General Discussion Of Moderation Procedures (aka 'The Whine List')

Just Being Real has been under pressure to supply evidence in support of "the great flood". In message 134 he did a rather noble effort at such.Then both Jar and you came in with messages 135 and 138. Neither were replies to the content of message 134. Instead you both launched off on giving your personal anti-flood sermons. Disaster was imminent, and IamJoseph stepped in (no surprise) to further thrash the topic. Much of what he got suspended for (and I did give a "-" to Admin's suspension message) was building on Jar's and your messages. You and Jar were parties in the crime.Yes, I too believe that anything having to do with young Earth creationism can be shot down with some variation of a "but the Earth isn't young" argument. But for the sake of having a debate on some aspect of "floodism" and/or "flood geology", we need to set such a thing aside.As I see it, the Biblical "one year flood" is a consideration in that debate. That it Biblically supposedly happened somewhere in the last 5000 years is not a relevant issue.Adminnemooseus

The topic in question just got a restart at message 134. Both Jar and Coyote replied to that message. Neither of their replies addressed the content of that message. Had a creationist pulled off this maneuver, the originator would be responding with something like "Did you even read my message?", or maybe even "DID YOU EVEN READ MY MESSAGE?"By the way, did you notice I had no objections to your message 136, in reply to message 134? That's because your content actually was a reply to message 134's content. I guess maybe you deserved a "+" for that.Maybe this all is a testament on why we should start new topics rather than reviving old topics.I await for the opinion(s) of another admin(s).Adminnemooseus

It's my impression that the Peanut Gallery has turned into a giant mess.There are only two active "Great Debates", and one of those has just been reactivated after a 3 month lull. Thus, all the PG conversation apparently relates to the RAZD/Bluejeans topic.Personally, I suspect the PG has turned into an independent piece of chaos.My suggestions:

1. All future "Peanut Gallery" topics be specifically tied to an individual "Great Debate" topic.
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2. GD participants do not post to the PG.
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3. GD participants can pull material from the PG, but only if such supports that participant's perspective (as always, source links are a good thing). A "Great Debate" participant is not to bring in and debate opposing perspectives from the PG.

What do you think? I think this could help both the PG and the GD.Adminnemooseus

But that is effectively making the PG poster a GD participant. The whole idea of the GD is to restrict participation.If the opponent thinks the so called "misconception" is a valid point, then he can bring it into the GD. Otherwise it can live and/or die in the PG.AdminnemooseusAdded by edit: I now see that your "with having to make that part of the GD" apparently was intended to be "without having to make that part of the GD". I still stand with my opinions concerning points 2 and 3.Edited by Adminnemooseus, : See above.

Yes, but the wrong place to post it. Note that I've hidden the message and added my comment.And as it is a moderation issue, and as he has admin status, the admin ID is the ID to use.And I agree with the content. The suspension should be permanent, with a possible commutation in not less than a month. And if there is a commutation, I think Hooah better be of wonderful behavior then on, or suffer the consequences.Adminnemooseus

I've been intending to do a message by message commentary on the here messages relating to the Jar and Coyote forum restriction and the subsequent Jar suspension... but that's a lot of time, effort, and writing, at least as I operate.The short version has just occurred to me, and I need to post it before I forget it.As I see it, there are three "forum" areas concerning the evo-creo debate, although the divisions between these areas are not sharp.The first area is that of legitimate science. That debate was completed a long time ago, and the science side won. Of course, the less than legitimate science side will disagree with that. That is where areas two and three come in.The second area is that of the general public, the "real world". There outbreaks of creationism happen, and it is the desire of the science side to come down on it HARD. The goal is to get the creationists to shut up and go away. This attitude naturally crosses over into the third area.The third area is that of the internet forum. In the case of evcforum.net, the goal is to have an ongoing discussion, day after day and year after year. The goal of the science side is NOT to get the creationists to shut up and go away (or is it?). If that is to be the goal (creationists shut up and go away), to succeed is to end the function of this forum (and have a lot of evo side people whining about not having any creationists to beat on).Thus, to sustain the viability of evcforum.net, the admins need to strive to maintain a (hopefully healthy) creationist population - We don't want them to shut up and go away. Thus, the admins need to promote a kinder and gentler discourse. The creationist side is relatively few in number and also have the disadvantage of have reality on their opponents side. The creationist's difficult mission is to show that that reality, at least to some degree, is actually on the creationist side.The admins find the need for "taking it easy" on the creationists. We need to protect the creationist side, least they go extinct at evcforum.net.Now, the debate includes the details and the big picture. The big picture is important, but maintaining topic structure and quality requires more of a focus on the details aspect. Even though "everything" may be to some degree relevant, permitting "everything" in any given topic just doesn't work.The debate works, at least best, when driven by the creationist side input. The creationists make their point(s) and the evolution side does their efforts to show why the creationist side is wrong. And the evolutionist side needs to do such in that "kinder and gentler" fashion, least they drive the creationists away. This is why I really don't like topics that start of with something like "Hey creationists, how do you explain this?" Then it is the evolutionist side driving the debate, and that just doesn't work well.That's how I see it. The evolutionist side needs to play softball rather than hardball, to maintain an ongoing discourse.Be kind to your creationist.Or something like that.Maybe I don't need to do the big "message by message" version.Adminnemooseus

