General discussion of moderation procedures: The Sequel

There can be SOME discussion of moderation procedures, but the various admins (and perhaps especially Admin) no longer wish to have drawn out discussions of such. You need to adopt some flexibility to fit in at , and be willing to accept the desires of the various admins.I've made a substantially extra effort to have you permitted to participate here, including a fair number of e-mail conversations. Now it's up to your efforts, to fit into this forum.Adminnemooseus

Moderation efforts at are doomed to being flawed - All the various admins can do is to try to get the various members to strive to cooperate in following the forum rules/guidelines. We can't now fix what has happened in the past - At this point, what we need to do is to put the past failings of both the admins and the various members behind us.I think the bottom line is that Contracycle needs to "seize the moral high ground", to himself truly strive to follow the guidelines. Don't fall to the level of the failings of others. If you (Contracycle) are "a good boy", and your debate adversaries are not "good boys", then they and not you will be the ones getting the suspensions.Adminnemooseus

The various admins, including myself, do the best we can. Mistakes are made - Believe me, there are debates in the "Private Administration Forum", about how to handle situations. We can also debate such in this topic, but after a little discussion the sensible thing for all is to just "put it behind us and move on". I don't think any of the admins "claim infallibility". Many situations are such that there is no easy, clear cut proper admin action. But some action needs to be taken, even if it is flawed. If an action I took was blatantly wrong, I will and have apologized. But many admin actions fall into "gray area" situations. Again, what we need to do is "put it behind us and move on". My memory of the specifics is weak, but my guess is that you are referring to Schrafinator. Personally, I think the use of the term "agitator" may or may not be "abusive", depending on the context. Yes, there were several, including Schrafinator, Arachnophilia, and Contracycle, that were part of the turmoil. BUT (IMO) the focus (and main contributer?) of the turmoil was Contracycle, and the admins needed to deal with the focus. Again, some action needed to be taken, even if it is flawed.As I suggested in one or more e-mails, why not a "Great Debate" between you and Schrafinator or Arachnophilia or whomever? In such context the admins have a chance of doing better moderation. I have long lost track of which topic you are referring to. I will gladly admit, that I tend to be the one admin who is most subject to closing troubled topics. I feel that that is the only effective action that can be taken - The topic would otherwise probably never come back to being a quality discussion. Again, how about a "Great Debate" on that closed topics subject? All I can say is, the various admins try to do the best then can. I repeat, " Moderation efforts at are doomed to being flawed". I also repeat, "We can also debate such in this topic, but after a little discussion the sensible thing for all is to just "put it behind us and move on"".There you have it - My flawed response. It's the best you are going to get out of me. The bottom line is, either accept that moderation efforts will be imperfect, or just go away.Adminnemooseus

My end of this discussion is done.Adminnemooseus {Edited to change ID}This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 06-09-2005 11:29 AM

While I'm done replying to Contracycle, I will make at least one reply to you.First comments re: your message 47: While I did indeed use the quoted phrase, I now think that it may be stating the situation a bit too strongly. I will now say, that there may well be moderation mistakes made. The prime example that comes to my mind was that overly harsh suspension I laid on Darwins Terrier. At the time I did it, I felt a very strong action was called for. But, in hindsight, the suspension was overly long.But I think the real monitor failing of sorts, is not so much blatent mistakes, but rather uneven moderation (including uneven topic coverage). But as I said a ways back, the nature of the system is that we are doomed to such flawed moderation.There are typically about 275 messages posted every day. Amongst these messages are an abundance of forum rules violations, small and not so small. As per Admins example of speeders on the highway - Some forum rule violators are caught and some are not. Many messages may never even get an admin reading. Some violations may be seen but not commented on. Others may get warnings, while some may get suspensions. And of course, there is the famous admin bias to "try to cut the underdog creationist side a little extra slack". The admins strive to be evenhanded, but are doomed to be (well?) less than a total sucess at it.If we had a moderator comment message for every forum violation that happened, we would end up with way too many of the total messages being of a moderation nature. That is not good. Besides, it would require way too much work for the admin staff.Some members manage to make themselves "high profile". Once that happens, they do probably have a higher susceptibility to getting suspended. Such is life. Don't like it? Then don't make yourself "high profile".Or something like that. The bottom line is, if you think Adminnemooseus is capable of doing anything close to perfect moderation, you are living a serious delusion.Now, on to message 48. I push for a "Great Debate", because it would have a greater possibility for a quality moderator contol. Too many participents and too many messages per period of time, and a topic subject to going bad will go bad, and probably pretty damn fast. We can have topic moderator(s) that do not have admin status. If a topic is going to call for special intense moderator monitoring, I still think it should be a "one-on-one" "Great Debate" And even then, limit the number of messages to only one per day. The recent Buz vs. Jar "GD" had too much happening too fast.There you have it. Yet another flawed message from...Adminnemooseus

Actually, Faith was suspended by AdminPhat. See here. AdminPhat's anouncement (under "Phatboy" ID) was posted within an hour of the time of the Faith message.BUT... I've just now checked Faith's posting permission status, and no actual suspension was done. I fixed that - Faith is indeed now suspended.It seems we might be having some technical problems in doing suspensions. There have been 3 recent examples of suspension anouncements where no suspension actually happened, until a somewhat later "fix" was done. These suspensions were done by 3 different admins, including one by Adminnemooseus. Perhaps we are forgetting to click the "submit" button.So admins, when you do a suspension, go back and check to see if the suspension set up actually happened.AdminnemooseusEdit: Changed subtitleThis message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 06-11-2005 04:07 PM

and Warning: The following may well contain "evo side bias".Faith seems to represent an extreme creationist perspective - She "knows what the Bible says, and has absolute confidence that it is absolutely correct". As such, her perspective is part of the evolution/creationism debate, and needs to be seen.Evo side members need to be able to resist "responding in kind". They are "the rational side" of the debate, while the creationist pespective is inherently irrational. In general, this is a big part of why the evo side is granted less leniency in regards to guideline violations.The (famous?) bottom line is: If Faith so offends you that you can't post a "decent" response, then don't post any response.This is not to say that Faith has total immunity to censure.Adminnemooseus

Token Adminnemooseus appearance.From a secret location,
Adminnemooseus

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