New moderators

We’ve now appointed three new moderators for the forum: Draconis, DavidG (aka frotz), and cvaneseltine. Please make them feel welcome in their new roles!

Hi!

Here’s to hopefully pleasant and rewarding moderating for all you folks.

I for one welcome our new overlords.

Hi.

Will the moderators keep deleting posts that they personally don’t like, so the readers of the forum can’t see them and think they never happened?

Is yes, please say so upfront, so that we can leave.

I’m surprised to see that coming from you. The moderators have never done that. We don’t even delete the posts of our most recurrent trolls.

Of course I don’t have a way to know who actually deletes posts (moderators or Merk). At least one post was deleted (most probably because of the #GamerGate thing.)

I hope that no more posts will be deleted (spam bots excluded, obviously.) Even locking threads is pushing it, imo.

I think that recently a post was deleted that basically tried to reopen a thread that had been locked; is that what you’re referring to, RealNC?

No, I think he’s alluding to a post in the “Places Where You Can Find Comp Reviews” thread: the post stated that a user would be posting reviews on Twitter on a particular hash tag. As far as I can make out, it did not of itself contain anything offensive. The post seemed to appear and disappear, and the claim on Twitter is that it was deleted. Whether that’s true or not I couldn’t say.

You can probably find the relevant bit on Twitter with a bit of Google-fu. Posting the link here would, I presume, get this post deleted.

I will add another vote: posts that are not egregious violations of the CoC should not be deleted. I have confidence the mods will resolve this issue appropriately.

Also, congrats to the new mods and welcome!

Thanks to the new moderators for taking up the challenge, and thanks to Emily and Dannii for remaining (you two are, right?). NB: Emily = Emerald.

I don’t know how many such deletions we’ve had lately, but if you’re thinking of the one I’m thinking of, it was a request for clarification on the new moderation policy that led to the thread being locked, and a straightforward response was given around the same time as the thread was deleted. (It would’ve been nice to have that response visible in public, though.)

The post was a link to the GamerGate thread about IFcomp, which was posted in a reviews thread but contains one quasi-review and a lot of screencapping of people’s forum posts to complain about them.

It’s not a forum with threads - it was reference to an IF-related hashtag on Twitter, which has some crosstalk with That Other Tag but is mostly people talking about (1) this weekend’s events on this forum or (2) writing interactive fiction.

I can see the logic behind removing it from the review links thread, since it didn’t link to any specific reviews and the reviews it promised had not been posted yet anyway. But I hope that if reviews are posted there and storified – converted to static pages highlighting specific tweets – then linking to those will be kosher.

Okay, some clarification on this.

To my knowledge, that’s one of the only – if not the only – non-spam post to ever have been deleted. I’m probably wrong there, but prior instances aren’t coming to mind and might not have involved me anyway. In the future, I think the plan is to move them to a hidden board so that if for whatever reason it’s determined to be a mistake, the post can be reinstated. I would be really surprised if that’s a common thing going forward. I won’t be involved in those decisions though.

The post announcing IFComp chatter on a different GG-instigated Twitter hashtag was deleted by me, after some private complaints about it. The content of the post wasn’t a problem. It was the possible ramifications of it. I, as a user, didn’t fully agree with that (at the time), for a couple of reasons. One, I felt that it wasn’t meant to incite panic or abuse in any way, and was in fact a legitimate effort to get into the spirit of IFComp, other agendas aside. Two, it seemed less harmful to send people there, than to bring GG here, the latter of which removing the post wouldn’t accomplish (if, in fact, it hasn’t accomplished the opposite).

This was done before the Code of Conduct was finalized and posted, and before I realized that there’s kind of an agenda at work regardless. But the decision was made due to some compelling reasoning in the complaints themselves. I had already misinterpreted complaints about a prior GG discussion, thinking that those who were alarmed by it meant for the conversation to be stopped, no further discussion needed, when in fact, they may have either wanted it deleted entirely, or for me to make a public statement condemning the people bringing GG-supportive talk over here to begin with. This comes from later comments that certain members were scared of the negative attention this brings the forum, and that it wasn’t right to just let the pro-GG comments stand. These are things said elsewhere – Twitter, PM, etc – but this is what I was working from.

So in the midst of a rough and uncertain weekend, I made the decision to delete the review announcement in question. Whether that was wrong or right, that’s on me and nobody else.

Here is my personal opinion.

The intfiction GG’ers have good intentions, but that’s never going to come through given the GG association. No matter what its proponents think may be positive about the movement, it is forever poisoned not just by its original inception, but in the absolutely horrific actions that have been carried out in its name. It doesn’t matter that many GG followers/fans think of it as something else; something noble; something that has “just a few bad apples.” It has gone so far beyond a perception problem, that guilt by association is going to be a given. So regardless of the good intentions (and I hope I’m not making the wrong assumption) of its intfiction members, that association holds the possibility of attention from a different set of GG followers, and it’s that possibility that makes many – myself included – incredibly uncomfortable about having any kind of GG-visible attention given the IFComp or this forum. “Uncomfortable” isn’t even strong enough a word. More like dread.

So even though I had mixed feelings when the decision was made, in light of further reflection and in light of the discussion the deletion itself is getting here and elsewhere, I think it was the right decision. Ultimately, there was more to think about and a bigger picture to see than just the deletion of one post. And even though I don’t think it’s going to be common, there is a newly minted code of conduct in place that explains that this very thing is among the options that moderators have when dealing with complaints. For all my fears/concerns about this – explained elsewhere – this is one thing that really isn’t a gray area to me anymore. There are real and proven consequences to becoming a target of GG, even if it’s not the entire GG. At this point, the smartest thing for many is to avoid that attention altogether. Even saying this makes me worry that the opposite will happen, given that many related posts are being screen-grabbed and shared with GG.

(Edit)

And just to mention it again, I’m no longer making these decisions. I do have access to the Admin account, but will be using it infrequently, and not to follow up on any complaints or take any moderator-type actions. This is Merk the ordinary user speaking.

I’m fine with mods deleting threads or posts. Thanks for keeping the place tidy, Merk.

And even though that post was deleted it’s wrong to say it was deleted because of personal dislike! It was deleted after a lot of discussion among the mods, after several other community members raised concerns.

Hey mods, welcome to the big time. You’ll need grit and determination and a lot of luck, but I think you three will do just fine.

Thanks. I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting into when I volunteered. I’ll do my best.

“It looks as if the main conversation here has closed, so I’ve locked this thread.”

Is this a new policy? Are you going to examine all past threads in this forum, and lock all the ones where the conversation has closed?