[Foundation-l] List moderation (WAS: Politico...)

[J Alexandr Ledbury-Romanov]

When I was brought on board as a list admin/moderator, I was told that it
was very much a case of a hands-off approach. This does not mean, however,
that anything goes. Usually a reminder, whether one or one or by a post to
the list, suffices. Moderation is very much the last step, and has only
been necessary in very rare circumstances.

Moderation for exceeding the thirty posts per person per calendar month has
not been required in my tenure, despite a couple of months of some very
vigorous discussion around the image filter. In that instance, I for one
felt that due to the importance and scope of the subject, a hard and fast
rule of thirty posts would have been detrimental to an otherwise generally
useful conversation.

Alex



2012/1/23 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>

> On 23 January 2012 14:53, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On the surface this is a very frivolous post. Funnily enough I have
> > a serious point I have been nursing along for a while. Any
> > list moderators listening? There are times when the mailing
> > list itself can be a source of infighting and internal politics. I submit
> > this is not one of them, and as such, I think modified rules to the
> > soft moderation rules should be adopted. Blatant trolling should
> > get a "one strike and you are on hard moderation" response,
> > and monthly moderation limits should be lifted entirely. We really
> > are on war footing. Not bean-bags at 50 yards footing. We need
> > to sort things out, and more talk is a good thing, not a bad thing.
>
> I'm splitting this out into a new thread, since it's off-topic for the
> lobbying thread.
>
> The problem with zero tollerance for blatant trolling (which is a
> policy everyone would agree to) is that there is often a lot of
> disagreement over what actually constitutes blatant trolling. If you
> aren't careful, you can end up with more heated debates about
> moderation than you ever had about the actual controversies that were
> being discussed.
>
> I agree that more talk is a good thing. The moderation limits serve
> two purposes - to keep the total volume down and also to avoid a small
> number of people dominating discussion. I don't think the former is
> necessarily desirable, but a case can be made for the latter. I
> suggest the moderation limits be set at 5% of the emails so far in
> that month (with some common sense applied in the first week or so -
> obviously the first person to send an email in a month would be at
> 100% until the next email!). In most months, that would be around 30
> emails, but it means that when there is simply a lot of discussion
> going on people can contribute to it without being unnecessarily
> silenced half-way through the month.
>
> I was looking at the statistics last night (I'm not too far off 30
> posts so far this month, so wanted to keep an eye on it) and apart
> from two people (who know who they are!) it's currently rare for
> anyone to go over 30 posts except in particularly busy months. I don't
> think anyone has actually been put on moderation in those busy months,
> so the policy might as well reflect actual practice.
>
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