benzemalyonnais

The DL forum is actually pretty good and is very active. No newbie would ever get harassed over there, although someone like DP MRing for a living would get attacked by Bubba for being a LVC....

WineCountryUA

This undermines any claim of objectivity of the blog.

Yes FT has it faults and we should all work (and much as been done -- Information Desk, for one) to improve its friendliness. But blogs and forums are different and meet different needs -- there is a place for both.

carpentry4thought

Can any part of that be compared to the fact that there is a place in nature for flesh-eating parasites that provide no discernible benefit to other creatures?

MSPeconomist

To me, misinformation is worse than no information. When someone copies from FT, one would hope that he would bother to get it right and then state it clearly.

OverThereTooMuch

You have to admit that it was a valid suggestion though. Wildly different levels of enforcement across the various forums.

CMK10

Do you think it's possible to have it any other way? Compare Dining Buzz! to United Airlines. Every forum involves different numbers of posters, sometimes posters from a different country, or different subject material. Airline forums bring in the angry people, other forums less so. The moderation has to match the forum, it cannot be anything close to uniform.

sbm12

Absolutely.
Nah...it would be quite easy to match them if the mods wanted to. And the community would be a better place for it.

CMK10

Hogwash. The way I see it: there are 10,000 or so active posters here speaking in approximately 100 forums about thousands of different topics. The posters all differ, the subject matter all differs and the moderators all differ. There will be different issues in different forums and a uniform moderation system could not work.

If you know something different or have a solution by all means share it. Especially if the Community will be better off.

84fiero

I'm with sbm12, there could be a lot more uniformity by simply following the TOS uniformly. Of course since I'm not supposed to discuss moderation, the foregoing should only be taken on general terms for internet forums in general

Back on topic though even if I agreed with that point, the DP post as a whole was ridic

sbm12

I tried for several years while I was a mod. I was eventually fired for such efforts. They don't want to change, even when presented with broad collections of facts showing the problems and how easy it would be to address them.

You say that the users in each forum need to be treated differently. Why? If I post in three different fora then why should I need to play by different rules in each? Are they not all part of the same site and, at least in theory, covered by the same ToS??

CMK10

Because context is key to everything. Just to give examples, some forums quickly close relevant threads at the end of a year and start brand new ones every year. Other ones keep mega threads going. Some have a ton of stickies, some don't. Some have hundreds of posts a day, some have five or fewer. Should Dining Buzz! really be moderated the same way as British Airways? I don't think so.

I do agree that people who are violating the TOS should be dealt with uniformly, but I think there's a lot of gray area to what constitutes such a violation.

1848

While uniformity may or may not be an end worth working for, I think even striving for it ignores the fact that it is unattainable. We cannot in good conscience expect multiple different mods from completely different backgrounds to see things and react in the exact same way. Especially in the medium of typed text many things are up to the interpretation of the person reading it, and we all know that doesn't always lend to uniformity.

84fiero

Well, the TOS issues seem most relevant to DP's little rant. Those should be uniform, but aren't, and often that would seem to be a turnoff to a newbie.

More than thread mgmt and style issues, it's a matter of tone and atmosphere. That is where I've often thought that a smiling, friendly sounding blog will attract more flies if FT becomes too vinegary.

OverThereTooMuch

I'm not talking about styles, like what discussions they will allow. I'm talking about enforcing the fairly simple FT rules. Which I assume they agree to do when they accept the moderator role.

1848

But from my understanding the Mod rules aren't public, so how do we know how simple they are? Also, what I am saying is that in any situation where you have multiple different people trying to enforce rules, the strictness of the rules is completely up to personal interpretation. What one person considers 'off topic' or even rude another may see as taking a long route to a valid point, playful or whatever.

For evidence of this issue outside of FT, I would like to shine a light on the legal system or even our own interactions with the banking industry. Not all rules are as clear as they seem to some, and there is usually quite a bit of variance between how people enforce them.

It's great to desire objectivity and complete fairness across an entire forum, but it isn't very realistic.