently...