I think there should be a rule in place, to stop all the pedants picking out every-one's grammar mistakes!
How long before one is picked out on this post?
Not a "rule of conduct", as such, but while we're thrashing out moderation policy...
I would prefer the moderation to be much more transparent. If a post is edited, moved, or deleted by a moderator, then that should be made obvious. The people whose posts are affected should be notified (if possible, obviously this isn't always going to be practical), and it should be made clear why the moderator intervened. If posts are to be moved "Outside", then it should be made clear in the original thread that this has happened. By default, the Outside part of the forum doesn't appear on many searches, so currently, if you're on a thread and some posts disappear, you've got to know to look at the Outside section to see if they've been moved there. Not good.
There are two reasons for making the moderation less secretive:
(1) If people don't know what gets moderated, they don't know how to behave. On one of the more strictly moderated forums I'm on, unacceptable posts are deleted, with a reason (e.g. "Deleted by Rob. Reason: swearing"). The way this has evolved is that many violations don't even get as far as the moderators - forumites will tell someone "You'd better delete that swear word before the mods see it". In general, it seems to work pretty well (and that forum has 10x the banter and jokes on it than this one does - so it doesn't kill the atmosphere).
(2) It's one thing if certain views, actions or attacks are, for want of a better word, censored. It's quite another when you don't even know that that's what is happening. The idea that posts can simply disappear, with no evidence that they ever existed bothers me.
For example, if you look at the thread that spawned this discussion, you would not even know what had happened if Lory hadn't specifically decided to add a post explaining things. Going back further, I wanted to see what GaG had been allowed to post, but the relevant posts seem to have been deleted, and there is no evidence that GetAGrip ever existed (other than Google's cache, that is). [Of course, the forum's brain-dead search engine may also be at fault].
And of course, there's the worry of out-and-out censorship. Posts criticising Ceroc being deleted, people with opinions differing from Franck having their posts disappear etc. I am not for a moment saying this has happened but the problem is that if it did, how would we know about it? Now obviously Franck could still make invisible edits regardless of the rules, but I think it would be better if doing so was at least officially against policy.
Let your mind go and your body will follow. – Steve Martin, LA Story
OK, we now have a Forum Disclaimer - it's in the "Disclaimer" link at the bottom of each page.
We'll add in links to other documents to that area as we do them - such as the FAQ and related documents. All suggestions welcomed, of course.
Hmmm, does it need to be dated? Or is it applied retrospectively?
"specified above" doesn't seem terribly clear -- since it's in the first sentence?
SpinDr
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