On 9/5/07, Rich Holton <richholton(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
* I prefer the moderators to use moderation
sparingly. I'd rather that I
make the decision of who I should ignore. Of course, pure spam should be
moderated. And abusive posts as well. But I would rather not see someone
moderated for simply being disliked and persistent.
It's a fine line. IMHO we're there to keep discussion moving along. If
every post from a certain user is causing a flurry of indignant "how
dare you use language like that", "oh sorry that's just the way I
talk, no offence caused", then they can really clog up a list and
reduce the signal to noise ratio.
* Somewhere in the thread it was mentioned that
most non-automatic
moderations are announced on list. I know I seen such announcements in
Mostly that happens to avoid confusion as to why a loud voice suddenly
disappeared in the middle of a discussion. People get moderated for
other reasons without such fanfare.
* Which raises a third point, or question really:
Are there times when a
contributor is put on moderation and intentionally not announced to the
list? That would be troubling...the exception being, I suppose, if
No, that would be weird. More likely, someone is moderated for blatant
list abuse (eg, spamming) and no explicit announcement is made, but if
anyone asks, we confirm it.
someone were to request that it not be announced
to the list in their
case, but that seems an unlikely scenario, since as I understand it,
there is no "negotiating" over moderation.
Dunno about "negotiating" but if someone really wanted to be
unmoderated, they're certainly entitled to ask politely. But it's
better to just change the style of one's posts. Remember, being
moderated doesn't mean being banned, it just means having every post
approved before it goes through to the list. So for example if someone
is being too abusive, I might moderate them, then reject future posts
one at a time with an explanation of what was wrong with it, and how
they should reword it. Or sometimes I'll end up just rejecting some
messages and letting others through. Some of the people in this
category have ended up sending 20+ messages a day, half of which were
sarcastic one liners like "Yeah, right." Really positive, helpful
stuff.
Steve