I've been sensing some bad aji regarding how the L19 community feels on the way admins/mods are moderating the forums. So...I'm curious to see if my aji senses are in the right direction and would like to see some feedback. Here are some questions to get the gears of discussion turning:

• What do you feel are things that need to be done in order to improve the L19 forum experience?
• Do the current forum rules and guidelines need to be expanded or are they fine as it is?
• If you could create your own set of forum rules and guidelines that all admins/mods needed to follow on top of the current forum rules and guidelines, what would it look like?
• Do you feel that there are too many or too few admins/mods? If there's too many, what would you say to a public vote to remove one or two admins/mods from their positions? If the majority feels that there are too few, then the solution is obvious.
• If you were involved with GoDiscussions, were you more satisfied with how it was moderated there than here? If so, what did they do that we could learn from? Or is it no different?

Now I don't think there's anything wrong with people bringing up specific admins/mods on their moderating, especially if it's positive. But if it's negative, I only ask that it be constructive criticism and not be degrading in any way (so obviously no personal attacks, name calling, etc.). And lastly, it's a poll thread because I wanted to let those who'd rather just say "yes" or "no" to the big question in the title and not get too involved in the discussion have a say as well.

If this were http://www.goproblems.com, I would vote +1 well-constructed.

My only request is to reduce the influence of British English on this forum.

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I am Tartuffe from GoDiscussions.com

You should add some intermediate choices to the poll.

In general, I feel that the mods here step in a little too early.

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

One good practice for moderation is that if some moderator notices a forum individual, who need to get moderated, that particular moderator should not be allowed to perform actual moderation. But their need to just report the case and some other moderator should clean up the situation. This way imprudent moderations can be weeded out.

Because power corrupts, moderators should not trust their ability to make judgments, because people are quite bad in dealing with unclear cases. Two heads is not infallible either, but at least two is four times smarter than one.

Also if some moderator is one party of the incident, that particular moderator should not perform actual moderation, but moderation must be performed by individual who has little more objective distance to the situation.

These are just guidelines, but if system is well planned, there should not be any need for moderation, because good system covers all corner cases.

Since I do not know how forum is moderated, I cannot say whether I am satisfied.

In regard to administration, I think it's doing good job whenever no one seems to aknowledge its existence or lack thereof. I'm satisfied. I haven't seen any unhandled, raging discussions or spammers. Current moderators seem to be laid-back, non-authorative folk. Discussion environment is pleasant. That's the impression I have.

@daniel:
That's a risk with too many moderators. Some people take it as proactive job, even though best policy in my opinion is to respond only when clear violations have happened.

OK, I'll leave if you want. Many a true word is spoken in jest.

I'm going to be very controversial here and ask for a vote of confidence / no confidence.

The purpose of moderators is to serve. If the community feels they are not being served, moderators in question should step down to be replaced by a new nomination. I think transparency and accountability are very important.

If other admins and moderators are ok with the idea, why don't we all put ourselves up for a vote of confidence?

To be honest, I don't think there's much point in that. You know that the majority of people will vote yes no matter what. If there were issues serious enough to call in question the way the forum is moderated, this might be worth doing, but aside from one thread where some issues were raised, I don't think this is the case.

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My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

By the way, how many moderation events there has been?

Eh, wot? Fishing for compliments? Alright, I'll bite.

John, your posts are without doubt the among the most informative, interesting and valuable contributions to the L19 community. The fact that you feel strongly about some issues and relish a heated discussion may at times be a good test for our moderators, but hardly a reason for you to withdraw. Au Contraire! (Pardon my French) Without Brits like you, this could be a dull place indeed, full of people unwittingly stepping on toes and those bending over backward not to. The only reason I could think of to reduce the influence of British English, would be to keep words such arse from slipping past our family friendly filters.

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Patience, grasshopper.

One thing I really hate is mods deleting posts or editing out parts of it. Then I keep wondering what it said. This doesn't apply to spammer accounts of course.
I'd prefer the mod editing in some warning text in red below the post. This makes clear what is unacceptable, but does not disturb the thread.
I generally prefer mods to act as guides rather than actually taking action.

And there is one thing where mods should be more active: Organizing discussion
* Moving threads to the correct sub-forum
* Renaming thread-titles to a clearer one
* Splitting off longer off-topic discussions into a new thread

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Sanity is for the weak.

