(Announcement) Please welcome our new PF team member!

My role will always be primarily administrative, and most of the moderation functions you'll see me perform will be basic housekeeping - moving threads into more appropriate forums, merging duplicate threads, deleting inappropriate threads, that sort of thing. Occasionally posting in-thread reminders about posting guidelines, if a thread looks as though it's starting to go into the ditch and needs to get nudged back up onto the road. For the most part, I prefer to avoid getting involved with actual, hands-on moderation of posts unless there are no moderators online and something needs to be addressed quickly. We've got a lot of discussion going on in the Staff forum about some upcoming changes, and that's been keeping me too busy to become very involved out in the general forums anyway.

 

Your suggestion has been noted.

I feel that everyone can help out with whatever needs doing, even if they have a "higher level" title.

We've had excellent feedback from members and Staff about the new direction we are heading in. We expect a few bumps in the road, but we have solid plans to improve the member experience this year.

More will be announced in the few weeks or so.

 

That's pretty much the way i see it, too. I'd rather not be doing any moderating at all, but when there's something that needs to be done right away, I can't just walk past it and leave it for someone else. As an admin-level staffer, everything that happens here is my responsibility. Right now, this is just the way it has to be.

Yep. I'm excited. This is going to come together very well.

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Why thank you, Albert! I genuinely appreciate that!

 

Yes, but... as you say, you're no longer a moderator.

There are a number of different models for moderating a message board. For the purposes of this discussion, why don't we just say that (among other things) you and I have different concepts of the ideal model. The board is going to be moving toward a more active, or proactive, moderating philosophy, rather than reactive.

Discussion threads are not a theoretical event, a lifeless concept - they are dynamic, living processes that are happening in real time, changing with every post. When something begins to go wrong with a thread, that's something very real that's happening right now, and it usually changes the direction of the thread toward something less productive than it might otherwise have been - sometimes nothing but an outright flamewar. If a moderator doesn't find it until 6, or 8, or 10 hours later, the damage is already done, and all we can do is clean up the pieces. An opportunity for a good discussion has been ruined, the sense of community has been eroded, people are bitter and angry (and carry that bitterness forward into other discussions), good posters have been issued infractions for losing control and letting themselves get dragged down into the mud, and every member reading that thread has lost a little more faith in our message board.

In that scenario, nobody wins. We've already lost, every one of us - members, moderators, administrators, and the owner of the board. Every thread we wind up having to delete or "clean up" because we didn't get to it in time represents an instance where we have failed our membership, and we owe them better than that. We have expectations of our members, and when they sign up, we make them commit to those expectations by agreeing to the terms of service. But when they do that, we're making a commitment to them, too - and they have a right to have expectations of us. I'm responsible for seeing that those expectations are met, and that's something I take very seriously.

The moderation model of this board is moving toward a more positive, pro-active model, with a greater emphasis on catching problems early, when they first start happening. When a thread starts to go off the road, we're going to make a greater effort to get in early and nudge it back onto the asphalt before it has a chance to plunge all the way into the ditch. Think of it along the lines of the community policing model - the emphasis is not on catching people who've done something wrong, but on early, low-level intervention to steer people away from doing something wrong in the first place.

Toward that end, we're revamping the staffing structure here - adding a third level of staff, bringing in new staff members, and retasking the whole team with an eye toward that proactive, early-intervention model. It's going to take a while to get all the pieces in place and get it fully up to speed, but we'll be making a more detailed announcement of all this in a couple of weeks when we're ready to begin.

I understand that your concept of how a message board ought to be moderated is different than this, but we're confident that the direction we're going is the better one for everybody. We appreciate your concern for the best interests of the board, even if we don't always agree on what those best interests are. You are, of course, welcome to continue bringing those disagreements to my attention through PM.

 

I'm baking cookies for everyone, but don't post it on the internet or anything like that. It's supposed to be a surprise.

Nah, just kidding. I don't have any cookie recipes. Just check out the post above yours. We're working on making some changes to the moderation system that will make it more efficient, more low-key, and easier for members to understand and relate to.

 

There'll be some work on the front end, but the payoff will be that once we get it going, the workload will be better distributed and more easily manageable. The mods we have are too few, and spread to thin, to consistently keep up with everything that needs to be done. They have a lot of different tasks, much of it behind the scenes, and we're bringing in more staff and redistributing the load among different levels of staff so that all of them can be out in front of things instead of playing catch-up.

How it turns out? Hard to say, but it will definitely be better. How much better, we can't know yet, but once we get the people in place things should go much more smoothly. There'll be more constant staff presence in the forums, posting in the threads, and ideally much more of the moderation will be more along the lines of friendly reminders (both in the thread, and through PM) in real time, before threads get too far out of hand, rather than just issuing infractions and deleting posts a few hours later after the thread has been trashed. We want to focus more on elevating the tone (and the quality) of the discussions by establishing a community standard for more civil, constructive debate, rather than just smiting people after they cross the line.

It'll work, but it will take a while to get it fully rolled out. I mean, let's face it, this is a politics board - it's never going to be the online equivalent of a Quaker meeting. When people are talking about politics, there are going to be heated, passionate arguments., and it's going to get testy sometimes. But it can be better. I can't make any promises about how much better, but I can promise that the pointless trolling and flamebaiting is going to go way down, because we'll have more resources in place to deal with it as it's happening. And as it does, the tone of the discussions will go up.

 

I think that sums it up very nicely. The board has two primary goals, which are often contradictory - to be a forum for people where people can freely express their opinions, and a forum where people discuss their opinions in a civil, courteous manner. Obviously those two goals are sometimes going to conflict. One person's idea of an honest opinion is always going to be at least one other person's idea of a blatant insult. We're always going to be walking right on what we hope is the proper balance point between the two ideals, but it's difficult to have a productive discussion unless it is first a reasonably civil discussion.