In Reply to: Bored request for civility posted by M3 lover on March 14, 2012 at 14:31:35:
It's always been a struggle to balance civility versus censorship. Our goal is to provide a healthy, fun community that is supportive, informative and open to diverse opinions. We don't believe in censoring folks because they don't subscribe to the 'group-thought'. At the same time, we don't particularly like the crusaders that have to jump into every single thread about cables or some other topic to preach their gospel.
It's a fine line and one that has a lot of gray.
We see civil debate as a healthy endeavor. People can disagree, but they don't have to be disagreeable in their discourse.
And contrary to popular belief, the mods do not read all of the thousands of posts and 50 odd forums. We rely on the Inmates to alert us to problems. Most posts that are deleted are ads or spam. A small number are from a few that resort to personal attacks as a way to attempt to 'win the debate'.
Herding cats isn't easy and often we do alright and sometimes we don't do a very good job at all. We do try.
Overall, Inmates tend to get along pretty well. Most forums rarely if ever need any moderation and blow ups tend to be fairly rare. When problems do get out of hand, we're usually oblivious until someone blows up and folks finally alert us. Then it always becomes a bigger problem than if we'd been alerted earlier and had nipped it in the bud. Personality conflicts that fester over time are the worst where one person or another is almost stalking someone, continually bringing up old issues.
The hardest issues for us is where Inmates have differing and passionate opinions over technical issues and we're supposed to take sides. Personally, I haven't got a clue about most of those debates and only know enough to be dangerous with a soldering iron.
Adding some more mods that are more technical and into certain forums that the current mods don't read would probably help. Leading by example and knowing the players makes moderation a lot easier.
-Rod
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Follow Ups
- RE: Bored request for civility - Rod M 17:48:01 03/15/12 (2)
- RE: Bored request for civility - josh358 14:00:01 03/19/12 (0)
- I may be tilting with windmills here . . . - M3 lover 09:35:12 03/16/12 (0)