A question.

[Tobus]

Steve, I understand your goal in trying to minimise any allegations of bias or partiality on the part of the moderating staff. But despite the best intentions, I think the opposite has happened.

As I described previously, relying on the member reporting feature has led to flagrant and obvious examples of selective enforcement of the rules. One dirk thread will be reported and taken to the Memory Hole while a nearly identical dirk thread will remain open. And it all comes down to the fact that a member reported one but not the other. The membership has no expectations of being free from bias, yet they are the ones driving the proverbial boat when it comes to flagging posts. If the moderators cannot act until a member reports it, then the bias in the system starts at the very beginning: with the membership. How is this a better system?

Again, I understand your basic premise. Putting it into normal everyday perspective, we would not want the typical street police officer to be the one to arrest people and also act as judge, jury, and executioner. I can understand your reluctance to have the moderators fill all those roles. Even though that's the way it works on virtually every other internet forum out there. But relying solely on the member reporting feature as a replacement for the proverbial street police officer doesn't seem to fix the problem. The bias problem doesn't get better - it gets worse. If your concern is that the person who flags a post shouldn't have a say in the final decision, then it would make more sense to have a policy where the moderator that reports the thread be excluded from the final vote amongst the moderators. But I'd still think it should be the moderators alone who flag threads, since they actually are expected to be unbiased, where the general membership is not.

It's your forum and your decision, of course. But since you did ask me these questions, my opinion is that I personally prefer the moderating team to have full authority over all of it. If you trust your staff to be impartial and act in good faith to support the rules and mission of this forum, especially since they confer with each other before any final decisions are made, it seems to me that this would be a much more bias-free system than relying on the extremely biased membership to decide what gets flagged. I don't know what goes on behind the curtain, as it were, but it seems to me that your moderating staff is pretty level-headed and capable of acting as faithful agents of the rules.

As to your last question, no, I'm not the kind of person who agrees with absolutes. So I'm probably not the right person to ask that sort of question to. I think there's always room for common sense in every aspect of life, regardless of what "the rules" say. Being a strict enforcer and hiding behind the verbiage of written rules is what leads to silly "zero tolerance" policies and mindless worship of authority. An internet forum is a place run by people, for other people. Nothing will be perfect, and you'll never please all of the people. But my personal opinion is that the reasonable members will always understand when reasonable staff members try to make the best decisions they can in trying to uphold the goals of the forum. The unreasonable members won't agree or care, no matter how hard you try. It's a waste of time trying to please the unreasonable ones.

[Steve Ashton]

Tobus,

You present an interesting perspective. Before I can respond may I ask a question. Have you ever flagged a post? Have you ever brought an issue to the attention of the Moderators?

[Chas]

An observation, if I may.

Steve owns the site and the name, but we the membership have 'ownership' of the content. We hear so much all over the internet about people's rights, but we never hear about their responsibilities.

I believe that we, individually and collectively, have a responsibility to each other and to the site to make and keep it the best we can. In our own towns and communities, are we like the Levites, who pass by on the other side; leaving it to others to sort out any problems. Or are we like the Samaritan and do something to help?

All we have in this place is the Rules. All that is required of us is that we keep to them. Is that such an onerous responsibility, that we cannot achieve it?

Regards

Chas

[Tobus]

Tobus,

You present an interesting perspective. Before I can respond may I ask a question. Have you ever flagged a post? Have you ever brought an issue to the attention of the Moderators?

I have. Specifically, when one member had outrageously personally attacked another. But I don't know why this should have been necessary. Any moderator who saw it should have been able to take action without my having reported it. In my opinion, a member flagging a post should only serve to call attention to something the mods haven't seen yet. Then they can choose whether to act on it or not.

[Steve Ashton]

Just so everyone can understand where I am going with these questions.....

I really am trying to understand. You see, an internet forum is one of the only true autocracies in the world today.

Autocracy is defined as: "A system of government in which a supreme political power is concentrated in the hands of one person, whose decisions are subject to neither external legal restraints nor regularized mechanisms of popular control"

I really do have the off button. With a single click of a mouse I can turn X Marks off. I would not be required by any law to give a reason or show cause. I would not be accountable to anyone.

I can also, with a single click, make any member of this forum go away.
You see this power utilized on many forums today. A member is there one day and the next, 'poof', they are not. No explanation, no discernible reason. This was actually the way X Marks was run for almost three years back in its very early days.

Back in the days before we had any Moderators, before we even had the first Advocates. X Marks was a true autocracy. One person held all the power and was answerable to no one.

But like many of our members I simply could not live with myself if X Marks were run this way today.

My entire focus, since I took over X Marks, has been to minimize the impact any one person could have on the overall forum. It was me, and me alone, who set up our current system of checks and balances.

It was my decision. I take full responsibility for how X Marks is run today.

It is also my responsibility, as I see it, to insure that X Marks is alive and thriving in 10 or 20 years from today.

So I truly want to try and understand these accusations of "thin-skinned whiners" that some people seem to lodge every time something happens.
I truly cannot understand how someone can say that there are "flagrant and obvious examples of selective enforcement" in one post and then say "a member flagging a post should only serve to call attention to something the mods haven't seen yet" When it is this 'call of attention to something" that is actually happening.

I think that this misunderstanding of the system is due to the word "report" as it has been used here for many years. This is the word that is built into the software, it is the default word. I recently changed this word to the phrase "Raise a Flag".

I think this phrase better explains how X Marks is run.

We currently have 7 Moderators. We purposely chose Moderators from the membership with an eye to their location. Our goal was to have Moderators in as many different time zones as possible. We also tried to have as many different nationalities and personalities as we could. This serves as one of the checks and balances and also tries to have as much coverage on the forum as possible.

But the Moderators do have lives, jobs, and do need to sleep. There are many times when no member of the staff is on line. I would actually say that in the past few months, with the lives of our Moderators changing, that there are more times when no Moderator is on-line.

So the idea of having some system to alert the staff to an issue is vital. We call this system "Raising a Flag". Any member may "Raise a Flag" alerting the staff to any issue for any reason.
The first thing that happens when anyone flags a post is an email is sent to every Moderator. They know to log on and look in this particular part of the forum before looking at PM's or going to their favorite forum section. This is how this system works.

It is the Moderators, and the Moderators alone who decide if something is actually wrong. Quite often these flags are nothing more than "Hey, I made a typo in the title of my thread. Can someone fix it for me?".

But I would like to clear up any misunderstanding. The most common flag the Moderators get is something along the lines of "You may want to keep an eye on this thread. It is getting a bit heated.".

Even in the case where a Flag may say "I think this post is wrong" is responded to by the Moderators with "Can you please quote what rule you think may have been violated."

Because it is the rules and the rules only that say what is appropriate or not. There are no gray areas. It is the Moderators and the Moderators only who vote. (I don't even have a vote unless there is a tie) The Moderators vote only on "Have the limits of this rule been exceeded." They vote yes or no.

There is no "I vote no, but I don't like this person." votes.

I truly hope that you can see that on X Marks there are no secret police and there are certainly no tattle-tales.

But the Moderators cannot be on-line all the time. We truly do rely on our members to be adults and to take responsibility for their own forum. You can participate or you can leave it up to someone else to govern you.

It really is your choice.