Steve Bennett wrote:
On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
You can add to the advantages that it can also produce a "why did you moderate *him*?" response from list members. I got an e-mail from the other user you placed on moderation, and I was puzzled as to why he had been placed on moderation.
Yeah, for sure. Being list moderator is pretty much a no-win game: the best you can hope for is that no one notices your presence. Once someone starts posting in such a way that a few people get annoyed, or they start mildly breaking the list rules, then any action will be divisive. Either leave them unmoderated (continuing to annoy people), moderate them (cop flak for being heavy-handed), etc.
List rules should be very few, and they should depend on common sense. And if it's only a question of "mildly" breaking rules doubts should be resolved in favour of the person making the post. There will always be people complaining that the traffic is too high; there was such a complaint recently on the Wikimania-l, and the traffic there is much smaller than what we have here.
When the complaint is about being off-topic, then what exactly is on-topic? Without a clear definition any moderation for this is inevitably subjective, unless the individual insists on continuing the topic ad nauseam. For Jay's post about "music" I had no idea what he was talking about, and maybe few people did; I was content to delete and go on with the next e-mail. Nobody else has addressed the contents of that posting, so it seems that but for the resulting discussion about moderation the thread would have quite rightly died an early death as a one-post thread.
You can also add "increases transparency".
Good point.
And transparency is what protects us from arbitrary and capricious actions.
Ec