JeffNZ
Administrator
Jimmy Morgan
Joined: May 2014
Posts: 2,468
|
Post by JeffNZ on Sept 8, 2014 10:02:58 GMT
I know this is going to cause more accusations of censorship but I have inadvertently deleted the original thread when deleting one of my own postings.
Use this thread to continue the debate.
Anyway, this was what I was trying to post.
______________________________________________
Moderators do not do this for a living, we are all online at differing times and we have agreed any one of us can moderate individually as required and yes, we will support every decision if it's made for the right reason, even when in hindsight it may not have been appropriate.
In case my name and avatar have not given the game away, I am in New Zealand and I deleted the thread around 2:00am UK time, perhaps I should have called all 1,000 members beforehand.
So what are you looking for CGS? Someone to fall on the sword perhaps?
As the person who originally set up the forum and canvassed the support from others to moderate, I'll take responsibility for the locking, falling and deletion of the thread and happily resign if that's what the majority on here want.
After the crap the moderators have got on this thread I'll be surprised if any of them want to hang around.
|
|
Deleted
Joined: January 1970
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 8, 2014 10:15:59 GMT
my only gripe comes from the deletion of the serious forum and the reason being - i cant be bothered
all too familiar that, ill moderate if need be, whats the worst on there, people arguing ?
|
|
Deleted
Joined: January 1970
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 8, 2014 10:22:36 GMT
my only gripe comes from the deletion of the serious forum and the reason being - i cant be bothered all too familiar that, ill moderate if need be, whats the worst on there, people arguing ? ...but it's a football forum, if people want to moderate it they can set up their own forum surely? I don't see a problem with it being deleted, the moderators run the forum and if they've made the decision then so be it. It's not censorship, it's just not allowing a platform for frankly turgid arguments that often cross the line. Maybe GasPoliticalArguments.Proboards.com will take off and become the one website the majority of Rovers fans can agree is utter bobbins.
|
|
Deleted
Joined: January 1970
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 8, 2014 10:27:08 GMT
yes but the point being if it doesnt intrest someone they dont have to read it, those of us using it wanted to
|
|
Deleted
Joined: January 1970
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 8, 2014 10:29:44 GMT
yes but the point being if it doesnt intrest someone they dont have to read it, those of us using it wanted to The mods do though. They moderate a football forum, not the Daily Mail comments section.
|
|
Deleted
Joined: January 1970
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 8, 2014 10:42:16 GMT
hence i said ill moderate it, those of us wanting to talk other stuff than football can do
|
|
Deleted
Joined: January 1970
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 8, 2014 10:54:49 GMT
|
|
LJG
Peter Beadle
Joined: May 2014
Posts: 969
|
Post by LJG on Sept 8, 2014 10:55:59 GMT
yes but the point being if it doesnt intrest someone they dont have to read it, those of us using it wanted to I don't think that's the point at all actually - the mods have a responsibility as publishers of this forum. The general chat section had libelous comments and direct accusations against public figures which could either result in an ongoing investigation being jeapordised or in civil action against those who run the forum - the mods. Freedom of speech isn't the freedom to say what you like about whomever you like regardless of truth or evidential proof. Removing that section of the forum removed the risk to the moderators and will allow them to concentrate on running what this is - a football forum. It has nothing whatsoever to do with "If you don't like it don't read it" - just like all the sh1te with our fans kicking off left and right the answer always comes back to "Oh get some perspective we only did this we only did that" Why don't people just grow the f**k up and take some bloody responsibility for their actions? The world is not your playground to do what you want with and hope that everyone else who doesn't like it will ignore it.
|
|
Peter Parker
Global Moderator
Richard Walker
You have been sentenced to DELETION!
Joined: May 2014
Posts: 4,920
|
Post by Peter Parker on Sept 8, 2014 11:04:16 GMT
Bladder, yes it is a bit of cant be bothered, but we check up on the current affairs section. I let most people get on and argue. However aside from the Scottish Referendum thread (which is a shame to lose) it is not a current affairs section. It is a circular argument over Palestine by a few posters and a poster, posting conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory.
