BartK I think we already have a great mod team of people who care about the community. I don't know if there was any announcement but currently there is @navindra, @ShiroKuro, @rsl12, and myself. We are part of this community and very much wish it to remain vibrant without the toxicity of of internet discussions in general. Therefore, I think the best thing you can do if you think any post is crossing the line is to simply flag it. We will see your comment, discuss it amongst ourselves, and take appropriate action. Perhaps you might not like that this is going on behind closed doors but please understand that making a public trial of someone is a really bad idea if you want forums to remain a healthy place.
First of all, I would like to thank everyone who has volunteered to moderate. I’ve said it before; I think this is a largely thankless job. Everyone will have different sensibilities about things, and I know that there are times when I probably would make different calls about when things have crossed a line, but overall, I trust the moderators to handle difficult situations, and I agree that moderating decisions should not be aired for general consumption.
One common issue that occurred on the other forum (and that has started to crop up here) is something that I think is very tricky, and I wonder if people feel there are structural things we can do. This is the issue of people getting on soapboxes— and filling threads with long and multiple posts, which all tend to basically say the same thing in many many words. I will say, for the record, that there are plenty of times when I don’t disagree with the substance of the posts. At times, it can feel like trolling, and at times (and with some particular users) these posts can devolve into personal attacks. Somewhat more commonly, my feeling is that these long and/or repeat message posts can come across as ‘browbeating’ to one or another participant. But I think that most of the time, there’s nothing inherently un-civil or off-topic, and so they’re not really in violation of any rules. My personal approach to these discussions is to respond at most once and to try not to feed the soapbox pontifications. But I think that the soapboxing can have the effect of quashing engagement/participation/diversity of viewpoints. So I’m wondering if this is an area where discussions can be broken off, or if we can develop a framework to deal with this issue.
Of course, if I’m the only one who feels that this is an issue, I’m not about to get on a soap box about it!
