Life In 19x19

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

I also think he is a very valuable contributor.

And +1 for *more* British English. This isn't an American-only place, I hope.

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.

Toge wrote: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.

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.

Li Kao wrote: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

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.

Thread moving = pain in the butt.

daniel_the_smith wrote:it makes it quite hard to figure out what I've read and haven't.

Doesn't the forum track what you have read and what you haven't? Or does phpbb have problems with renamed/moved threads?

Li Kao wrote:

daniel_the_smith wrote:it makes it quite hard to figure out what I've read and haven't.

Doesn't the forum track what you have read and what you haven't? Or does phpbb have problems with renamed/moved threads?

depends on how its implemented, but moved threads tend to reset the read/unread flag.

I don't read or post here as often as I did on GD, but I have not seen a need for or an instance of moderation. That seems to tell me that there is nothing wrong.

As for John Fairbairn, being bilingual in English and American I have no trouble with his posts. For those of you who do I am sure there are automated translators available to convert from English into American.

DrStraw wrote:As for John Fairbairn, being bilingual in English and American I have no trouble with his posts.

What about us, whose language is the most common in the world: Bad English?

tj86430 wrote:

DrStraw wrote:As for John Fairbairn, being bilingual in English and American I have no trouble with his posts.

What about us, whose language is the most common in the world: Bad English?

Unfortunately, I am not trilingual so I cannot help there.

Dr. Straw, indulge my curiousity. Are your references to being bilingual in American and British English a joke? I've never felt like I got your tone or the potential humor well enough to say.

hyperpape wrote:Dr. Straw, indulge my curiousity. Are your references to being bilingual in American and British English a joke? I've never felt like I got your tone or the potential humor well enough to say.

Also, I should add that your views about the word 'doctor' make me hesitant to try and predict what you think.

hyperpape wrote:Also, I should add that your views about the word 'doctor' make me hesitant to try and predict what you think.

Now on that one there is no doubt. A doctor is a teacher: look at the root of the word. Most physicians don't care one whit about teaching their patients. In the UK you don't even need a doctoral degree to practice medicine but they still call themselves "doctor". I will concede that physicians in the US have to have doctoral degrees but I am offended by the fact that most people, and almost all the mainstream media, reserve the use of the word "doctor" for medical practioners. Even though you would not guess it from the mess they have got the country in, both Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have PhDs in Economics, but how many times have you heard them referred to as Dr. Greenspan and Dr. Bernanke? The use of the word as a teacher has been around since the middle ages but its use as a medical professional has only been around for a couple of hundred years.

I don't know why I should be impressed by the root--I just don't think it's that essential to reference. In fact, I suspect that your type of reasoning would have baffling consequences if applied across the board.