Should threads discussing moderation be allowed

To Gofre, let's be honest, you all get an ego trip when you wield your power. You may not have signed up simply for the purpose of ego tripping, in fact I'm sure most of you volunteered with the idea you can make TSR a better place. However, when you abuse your power as one of you did on this thread, that is where the problem exists, and it only serves to create division between user and moderator.

If you have done no wrong, it shouldn't upset you what a stranger on the internet thinks.

I have never said you are lying or being offensive. In fact, I don't think you ever responded to one of my AAM posts. At least I don't remember. In fact the one mod I dislike the most has not posted in this thread. Edit: well that ain't true any more.

All I am saying is that there is no transparency (e.g. it tells us who responded to a reported post, but not who warned us) in the way you moderate, that from my personal experience you rather argue some obscure case (the one that pisses me off the most is "it is up to our interpretation") than admit you could have been wrong. I have reported several posts that were so similar to what I was warned for and been told that it is not against the rules or simply in this case allowed. Or been told the reason why a thread was closed was because it was not constructive. There was no swearing, the topic wasn't against the rules, a few of us were having a debate, I found that very pretentious to close it just because one mod deemed it wasn't "constructive". And that you judge a priori, as I said above, I have been told so many times "looking at your warnings history". As far as I can remember we go by innocent until proven guilty.

At the truest level, it is simply opinion vs opinion. The user has the opinion that what they're saying is fine and correlates to their level of freedom, whereas the moderator has the opinion that the user's post is "Against the rules". What is against the rules is the following (just from the report post button) : Adult Content, Advertising, Misuse of Anonymous, Offensiveness, Spamming, Swear Filter, Thread Move, and Trolling.

...any attempt to change the system from the position of user is a waste of time

After cleaning up the last couple of posts, can we please keep it constructive and not descend into spammy arguments? Thank you.

I think Tactical Nuclear Penguin has summed up many of my own thoughts to your points. Of course, every case is going to be different but we have substantive guidelines for the situations that usually arise and in cases that we are unsure, we ask for guidance from the other moderators or Section Leaders.



If we accept the fact that signing up to TSR and agreeing to its terms and conditions binds you to the rules then I'd say a lot of rule breaks are very clear cut and mistakes in these cases tend to be rare. With certain offences, it's mostly always a case of you did break this rule or you didn't break this rule. For example, there's no real scope to argue that the picture you posted of a man's genitals did not break the rule on adult content, which includes the display of genitals of either sex. The same goes for any avoidance of the swear filter. A word is either filtered, and therefore bypassed, or it isn't. In other cases, we can't really be specific and therefore have to set out the general parameters of what is acceptable and what isn't. I think that's what you may have issue with.





I think that's very unfair. We have a whole forum (this forum) dedicated to you posting your views on rules and initiating debate. I'd also point to the very recent survey (linked here) which invited feedback on what users thought of warnings and rules and then started a process to improve the system based on that feedback.

True codification would be very difficult and extremely cumbersome for both moderators and users but we are working on it. There are detailed rules linked to in the footer of every page, in the FAQ/terms and conditions and forum specific rules in the corresponding firms. The D&CA Guidelines are really good. There are a lot of specific codified rules there. You may argue that 'Posts must contribute to the discussion' is very subjective but that's there because we can't codify every specific situation, so we need a general guideline to cover it and if we are unsure of a specific circumstance, we consult with other moderators.

Behind the scenes, we are working on both making the rules clearer, accessible and easier to grasp and making the warning system fairer for members whilst still having a distributive effect.

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actually... i do care.

i only have one question...

Should threads discussing moderation be allowed?

They are allowed. /end of discussion