There have been a couple of exchanges recently that crossed the line on how we treat each other here. I’ve looked into them and taken action in line with the guidelines. I’m not going to lay out the details or name people, because some of it involves personal matters that deserve to stay private, and airing it publicly would only make things worse for people who don’t deserve that.
What I will do is restate the standard, because I think most of you would want me to. Disagree all you like, that’s the whole point of the place, but keep it about the argument. No personal attacks, nothing about anyone’s health or private life, and no using something someone’s shared in confidence against them. If you see that happening, flag it to me or report the post rather than piling in, and I’ll deal with it. I have been super busy over the last month and I am still trying to build some tools to help me moderate the place in a non-invasive way. But the lax moderation recently is my bad and I apologise.
Thanks to the overwhelming majority of you who make this an easy place to run. On the moderation side I’m going to tighten things up so these don’t slip by unseen in future.
There’s been some situations happening again recently. I’ve been working a bit too hard and was only informed of it via someone who directly contacted me as I was trying to stay away from my phone. Eye was not on the ball and that’s my bad.
Two takeaways from this - it’s actually pretty hard to keep this place moderated (when stuff can kick off literally any time of day, in any thread), to keep a temperature check between forumers and to be fair to everyone. And it’s impossible to do it with a skeleton crew of mods.
So over the next week or so I’ll be prioritising figuring out how to reduce the chances of it happening in the future.
I like how that thread got auto locked for a while. Can that trigger the flagged users account to be locked for 4 hours too? That way, it should help cooling off and avoids it spilling over into different threads etc and can be moderated in due time?
Speaking from personal experience, as great as this forum is it’s still a form of social media. That makes it addictive, opinionated, an echo chamber and other nefarious attributes of the genre.
It’s also an incredible support community with culture, education, humour etc.
What I would suggest is for users to do a little self check on their mental health. I sometimes feel that when you read other people’s posts, you can tell they are ruminating over things which leads to poor judgement or mismanagement of emotions.
