When I first started the incorporation process, I assumed that I would probably end up being the president for many years. But starting in Jan and Feb of this year, I came to the conclusion that I wouldn't run for the board at all. I no longer was of a mindset that would allow me to be fair and unbiased. To explain that, I have to go back a bit and explain a few things.
The standard story of my looking for a website that would fulfill local needs, is only partially true. The main motivation was to create a woodworking site free of what I considered the worst ills of the Internet, the generally horrible way many people interacted with each other. Think of Woodnet at its worst. Think of Woodnet's "Basement". Think of many other internet places you've been.
It has almost always been that way. There is something about the relative anonymity of the Internet, it's "tradition of free speech", and the difficulty of expressing some things in writing that too often lead to heated discussions and outright verbal aggression. Generally, people have 2 ways of dealing with those situations, strike back in kind and/or stop visiting the site. There also are a few cases where eventually heated discussions in a usenet group led to a physical exchange, :swoon: :XXcompute :argue: :kamahlitu :slap: :qright5: Think syntax of the 'C' programming language :roll: :rotflm:
So when I started, I had a few principles in mind.
In addition, I wanted no overt or implicit statement of any form of prejudice. Certain topics were to be forbidden, politics and religion. Why, read the site policies in detail. There are explanations.
I did almost all moderation myself, in the very beginning. When I moderated, I went through an informal process in my head to reach my final actions.
Many moderators that have come and gone questioned my policies as perhaps being too restrictive and unnecessary. They felt I should wait until things have gone to xxxx before taking action and I , of course, felt prevention was the real way to go.
Over time many users and moderators have come to the conclusion that I was on the right track, if not in detail, at least in principle. Others, came to the decision that while they may not agree with me even in principal, they could and would try to stay within the spirit of the rules, I wanted to enforce.
Ask yourself what made you come and stay on this site. The reasons that I hear the most have to do with friendly and helpful atmosphere. The fact that many people have become friends and see each other outside of the website, further helps that image. You see, people lurk on the site first and get a feeling for the interactions here, before they would ever post or even come back on a regular basis.
So, from my point of view, things were working well. We reached a point where it seemed to be understood that if you were moderated, it was taken with good grace. It was understood that all of us get moderated once in awhile. The moderators and the user being moderated understand, that there are really 2 kinds of policy violation, the non intentional and the direct attack on policy. The staff and myself doesn't or least shouldn't take any offensive at the non intentional ones. Simply correct it, explain it to the offender and move on. The intentional violation needed to be dealt with slightly differently. In addition to the normal moderation process, I usually tried to explain why I was doing what I did and perhaps even attempt to "see the Light". Sometimes, it was necessary to go even further and I would telephone the person and even meet in person. The usual result was that the person involved would eventually agree to abide by the rules and no real hard feelings persisted.
Of course, there were a few times, the person involved would publicly and/or in a PM "quit the site". As far as I can tell, with the exception of one user, everyone came back to using the site. (The one exception, passed away suddenly before he could come back. But he was lurking till the end)
One of the things that I was very proud of, was the fact that we never really had to suspend or ban any user. I felt that we as a staff seemed to always find a way to get our members to accept the rules and at least try to keep to the spirit.
Of course, while I don't personally know of anyone that has done this, I am reasonably sure that we had people decide that, they don't want to restrict their posts because of this site's rules. Those people must have quietly, just started going to other sites and stopped visiting here. While I might miss some of those people, I admire them, becuase they did the right thing. "They didn't like it here and they went elsewhere" and they did it with out attempting to disrupt this site.
Well, please tolerate one more digression before I get to my point.:rotflm:
Many people ask why is this such a friendly and peaceful site? The usual answer given is that fact we are very local to each so people don't say nasty things to people that they might meet. Well I guess I disagree. I think the foundation is and has been, the basic posting policies. Used as guidelines by most and the necessary enforcement helps create and maintain the atmosphere that makes it possible for our users to even want to meet people they have never met.
If I am always saying something nasty and/or insulting to you or others in my posts, are you really going to PM me and offer to travel several hundred miles to my place to teach me the fundamentals of goblet and Bowl turning. :nah: Or vice-versa( actually it would have to be something about computers or the internet, since aren't much:swoon: )
So now we come to Jan and Feb of this year. I was preoccupied with the many different things with the Corporation and wasn't really watching the site. The Senior moderation staff was fairly new.
When I was made aware that there was a problem, it had rapidly deteriorated. There were several threads that were trying to drag our current political and economic climate in to every discussion in the Off Topic forum. These threads were edited and/or closed and/or deleted. In return, the moderators received personal abuse in PMs and in posts. But this group of 5? users kept trying to post things they knew they weren't supposed to. Sometimes they would make a post that was intended to get someone else, by hitting their obvious hot buttons, to violate policy, so they could jump in. It doesn't take much, to get someone to respond to an indirect comment on the economy when that person is unemployed. Then they added to their tactics. Now they tried to deflect the issue, by questioning the right of the staff and officers to set policies. Then other users who had no idea what was really going, decided to pick sides. When new staff members got frustrated and only provided abbreviated reasons for various moderator actions, they were accused of being "high handed" and other such ill defined phrases.:kamahlitu
Frankly, I applaud those staff members for their actions and restraint, in that whole time only two staff members lost their cool publicly. And that was simply to say words that were true. "If you dislike the policies that strongly, go somewhere else." That can sound very harsh without all the context available. But basically that is the reality. You really have only three choices
Of course option 3 was only available recently. It didn't apply during those months.
The standard story of my looking for a website that would fulfill local needs, is only partially true. The main motivation was to create a woodworking site free of what I considered the worst ills of the Internet, the generally horrible way many people interacted with each other. Think of Woodnet at its worst. Think of Woodnet's "Basement". Think of many other internet places you've been.