The message in question (quoted by Bolder-dash).I agree, that message did not belong in that topic.Possible solutions:1) Percy finds a better home for the message.or2) The message gets posted as by Admin.I do think that Percy's message was a valid appraisal of the situation. It was a moderation observation and comment.I also think that anyone holding admin status at evcforum.net, should post all their moderation issue related messages via their admin ID's. I am pretty strict to the procedure, but I see most to all of the other admins sometimes posting moderation type messages via their non-admin ID.Adminnemooseus

My evalution is that Chuck's message was poor, but it was marginally a summary message. At least he did recognize that the topic was in the "summary messages only" phase.Bluescat's and DrJone's messages were even worse - They were snipey little (essentially) one line replies to previous messages. Bluescat's reply seems to be badly off-topic, and DrJone's reply was to a highly dubious first message from a new member.And concerning off-topic - When someone goes off-topic in a message or has some off-topic content in an otherwise on-topic message, it would be nice if others didn't "chase the off-topic".Adminnemooseus

From here: I looked back through the Coffee House index. There weren't very many closed topics, and most of them were either spam and/or Mabus.Getting back to September of 2010, there was the Obama Gun-control topic, started by Artemis Entreri. I closed that one at message 79, with the message subtitle "Terminal topic drift into something deserving its own topic". Is that the one AE is complaining about?By the way, individual members can set their page length - My setting is 30 messages per page.Adminnemooseus

1) This is the "Free For All" forum, but the big traditional exception to the "no moderation" rule is that things should still stay on topic. Much of what is being said is pretty remote to critiquing moderation actions or non-actions.2) My impression is that mixing it up with the perceived offender (aka "Feeding the troll") doesn't help the moderators deal with the situation. Instead of having one clear cut offender, we also have a bunch of others contributing to the mess.Or something like that.Adminnemooseusps - I probably would have slammed AE hard, when this was first reported by Theodoric, but I am still a little miffed about his sniveling after the Hooah affair.

Oh darn, I should have created that announcement anonymously. Now people aren't going to post to the POTM topics because I suggested it. Might as well shut the POTM forum down. Adminnemooseus

I think your assessment is largely in line with my interpretation of the topic intent, although I don't understand what you're trying to say with this part: Now per: I think that it is on-topic, but not something that should be a focus in the topic. I think better discussion can happen, other than a big "God did it, God didn't do it" thing.Perhaps I should have done more pre-promotion work with FEY before I promoted it. But then, there probably isn't such a thing as a message 1 start that the general membership couldn't screw up. Like any topic, the topic in question is going to have on/off-topic grey areas. But stuff in those grey areas really have a way of leading to stuff that is clearly in the off-topic area. AdminPD and I have been trying to keep the topic clearly in the on-topic zone.So far, this topic is rather an illustration of attempts at high intensity moderation. Not a bad thing, but such requires constant attention and a lot of work from the admins. Something that is not practical for us to sustain. What are we to do, have 3 admins each spending 8 hours a day riding that topic? That's like a real job that I should be getting real $ to do. I'm not even getting fake $.Adminnemooseus

I find the "God didn't write the Bible" argument to be a valid part of the topic, but I wish it not to be a major part of the topic. Perhaps I am wrong - I will look over the topic again.In all, I now wish I had pre-promotion exchanged a few messages with FEY, to refine the topic title and maybe the message 1 content. I think it would have been best to have gotten the "God wrote the Bible" out of the topic title and to have used a less extreme term that "lies". Maybe turn the topic title "Why would God write a book of lies and why would you worship such a being?" into something along the lines of "If the Bible contains bad information, what is its validity as a theological source?".Probably a non-messy topic is all but impossible, except perhaps as a "Great Debate".Adminnemooseus

Invoking the "He's an idiot, therefore I'm free to be an idiot" defense?Adminnemooseus

I'm not here going to comment much on the Dr Adequate/Faith affair, other than to say that Dr Adequate might have gotten away with the offending content if he had also included some significant on-topic substance in the message.I will focus on the Capt Stormfield matter. Just upthread, Theodoric made a comment for me to build on: Well, I think that truly even handed moderation MIGHT be possible, it certainly isn't practical. So, yes, there is a certain randomness to my moderation efforts. And while the bad behavior of certain individuals might well build up to influence my actions, this wasn't the case for Capt Stormfield (other than perhaps the other dubious messages of the same day).If anyone wishes to review the Capt Stormfield output, go to EvC Forum: Search , enter >Capt Stormfield< in the author field and then click search. This will give you a list of his most recent messages (as I type this the ones in question), even multiple messages in the same topic. He posted a bunch of pretty minor messages, including the two that got him suspended.In the context of all this, I must give special kudos to PaulK and AZPaul3. While others were posting crap and getting suspended, they followed up in the same topics, with quality messages to Faith and to Ed67.In summary, yes moderation efforts are spotty and random. Sometime, day after day, I see undesirable content messages and don't know what to do about them. Micro-management-moderation just isn't possible/practical. So, somewhere along the line I see something particularly bad, or in general get triggered to make an example of someone. I then hope that others notice and improve there behavior.Warnings are not effective. They just get lost in the clutter. Suspensions get noticed.A week may well have been overkill, but I always have the option of shortening it.Well, probably not a well organized message, but I don't have the time or energy to do better right now.Adminnemooseus