New Code of Conduct
- Thread starter n0e
- Start date
I could do that anyway. If I wanted to ban people, I'd just say nothing when they misbehaved. I'd stack up the infractions against folks and count the bans. That is not a hard thing to do. It's not a particularly worthwhile thing to do, but considering some of the concerns around here I take it as essentially general knowledge that this is a pattern that works...NXNW said:
Yes, technically speaking it might take a bit longer chronologically to get a few infractions against someone that will auto-ban them. It would probably be more difficult to go straight in one move to banning someone (because unfortunately the infraction system is set up, whether or not anyone likes it that way - mod or member - to be used as a means of keeping track of and communicating concerns to users.) But it would unquestionably be less bother to me to do so. Five seconds to type 'Don't be an asshat', wait a couple of days and type it again. No real explanation about why someone's being taken to be an asshat, and I could do that essentially at will.
There's nothing that rule's going to give me in terms of discretionary power that's not more bother to wield. Things that are functionally isomorphic to this at an extreme already exist - they're just not consistently applied.
Part of the reasoning for the rule, part of the reason that when I've talked to people about it they suggested it might be worth trying, was largely that concern. That one side - and both sides seem to believe that to be the other side - got to keep snipping at people and they had to walk on eggshells because of imbalanced modding considerations of what was or wasn't insulting. (Honestly that's going to come down to individual differences in the mods that see the things, there is such a thing as shopping around for an opinion that's going to support getting someone banned, - which I don't exactly approve of.)
My hope is that the rule clarifies things that already exist and consequently results in more consistent behaviour and moderation.
Now maybe you're right and it doesn't work out. Manners exist because of the interaction of a person with their environment - including the other people in it. That means you're rarely going to know before you change an environmental variable and see the effect on the system quite what the effect is.
If it doesn't work out, we can always fold it back into the more general ruleset - but if it does we may find out that people aren't actually that ill-mannered and just behave as they do because their environment has been... strategically unstable.
Why do some people who break the rules only get a "Mod Voice" verbal warning, but others don't? More specifically, with regards to myself, (as has been the case for almost a year now), a moderator always seems to swing the warning-hammer first and ask questions later. And yet I see other people posting things FAR worse than me, and they only get a telling off in the thread with no consequences to their health meter.
I have to ask; why the inconsistent approach?
I have to ask; why the inconsistent approach?
That's exactly what I've experienced first-hand for the best part of a year. Thankfully, the appeals system helps curtail this type of thing in most cases.Nemmerle said:
Although, I still feel there should be more penalties and consequences for the moderator who engages in the sort of behavior you've described here. Because as far as I can tell at my end, nothing happens when a moderator starts unfairly targeting a specific user in the manner you've described.
Worse still, users aren't even allowed to know which moderator is doing it.
Well, 'trust' is something that gets earned over time, not something that gets granted automatically to the 'new' (which I assume is the point you're facetiously making).NXNW said:
But you do bring up an interesting point that I will springboard off of.
I assume it hasn't escaped the notice of people that the new moderator appointments have all been from off-site, rather than from the existing userbase.
On the face of it, it may seem like people who are unfamiliar with this community and website would make poor choices for moderators, but it's worth noting that sourcing moderators from the existing user pool presents some problems in itself. A long-time Escapist user with tens of thousands of posts is going to already have preconceived biases, they're already going to have an extensive friends list, and they're going to have (even subconsciously) users whom they like and dislike.
So, sometimes a fresh and unbiased perspective from off-site is exactly what a forum needs.
Each situation is different.IceForce said:
Some people may not realise what they're doing is wrong, have been provoked into a situation, or can be talked down from a bad position. I'm a firm believer that telling people where they're going wrong in a thread, or sending them a Private Message, both options I've been choosing to exercise when I can, both puts a face on the moderator and is more likely to get a positive outcome then just slapping a warning on someone.
I'd prefer to give people a chance to reform rather than banning someone for something relatively minor in the first instance, but if someone keeps performing the same 'mistakes', it will happen.
