So "suck a dick" is ok but "Kick your ass" is not? Am I the only person that sees that as a contradiction?
The whole approach the mods/admins take completely leads to the problem.
Somebody has a complaint - you look at the complaint and decide that it's not a valid complaint and so you dismiss it. This kind of a policy - in my experience being a mod on 4 different forums for over 3 years - is that it always leads to people feeling alienated and resentful towards the mod/admin staff. It doesn't matter if one person made the decision or 20 people made the decision. Instead of being confrontational, mods and admins job should be to work with the people involved no matter how ridiculous and childish they may be. It should be like a customer service job. If you work in customer service and somebody comes in with a complaint, no matter how ridiculous, you try your best to address their complaint until they're satisfied. In some cases you may not actually be able to do what they want but you don't just dismiss them - you try to have a dialogue and work on it until you can hopefully make them happy. If you don't do this you usually get fired.
Something I said again and again when I was a mod/admin was that having those positions is a job to serve the forum - not a right or a power position. The best run internet forum I've ever seen (which is a video game forum and is also officially in the top 1000 largest internet forums) gives as much weight to the opinions of a general user on if content is appropriate or not as they give to a mod or an admin.
Also as far as I saw there was no discussion of the guidelines. You just posted them and said these are the rules of the forum. Surely the people of the forum should have been actively involved in writing the rules for the forum they post on. Here are my opinions of your rules:
First there used to be a policy on this forum that worked really well where when a mod sees something that they think is uncool - they post or pm the person telling them their own personal opinion - nothing to do with the rules at all. 90% of the time just doing this resolves the issue without having to use any power at all. Why has this policy been removed?
-If a mod, or any forum user sees someone who doesn't have their real first and last name in their signature, send them a PM letting them know that we ask that users have their real name in their signature
**If they respond saying they don't want anyone to find them by using a search engine such as Google, you can tell them that it won't happen. The only time someone will see their signature is if the person looking is signed in to Modified**
None of you guys have seen my signature even though at least one mod has commented on it? Are these the rules or they just what you'll follow when you feel like it? If you're going to have rules you should follow them. Maybe it's time to re-evaluate the signature policies. I know that every other forum I post on or have ever posted on (including modified for a time) had a rule about the size of images in signatures and it's very easy to enforce despite what Emily says. Usually a pixel limit is set - something like this:
Usually people just go by eye and if something looks too big then they'll check it out and send the person a pm asking them to make it smaller. If I had a 28010 pixel signature you probably wouldn't check to see if it's ok or not.
- There may be no direct references to methods of obtaining drugs illegally. Any post containing such references will be edited or deleted.
- While coarse language is permitted derogatory remarks regarding religion, race, nationality, gender, sexuality and physical/mental disability will not be tolerated. Such remarks will be edited or deleted.
-Threats of violence will not be tolerated, such threats will be deleted.
While I understand the first two rules I think it was clear when we tried to enforce the "no using gay" policy that in practice it just doesn't work and indeed we found that a much more effective way of dealing with people's intolerance is turning their usage of that word into a discussion about why it is or isn't ok. While you can't ever convince everybody, I certainly remember people beginning to understand the point. I also think drugs are a very relevant issue for the majority of people on this forum. If somebodies looking for a way to get drugs than surely this is a perfect opportunity again to address the issue rather than sweeping it under the carpet. There have definitely been people on this forum who I felt had serious drug problems and knowing what they're doing now, I really regret not talking to them more about this in the open. A community should deal with issues that occur in the community - even if they are negative - they shouldn't pretend that they don't happen.
The threats of violence rule is ridiculous. It should be changed to "genuine threats of violence" - meaning somebody feels that the threats of violence could become real violence. One of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen on this forum was when Emily removed a bunch of "threats of violence" from a post by Dan Feary and then asked and had him suspended for making those threats. While one of those "threats" was probably over the line (something about punching the other guy in the face). 2 or 3 of those "threats" were "I will kick your ass". I think it is crucial that you keep a sense of perspective. Threats of ass kicking are not threats of violence.
The other thing that is totally not mentioned in those rules is an issue that came up and was never resolved in the mods/admin forum where a user posted in the "what's the worst thing you've done to a friend" topic with an account of a morally questionable act with a passed out girl which could have been construed as sexual. While the act was vulgar - I felt very strongly that people should be allowed to post about actual events that occur in their life and I tried to understand the reason it was deleted. For those of you who have been here for a long time, you'll remember that I became a mod here and at .org because of my very strong belief in freedom of speech. I think a community where you're not allowed to talk about bad things happening to you (or you doing bad things) is a worthless community. It is clear that in everybody’s life there are ups and downs. There was a time on this forum where a member had three of his friends kill themselves on the same day and he was very was obviously very traumatised (and suicidal) but with the help of some of the people on this forum, managed to get through it. It seems entirely wrong to me to not allow people to talk about these bad things in their life. What if somebody was raped? Would they not be allowed to talk about here with their friends? In the end, after hours of getting passed the non-sequiturs, we managed to find out the reason Emily removed this comment was because "Something about it just struck me as wrong." She claimed it was not a moral judgement but clearly her later comment suggested that it was. What is are the rules for when mods and admins overstep the mark? How much tolerance is allowed for this? Is the non-inclusion of talking about sexually explicit issues mean that removing that comment was indeed the wrong thing to do?
It seems clear that these rules are not clear at all. Who decides if a remark is "derogatory" or not? What about personal insults? I fail to see how the pictures that Chris was posting fail to meet the guidelines you've posted. The guidelines don't address what Chris was posting at all - if you were to follow those guidelines you would have to allow him to post that image in one topic. So the mods and admins don't even follow their own guidelines, but just decide if they like something or not anyway - regardless of the rules. Just like Emily with the comment I had such an issue with, if it just "strikes them as wrong" they get rid of it.
What is the point of telling people how you moderate the forum if it's not how you moderate the forum?
Regardless of these points, I think the most serious problem I have was the one I brought up to begin with. Confrontational moderating always creates more problems. It always creates a divide between mod/admins and the rest of the forum and it always creates resentment and alienation. We learnt very well on this forum that it wasn't the way to address problems - now the forum is returning to those days. It won't make the forum more liked, it will mean even more people dislike this place and more of the older members will leave. If you don't learn from past mistakes you will be forced to repeat them.
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