It has almost always been that way. There is something about the relative anonymity of the Internet, it's "tradition of free speech", and the difficulty of expressing some things in writing that too often lead to heated discussions and outright verbal aggression. Generally, people have 2 ways of dealing with those situations, strike back in kind and/or stop visiting the site. There also are a few cases where eventually heated discussions in a usenet group led to a physical exchange, :swoon: :XXcompute :argue: :kamahlitu :slap: :qright5: Think syntax of the 'C' programming language :roll: :rotflm:
So when I started, I had a few principles in mind.
Site Policy said:
In addition, I wanted no overt or implicit statement of any form of prejudice. Certain topics were to be forbidden, politics and religion. Why, read the site policies in detail. There are explanations.
I did almost all moderation myself, in the very beginning. When I moderated, I went through an informal process in my head to reach my final actions.
- If a thread was on allowed topics, then every effort would be made to preserve the thread. I would edit posts, if possible, and deleted others where editing would change the whole meaning or the whole post was just out of line. And of course I would send a PM to try to indicate what the issues were.
- If a thread was about a restricted topic, it was just deleted. Period. No argument, just an explanation.
- If a thread was on a valid topic, but for whatever reason was "going bad" or was likely to go bad, I closed it as a preventive measure. Again, Period. No argument, just an explanation.
Many moderators that have come and gone questioned my policies as perhaps being too restrictive and unnecessary. They felt I should wait until things have gone to xxxx before taking action and I , of course, felt prevention was the real way to go.
Over time many users and moderators have come to the conclusion that I was on the right track, if not in detail, at least in principle. Others, came to the decision that while they may not agree with me even in principal, they could and would try to stay within the spirit of the rules, I wanted to enforce.
Ask yourself what made you come and stay on this site. The reasons that I hear the most have to do with friendly and helpful atmosphere. The fact that many people have become friends and see each other outside of the website, further helps that image. You see, people lurk on the site first and get a feeling for the interactions here, before they would ever post or even come back on a regular basis.
So, from my point of view, things were working well. We reached a point where it seemed to be understood that if you were moderated, it was taken with good grace. It was understood that all of us get moderated once in awhile. The moderators and the user being moderated understand, that there are really 2 kinds of policy violation, the non intentional and the direct attack on policy. The staff and myself doesn't or least shouldn't take any offensive at the non intentional ones. Simply correct it, explain it to the offender and move on. The intentional violation needed to be dealt with slightly differently. In addition to the normal moderation process, I usually tried to explain why I was doing what I did and perhaps even attempt to "see the Light". Sometimes, it was necessary to go even further and I would telephone the person and even meet in person. The usual result was that the person involved would eventually agree to abide by the rules and no real hard feelings persisted.
Of course, there were a few times, the person involved would publicly and/or in a PM "quit the site". As far as I can tell, with the exception of one user, everyone came back to using the site. (The one exception, passed away suddenly before he could come back. But he was lurking till the end)
One of the things that I was very proud of, was the fact that we never really had to suspend or ban any user. I felt that we as a staff seemed to always find a way to get our members to accept the rules and at least try to keep to the spirit.
Of course, while I don't personally know of anyone that has done this, I am reasonably sure that we had people decide that, they don't want to restrict their posts because of this site's rules. Those people must have quietly, just started going to other sites and stopped visiting here. While I might miss some of those people, I admire them, becuase they did the right thing. "They didn't like it here and they went elsewhere" and they did it with out attempting to disrupt this site.
Well, please tolerate one more digression before I get to my point.:rotflm:
Many people ask why is this such a friendly and peaceful site? The usual answer given is that fact we are very local to each so people don't say nasty things to people that they might meet. Well I guess I disagree. I think the foundation is and has been, the basic posting policies. Used as guidelines by most and the necessary enforcement helps create and maintain the atmosphere that makes it possible for our users to even want to meet people they have never met.
If I am always saying something nasty and/or insulting to you or others in my posts, are you really going to PM me and offer to travel several hundred miles to my place to teach me the fundamentals of goblet and Bowl turning. :nah: Or vice-versa( actually it would have to be something about computers or the internet, since aren't much:swoon: )
So now we come to Jan and Feb of this year. I was preoccupied with the many different things with the Corporation and wasn't really watching the site. The Senior moderation staff was fairly new.
When I was made aware that there was a problem, it had rapidly deteriorated. There were several threads that were trying to drag our current political and economic climate in to every discussion in the Off Topic forum. These threads were edited and/or closed and/or deleted. In return, the moderators received personal abuse in PMs and in posts. But this group of 5? users kept trying to post things they knew they weren't supposed to. Sometimes they would make a post that was intended to get someone else, by hitting their obvious hot buttons, to violate policy, so they could jump in. It doesn't take much, to get someone to respond to an indirect comment on the economy when that person is unemployed. Then they added to their tactics. Now they tried to deflect the issue, by questioning the right of the staff and officers to set policies. Then other users who had no idea what was really going, decided to pick sides. When new staff members got frustrated and only provided abbreviated reasons for various moderator actions, they were accused of being "high handed" and other such ill defined phrases.:kamahlitu
Frankly, I applaud those staff members for their actions and restraint, in that whole time only two staff members lost their cool publicly. And that was simply to say words that were true. "If you dislike the policies that strongly, go somewhere else." That can sound very harsh without all the context available. But basically that is the reality. You really have only three choices
- Obey the rules anyway.
- Go somewhere else.
- Obey the rules in the meantime and use the other rules that are meant for that purpose to try and change the posting policies
Of course option 3 was only available recently. It didn't apply during those months.
(to be continued in next post)
