That is the very thing I was addressing, along with Bob’s discomfort towards it.
In the case of our maker space those who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, abide by the policy were excused (or removed). It worked there. Setting the problem of specific moderator abuses aside, perhaps DPR was too tolerant of such behavior overall.
I’m advocating we don’t throw the baby away with the bathwater here.
This depends on your definition of 'toxic'. When threads really go what we consider 'toxic', as in liable to do actual harm, we do something about them. When we think a discussion is short of 'toxic' but disruptive, we move it to the Dumpster forum. I'm not sure how much real evidence there is that more people are driven away by robust discussions than a re attracted by the ability to say what they think without harassment. There are plenty of aggressively moderated sites you can use, if that's your preference. My view is that very often they cease to be interesting.
Neither of those things is a good idea, IMO. The only reason people should be banned is for the few reasons we put forward in the draft ToS, and being irritating is not one of those. Banning people from their preferred social space can cause them a great deal of distress, so to be avoided. Similarly deleting a whole thread for a few disruptive posts doesn't show much consideration for the people that started and discussed in good faith in the thread.
Who does? I suspect that it's me that is supposed to not like it. My view is that it's great as a guiding principle, useless as a rule on which to base disciplinary action. If you're going to start taking sanctions against people you need clarity, just for fairness if no other reason.
See here.
An amazing post, coming as it does from a member who makes a practice of repetitive confrontational rudeness !!
I've seen environments, where posts can be voted both up and down and having enough negative score (upvotes minus downvotes), post content will be dimmed or even collapsed - just made less noticeable.
I hope that in some future we can have something similar here. This way threads will be automoderated and if users can set their 'irritation threshold', then anyone can decide, does ze want to see more controversial posts or not.
No human moderation needed.
This approach may have little problem of serial down/upvoters - but we could limit (down)vote count per day then.
Just an idea.
Say, I make a post that doesn't have any upvotes, and a joker comes and downvotes it.
Single joker would not be enough. In current state of forums I think about 10 or so downvotes should be needed to start affecting post visibilty.
Like I said, this is just an idea from a bit of different environment (stackoverflow).
I personally would not hide anything anyway - let people say what they want, as far as this doesn't go criminal, I don't have problems with that.
Yeah, if I could have a "down vote" this post would get it.
I remember being singled out, more than once, by a virtual crowd of "haters" and collecting a lot of down votes over at DPR. The problem with down voting is that it encourages negativity and generally bad behavior. The antidote that could be offered by up votes just isn't as effective. I don't think we should allow this site to become another social media cesspool.
I can remember when DPR introduced the up- and down thumbs. Soon the down-thumbs outweighed the up-thumbs by a large margin and they hasted to remove the down-thumbs.
If you find an ivory tower, let me know, I’m in the market for one...😎
I’m beginning to think that a lot of people here have led very sheltered lives !
If you are uber-sensitive to different views and opinions, then maybe online forums are not for you.
This is a global open forum, a broad church with many personalities… suck it up, or go mow your lawn. lol
nil desperandum
OK, I put you on the list. Stay tuned :)
The problem is that online forums tend to engender bullying, and many of the features that people are suggesting here are fodder for bullies.
There used to be a scheme on some forums called 'disemvoweling'. People were punished by having all the vowels removed from their posts for a while. Thy cld stll pst bt thr psts bcme mch lss ntllgbl.
Stll, n sch snctns ncrg bllng, snc prsn cn b pckd t b th vsbl rslts f th snctn.
Ivory trade is illegal in most civilised countries, so by trying to use this forum for purposes of conducting an illegal trade you have just broken the ToS and by the rules should be permabanned. You might claim it's just a joke but....
We are not having downvoting. That's proven not to work.
In the last few weeks the forum postings have got much more civilised. If you ignore anything from over 3 weeks ago, it's quite a nice place to be.
There's been only a few posts that were (to me) not acceptable - and I've moved them out. I'm prepared to keep doing that on ones that I see or are pointed out to me. Eventually, the trolls go away and the ones who respond with similar posts don't have any to respond to.
Alan
Bob wrote: Ivory trade is illegal in most civilised countries, so by trying to use this forum for purposes of conducting an illegal trade you have just broken the ToS and by the rules should be permabanned. You might claim it's just a joke but....
LMAO
Maybe you need to stay out of the Sun for a few days, and / or increase your hydration. lol
You guys can run your forum how you see fit but at some point you're going to have to recognize that you have toxic member who are ruining things for others.
Right off the bat there are 4 individuals who (IMHO) should/could be put in a time out corner and told that their behavior here is unacceptable. This includes the guy who is going to chime in and call me a snowflake again.
The good news is that DPR is still alive.
Looking at the activity there, you could say it has a very weak pulse at best.
There are several kinds of toxicity. One is bullying, which on public forums often takes the form of campaigns against individual members to get them banned.
Another form of bullying is users who always have to get the last word in and are allowed to make insults and snide remarks (which they try to make seem like jokes by adding happy faces, are they really stupid enough to think that fools anyone?) Petrol gets thrown on this dumpster fire when there are no recriminations for these bullies because they are the pet of certain moderators. They do their best to turn every conversation toward a topic they think they know about (even when they don't), turning off new users and wearing down those who actually have something useful to contribute. (Note we haven't seen Michael Fryd or MarshallG around in a while. I wonder if the only reason Bill Ferris is still here is Alfn's recent idiocy at DPR. That should have been addressed by mods but wasn't.)
Yet another form of bullying (and toxicity) is moderators who have to lecture in a nasty way rather than engaging new users positively. One wonders if such people started a forum for any other reason than to boost their fragile ego.
One more form of toxicity is moderators who know exactly what the problems are but don't have the stones to have difficult discussions with bullies and egomaniac moderators.
Say what you will about DPR moderators going to far, at least they had the spine to deal with problems rather than pretending they don't exist while watching traffic and participation plummet. It's easy to brag about 4000 members but when will we get an honest answer about how many are still here? 4000 users and yet your 50th ranked user has <200 posts and hasn't shown up in a week. That's a forum that is dying. It's easy to plant, hard to grow. I'm trying to teach you something here. Ignore me at your peril.
DPReview Beginners Questions has 26 posts that have had activity in the last week.
DPRevived Beginner's Questions has 3 posts that have had activity in the last week.
DPReview Open Talk has 42 posts with activity in the last week.
DPRevived has 25.
That indicates a definite pattern including where the beginners are going. Furthermore, intelligent, useful contributors like Michael Fried and Bill Ferriswheel are now migrating back to DPR. Having been involved in several high-level discussions, it is widely agreed that offloading their number one problem child to this place has been a key success factor. I had recommended sending you a thank-you note and a fruit basket but no one else agreed.
The sad truth is that it wasn't for trolls like me and you, DummoLeakedBraincells, this place would be D-E-D dead.
I think it's obvious where the weak pulse is.
Which is well below what it was before the closure announcement.
In any case I looked at the overall activity not just a few hand picked forums.
DPReview's pulse now is much weaker than what it was.
This is going way off topic regarding moderation.
Feel free to start another topic on the amount of activity in various forums.
Cheers
Alan
