Overmoderation?
Discussion
I seem to see more and more everyday threads locked for minor reasons now.
I'm rather confused today asone of my own from last night has now vanished.
Although fairly trivial (it was moaning about the fact that petrol stations only stock 'Maxi' packs of crisps) during the page of banter on the thread there was nothing offensive and i just can't understand it!
I'm rather confused today asone of my own from last night has now vanished.
Although fairly trivial (it was moaning about the fact that petrol stations only stock 'Maxi' packs of crisps) during the page of banter on the thread there was nothing offensive and i just can't understand it!
The line of moderation is a tricky one to walk. I'm in favour of moderate moderation but what that is changes from person to person.
I mod over on another forum (not quite as busy as PH but fairly active) and you're damned if you do and damned if you don't most of the time. We now have a policy of zero toleration on abuse and 'offensive' posts.
Over there we have a policy of communicating the reason for thread closure/deletion to the thread starter but, with the volume of traffic here, I doubt PH could do that.
I mod over on another forum (not quite as busy as PH but fairly active) and you're damned if you do and damned if you don't most of the time. We now have a policy of zero toleration on abuse and 'offensive' posts.
Over there we have a policy of communicating the reason for thread closure/deletion to the thread starter but, with the volume of traffic here, I doubt PH could do that.
It is a tricky one to decide, there are no hard and fast rules unfortunately, so a lot of it does depend on the mod who is about and what sort of a day it has been. If there have been an unusually large amount of crap threads and posting for postings sake then sometimes it can seem as if there are loads being locked. But you can balance that off when sometimes you don;t see a padlock for days and days.
Some threads are mind-numbingly boring, others like chat rooms. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the freedom of speech, but a debate on the size of crisp packets? Really!Mrs Fish said:
I think we have a hell of a lot of nonsense on the forums to get too hot under the collar about having a few locked.
I think thats my point though! Pie and Piston is 50% nonsense and I can't quite see a logic to which get locked and which don't!
I think at the very least moderators should explain why they have locked a post as often it isn't clear.
blindswelledrat said:
I think we have a hell of a lot of nonsense on the forums to get too hot under the collar about having a few locked.
I think thats my point though! Pie and Piston is 50% nonsense and I can't quite see a logic to which get locked and which don't!
I think at the very least moderators should explain why they have locked a post as often it isn't clear.
would be an idea to give a reason why threads are locked as if it is due to a waste of bandwidth with pointless threads being posted, then as some people just post another thread crying about their last thread being locked it is self defeating.
blindswelledrat said:
I think at the very least moderators should explain why they have locked a post as often it isn't clear.
and on the days when its a free for all, how do you expect them to reply to every locked thread when there are a number of posters causing chaos ??
I can see where you are coming from - its a fine line trying to please all PHers in all the forums - the very nature of the mods personalities i think comes out in the moderation, a good thing IMHO...
blindswelledrat said:
I think we have a hell of a lot of nonsense on the forums to get too hot under the collar about having a few locked.
I think thats my point though! Pie and Piston is 50% nonsense and I can't quite see a logic to which get locked and which don't!
I think at the very least moderators should explain why they have locked a post as often it isn't clear.
Moderators rarely act in isolation. We have a moderators' forum and we discuss any post in question and reach a consensus. Moderators give their time gratis and the fora would collapse without them. Be grateful that Ted donates the bandwidth and that a group of people give up their time to do a difficult and thankless job.
blindswelledrat said:
I think at the very least moderators should explain why they have locked a post as often it isn't clear.
To be fair to Ted, he's usually very good at putting a short sentence onto any threads he's locked explaining the reasoning. I also think though that if a moderator can't be bothered, or hasn't got the time to post a short explanation like this they shouldn't really be moderating in the first place... however as mods are volunteers and there's presumably not many people offering their services then I can see that they're probably doing the best they can with limited resources.
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