Seriously, John, I'm sure Peter only meant it in jest. And I agree with daal. Yours is a voice of reason that would be sorely missed around here if you left.

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"This is a game that rewards patience and balance. You must think like a man of action and act like a man of thought."
-Jonas Skarssen

I think John Fairbairn is the most valuable contributor to these boards.

As for moderation, to me the most annoying thing is the automatic editing/replacement of words deemed unsuitable for tender ears. In the first place those ears have no doubt already heard and are familar with those words. So familiar, in fact, that the euphemisms and edits simply don't work. Finally, there are easy "work arounds" using characters like @ and $ and homonymic spellings.

With all due respect to John, the last few posts seem a bit off topic.

Araban: I vote "don't know." I'm reasonably active, and I still feel like I'm in no position to comment on the moderation.

To answer the questions:
* Next to nothing. Minor technical improvements.
* Definitely had forgotten the entire content of these. The formal list had not crossed my mind in the past month.
* Not sure.
* We could probably get by with fewer, but that's not the same as too many. We're probably at the high end of the range of what makes sense, but within that range.
* Not aware of what it was like on GD.

My motto: "I demand that the voice of those too cautious to speak be heard! Wait, nevermind, I don't demand..."

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Occupy Babel!

The only suggestion I would make is to clearly define the moderation procedures (posts will be edited, deleted, etc.) and document them in the Forum Rules. That way all members will know what to expect and moderation will not run the risk of appearing arbitrary.

Honestly, the mods are doing one of the best jobs I've ever seen. They are friendly, love the community, they better the community, and they've never given me a reason to doubt their ability to moderate.

[soapbox]
Now, if I could draw some comparisons to another forum, talkchess.com which is all about computer chess. Talkchess elects their mods and has them serve a six month term. Bad idea. Last January to July, threads were moving all around, threads were being deleted on a whim, mods resigning and then retracting their resignation, miscommunication between the mods, modifying posts, polls about whether the mods should resign, and there were so many freaking complaints all across the board. From hidden subforums, to trigger happy mods, to a controversial supposed reverse engineering of Rybka top program, deleting links to the "shady" programs.

I suspect the bad aji that Araban is feeling is only from a handful of people, and I also suspect that these people think that the mods are doing a terrible job. The reality is people that Joaz, Araban, Jordus, Fwiffo, Topazg, and all the other mods are doing their best. There was only one instance where I personally think that the mods could have done a better job, but I also realize that they are human. I'm not going to get hung up on these issues.

The community already pulled together once when godiscussions.com went down. We're one community, and due to all the different nationalities involved it's inevitable that people get offended. If anyone, including myself, has offended anyone, I apologize. Can we all be quick to forgive each other and not judge one another?

If you think that the mods are doing a bad job, then you need to see what happened with talkchess.com. With a month left in the last mod teams' turn before the election, one of the mods created another forum Openchess.org and basically left talkchess forever. There was bickering, fighting, personal attacks, polls, you name it. You also need to see how bad it was on talkchess, and trust me the people over there aren't as friendly over there. I haven't seen anything as bad

This forum has dang good mods, and they do a pretty dang good job. I've seen how ugly things can get in forums, and trust me you guys don't want to.
[/soapbox]



I also think he is a very valuable contributor.



I agree completely. I value the non-American people's input.

I don't think elections are a good idea in this case. I've seen how bad the results can be, and I don't like that. Sorry Topazg.

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My plan to become an SDK is here.

I feel that the best moderation policy is to "be invisible". The mods like Toge describes are indeed laid-back, non-authoritative folk, and I'd like to add invisible. Invisible meaning that most of the community can't tell whether or not somethings been done the majority of the time.

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My plan to become an SDK is here.

Moving threads is the one thing that will send me somewhere else -- it really drives me nuts, because I then have so much trouble finding and following a conversation that I remembered seeing somewhere. I can't follow TigersMouth or IGoLocal because threads are constantly being renamed and/or moved (and on IGoLocal, the entire fourm keeps getting rearranged such that the navigation links are broken)

I do understand that there are indeed times when threads, or parts of threads need to be moved, but moderation (sparingly) is key.

Another -1 to more frequent thread moving, it makes it quite hard to figure out what I've read and haven't.

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

Thread moving = pain in the butt.

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Occupy Babel!