It's time to talk abt this Politically correctness madness.

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Again, no one's holding a gun to your head, or anyone else's for that matter, and by continuing to make this argument you disqualify yourself from later utilizing the "WP; if you don't like it you can leave" argument so popular with your fellow moderators. Further, numerous suggestions have been offered (not just in this thread) for improving the moderation of this site, including empowering more part time moderators, rotating active mods to help aleviate burnout, and revising the TOS for clarity, all of which would make the job of moderation easier for all of you. My primary concerns have to do with the siege mentality often displayed by the mods, manifesting itself in the form of imperious and condescending interactions with the site members that the mods are suposed to be serving. No one is claiming that being a mod is easy or fun, but that the difficulties and frustrations of the work are no excuse for treating the site members in a contemptuous or condescending manner, in doing so a moderator is no longer a problem solver, but a problem causer. Quite aside from the basic decency in being civil, the slight amount of extra effort required will pay dividends in not provoking incidents like this one and save time in the long run.

You would be correct on this only if it were easy to find what everyone agrees are qualified mods. I found a poster I thought would be really good, but then that person got to busy to even visit the site much less mod it. Which leaves me feeling like if I just quit I'd be screwing over people that are already working too hard. I realize no one is THAT indespensible, but sometimes it feels that way. We want to find more mods, but it isn't that simple. And, while you are focused on the occassional deleted post or edit, you forget that a huge amount of work - the majority of the work - goes into keeping this site clean of spam and personal agendas that have no place here. I have a horrible time with the technical side of it, but fortunately some other mods are ace.

You are comparing apples to oranges with this argument, I believe. One of those things that sounds good but doesn't really work if you actually think about it.

I know a lot has been aired, and people will consider it. Beyond that, I think I should stop interacting in this thread, before I make things worse. That can happen, you know, if it hasn't already

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 29 Sep 2009, 10:18 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Unfortunately, the contents of private messages can and do get posted on the public boards without the consent of the sender, as I found out to my cost last year. The advice I got from a moderator at the time was that the contents of PMs are not subject to any privacy requirements. That is, once a PM is sent, the recipient may do whatever he or she pleases with its contents. Asking the sender for his/her permission to publish is a courtesy, and nothing more. The obvious implication is: "Don't say anything in PM that you wouldn't like to see posted in the public forum."

An Internet forum which claims to have a membership of nearly 30K (a more realistic estimate, I'm thinking, would put the active membership in the low thousands, which is still plenty big) is going to look like a big juicy target for spammers, scammers and ne'er-do-wells of all stripes. Hence the ongoing work of spam eradication and defence against other types of online attack. Much of this unpleasantness takes place out of the public eye — as it should be; moderation is not a spectator sport. But if the moderators are acquiring a "toiling in thankless drudgery for an ungrateful membership" mentality, and this is affecting their ability to make reasoned and consistent judgments, it's incumbent on the site owner to address the problem.

Just dropping a note; it will likely be tomorrow night before I can properly respond to everything due to my schedule. Just wanted to let those involved know that they were not being ignored.


M.

I think I remember the last two, but I never went to read the first thread mentioned, I googled it, and it was quite interesting, although that seems more like plain correlation, the conclusion provided in said article seems questionable somehow, in the sense that the conclusion is a bit of a strecht, but I believe that may happen with numerous studies, the reliability to said studies is something to put into question I believe, but that is MHO.

I don't know, I tend to doubt wether such studies are truth, they might be, but I'm not quite certain, but there are some aspect that makes one doubt the legiticamy of such studies.

Anyway, regarding the threads being no longer here, at least people can google them and read them and judge by themselves or just to entertain, whatever of these, I think it is a shame they were censored, I mean, those articles don't seem to pose much of a threat and it seems they can easily be dismissed anyway, unless the issue could probably be more related to what was discussed there.

PPR! *smacks self on forehead* THAT'S what I was missing here.. SB does get stuck with a lot of the modding of PPR, doesn't she? I don't even go there often 'cause I don't like the heated-ness. That's, like, an entirely separate thing. I think the mindset required to wade through that sea of controversy is directly contradictory to explaining what is an is not appropriate to a lot of the other forums. *scratches head* I really have no idea how one would go about addressing, that, though, besides that maybe mods who have been attempting to figure out how to keep attacks down in PPR might not immediately go and try to figure out what is appropriate in the dating or adult forums?

The forums with less heated debate are, I thought, open to slightly wider ranges of conversation since there are more restrictions on the type of conversations. Erm, if that makes sense.

DW, what you said about trouble finding qualified mods and that busy person.. You don't have the "moderator" thing by your name, so might it be possible to create a few more semi-mods? Like, people who don't change their role in the community and become mod-types, but who have the ability to just remove the obvious spam? There are probably some people who would turn down an offer to actively moderate, but might be willing to have the ability to kinda silently pull down spam attacks when they're already on.. Might take some of the heat off of the active mods? Just a thought.. I was a bit confused before when SB mentioned not having time to explain every moderation decision.. I hadn't really thought of PPR.

What's pc madness mean

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K21e7po1Sro

^ Beautiful

Did I miss something?

Just keep on making offensive posts. The mods on Wrong Planet like combat.

Well that seems to be the point of contention; what constitutes an offensive post. I've yet to see any of the disputed posts mentioned in this thread returned to their respective forums despite no indication of anyone besides one moderator in particular being offended, so I suppose that "offensive" is anything one of the mods wants it to be. As far as I'm concerned that is a serious problem, it's a sick joke to run what is supposed to be a support site for AS affected individuals in such an arbitrary and ambiguous manner when it's very well known that those are precisely the type of thing that we don't deal well with, it's on the same level as running a site for epileptics featuring flashing graphics. It has been made abundantly clear that the preferences and opinions of we the members will not be taken into consideration in the running of the site in any meaningful way, so at this point my hope is that Alex will return and come to his senses about the way things work around here and make the necessary changes, otherwise I fear a similar situation as to what happened to AFF will befall WP.

The posts regarding wealth and orgasms have been merged and restored to the Adult Autism Issues forum after review.


M.