That being said if you're just blatantly going in for an inflammatory attack, trying to rile people up with a post or derailing a thread, etc, completely out of nowhere, then I and I am sure any other moderators will have no problem issuing an infraction right away, because one would like to think that people should know better.
TL;DR, I want to try and help people improve and avoid moderator intervention where possible, but if you throw a blatantly rule-breaking post in from out of nowhere, don't be shocked if you get a warning or worse.
So sorry, I thought someone had answered these!MarsAtlas said:
I'll do my best for you now;
Photographic depictions of full frontal nudity, or genitals, even in the context of relevant topics, are pushing it really, especially if we want to maintain a PG-13 standard. Documentaries and educational materials aimed at this level would normally choose to use drawings or diagrams over photographs, so that would be ok.MarsAtlas said:
Photographs or shocking images of genital mutilation or sexual abuse would be a massive no-no, even in that context.
I will double check with n0e, but I see no problem at all in discussing thing such as;MarsAtlas said:
- Celebrities / figures who have been accused or found guilty of peadophillia
- A debate about the biological / sociological aspects of it.
etc. etc.
What will obviously get someone banned quite quickly, however, is someone advocating for child abuse or sharing ways to obtain child pornography, etc. - but I hope to God nobody here would be daft enough to do such a thing.
I would say the same thing;MarsAtlas said:
- Discussion about the rights and wrongs of legalising marijuana - Fine.
- Posting 'I'm so fucking stoned right now, here's my dealer's phone number' - Not so fine.
I would hope people would be sensible enough to be able to debate a topic like this without admitting to breaking any laws or telling others how to break those laws, basically.
But debating these things I would say is fine. We can't ignore some of the more unfortunate aspects of society and ban them from debate altogether, but if things get out of hand then that may change again, but hopefully people are able to understand the difference between a healthy debate and crossing the line.
One of the big limitations of an infraction system is that it runs into death by a thousand cuts. Something doesn't have to be serious enough to ban someone over, it just has to be serious enough to impose an infraction over and the system automatically imposes a ban once someone's reached a certain point. Indeed, once the user has reached a certain point it doesn't look like you can impose an infraction without banning someone - it may be possible, I haven't drilled down into the tools a great distance - that's the least that the system will let you do.NXNW said:
You wouldn't be justifying banning someone, you'd be justifying that one thing they'd said was bad enough to attract an infraction.
Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of it. If you're talking to someone about their behaviour, they don't need something explained eight times in a relatively short space of time before it becomes apparent they're not playing ball. If you're not talking to them, then it's all too easy for them to attract the critical value of infractions over a year or two, which individually aren't worth more than a talking to and a reminder not to do the thing.
Moderating only works, in the sense of improving behaviours rather than in the sense of banning people, if you can get some sort of accountability and communication going on between users and staff. If that's not possible, you may as well forget it and go home.
Consistently? Of course not. There are a whole bunch of problems with consistency, and there's an effectively unsolvable one regardless of the context of the rule in that there'll be things that get seen and things that don't get seen. Equally? Hmmm, I shall be as interested to see how that works out as you are - which brings us to the broader issue of why people get treated differently:IceForce said:
Prefacing this with the statement that I'm not going to comment on specific cases that I'm not involved with beyond general comments:IceForce said:
As far as I'm aware, no-one other than me gets much use out of Mod Voice at the moment. It's a workaround I use because the forum tools don't suit the style of moderation I find effective - it still makes interactions a matter of record that can be linked to other records for auditing purposes, but it avoids immediately poking someone with something sharp.
More generally, consistency is a matter of tooling and procedures that allow and encourage certain styles of communication and the appropriate auditing of those interactions. If the system is set up whereby to communicate with a user, and have a record generated of that, you impose an infraction - and that's what things are set up for right in the user interface... Is it really that surprising if someone does so? It will seem the natural way to do things. There's certainly the implication there that it's the desired way to do things - after all, that's what the system was built around. It's an embodied procedure, more or less.
