On 05/09/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/5/07, Rich Holton richholton@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
Peter said this better than I can: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-August/078970.html