Heck, even for myself, the first interaction I had with a user on here I sent them a PM but I also used the infraction system because there didn't seem to be another way of generating a record of the interaction. Hence the mod voice thing, since I definitely got the impression from that interaction that it came off as a lot more aggressive than I'd desired my actions to be at the time.
Couple that with the fact that mods are people, and people all see things differently, and what would otherwise be minor differences in approach that would easily be talked out between mods in the background can instead snowball into something that from outside the loop are hard to understand or predict.
[hr]
The high-level take-away from all this is something to the effect of:
Look guys, we're already working in an imperfect system with imperfect tools that encourage relatively high local variances in the responses to your actions dependant upon the perspective of the person interacting with you at the time. That variance triggers, presumably undesirable to you, interactions when it goes over some fuzzily defined critical value. If you're interested in people being treated equally, then it makes sense - assuming that you view things in the manner given above - to lower that critical value and inform people of its location.
That won't be enforced in every instance, because people aren't gods. Though the balance of interactions with respect to ideological camps should work out more equally when averaged out, assuming our assumptions in this regard are correct.
Will it work out that way? Well, if we don't try we'll never know. If it doesn't, then we'll need to work out what was flawed in our assumptions.
Agreed. Which is why I have to question the wisdom of having the moderation system fully anonymous the way it currently is.Nemmerle said:
Because it means that mods can effectively hide behind a shield of anonymity, and as your said, not be held accountable for their actions.
And we've already seen an example of that happen. As I'm sure you're aware, there was a case of a moderator (now ex-moderator) who abused his powers. And the reason why he was able to get away with it for so long was specifically because he was able to hide behind a shield of anonymity.
I'm active on a couple of other forum sites too, and if the moderators there were able to anonymously issue infractions and bans to people without ever revealing themselves or showing their faces, the users there would fucking riot.
Anyway, I'm glad there's now someone here with some level of power, who agrees that the current system is inherently flawed and that the status quo needs changing to some degree.
As Nem says, I don't think anyone is going to disagree that the current tools in place need revamping, but the problem is re-coding them / technical, and so it will take time to get a more effective system in place.SolidState said:
In the mean time we will make do and mend and try our best with what we've got.
Fair enough.FileTrekker said:
I don't want to come across as too critical, but I do feel that the current system is too open to abuse, (and certain previous events have confirmed this to be the case).
I'm glad to see these things are now being given serious thought. I've argued for a long time that the gamification of the disciplinary system has somewhat predictably led to it being extensively gamed, in what I like to call "Forum Team Death Match" because it's most effectively played in teams. Possibly to the point it's become the dominant paradigm for some subsections of these forums. And once the game becomes the norm, it gets really hard for people to keep out of it, no matter what their original intentions in getting involved in whatever controversies supposedly occasioned it. Discussion in good faith itself becomes something out of place, hopelessly naive or suspect.Nemmerle said:
Having said that, I sure know how to pick at the flaws of a given system, but it's not like I have some definitive fix in mind. The system in place does have its own virtues that I can certainly appreciate, having seen moderation teams at other, inferior sites who just unceremoniously disappear comments that don't appeal to them for some reason down the memory hole, with no accountability or even notice. Having a procedure in place is a major step up from such arbitrariness, but may be subverted to more vicious ends by manipulation.
Oh well, I have been trying to come up with a more substantive contribution to this line of deliberation here for a while now, but it doesn't seem to be happening at the moment. So with that, I guess I'm done for the moment. Like I said, it's just nice to see people actually wrestling with the beast that is the theory and praxis of moderation.
For nearly 5 years users have been pointing out that the infraction system was broken, that the system was slanted against users who post more, that it was absurd for someone to be banned because of something like a low content post, that it was unrealistic to ask that people not slip up more than once every six months; and for nearly 5 years the response has been "If you can't figure out how to behave after being given 8 chances, we don't really want you as part of our community."(an actual quote from a previous editor in chief.)Nemmerle said:
It's sooooo good to be finally vindicated by the staff and mods! It's just too bad that, at this point, most users have either been banned or simply left the site.