We do not want to wade through Cliff Richard is an elitist MI5, paedophile spy, running the new worlds order. Or its Israel’s fault, its Gaza’s fault. Most sections of the forum work fine, but it is a chore to keep checking on the current affairs section for us.
A fair solution has been offered to port the threads and a link to a new pro board forum should anyone care to run it and mod it themselves
Yes we are moderators, but the last thing any of us want to do is moderate anything.
|
|
Deleted
Joined: January 1970
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 8, 2014 11:15:48 GMT
yes but the point being if it doesnt intrest someone they dont have to read it, those of us using it wanted to The mods do though. They moderate a football forum, not the Daily Mail comments section. how ironic in a debate about censorship you belittle people who read the mail , their views not pass your test ?
|
|
Deleted
Joined: January 1970
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 8, 2014 11:16:34 GMT
Bladder, yes it is a bit of cant be bothered, but we check up on the current affairs section. I let most people get on and argue. However aside from the Scottish Referendum thread (which is a shame to lose) it is not a current affairs section. It is a circular argument over Palestine by a few posters and a poster, posting conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory. We do not want to wade through Cliff Richard is an elitist MI5, paedophile spy, running the new worlds order. Or its Israel’s fault, its Gaza’s fault. Most sections of the forum work fine, but it is a chore to keep checking on the current affairs section for us. A fair solution has been offered to port the threads and a link to a new pro board forum should anyone care to run it and mod it themselves Yes we are moderators, but the last thing any of us want to do is moderate anything. fair enough pp at least youre upfront about the effort
|
|
Deleted
Joined: January 1970
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 8, 2014 11:21:13 GMT
The mods do though. They moderate a football forum, not the Daily Mail comments section. how ironic in a debate about censorship you belittle people who read the mail , their views not pass your test ? Nope, mainly belittlling the bile spouted by many in their comments sections on their website.
|
|
Deleted
Joined: January 1970
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 8, 2014 11:29:15 GMT
how ironic in a debate about censorship you belittle people who read the mail , their views not pass your test ? Nope, mainly belittlling the bile spouted by many in their comments sections on their website. ah so you deem its bile good job we dont all label anyone with a different point of view as spewing bile
|
|
|
Post by CountyGroundHotel on Sept 8, 2014 11:42:02 GMT
I know this is going to cause more e ccusations of censorship but I have inadvertently deleted the original thread when deleting one of my own postings. Use this thread to continue the debate. Anyway, this was what I was trying to post. ______________________________________________ Moderators do not do this for a living, we are all online at differing times and we have agreed any one of us can moderate individually as required and yes, we will support every decision if it's made for the right reason, even when in hindsight it may not have been appropriate. In case my name and avatar have not given the game away, I am in New Zealand and I deleted the thread around 2:00am UK time, perhaps I should have called all 1,000 members beforehand. So what are you looking for CGS? Someone to fall on the sword perhaps? As the person who originally set up the forum and canvassed the support from others to moderate, I'll take responsibility for the locking, falling and deletion of the thread and happily resign if that's what the majority on here want. After the crap the moderators have got on this thread I'll be surprised if any of them want to hang around. Jeff I presume the question was to me. You replied why the original theard was deleted, which was absolutely fine & understandable. But it's not dealt with the cause of it being deleted, all the mods (bar one notable exception) have commented on it basically saying we stick together (fine I understand that) but then contradicting each other with the facts in some sort of cover up of individual decisions & dis ussions To put it in simple terms if I went on the thread about the Braintree player being punched saying he got what he deserved & it's a pity he wasn't knocked out I would expect my post to be deleted and to at least expect a warning from the mods if not more. Now in effect that is what strungout has got away with because he's a mod. As to the current affairs not anything I'm complaining about. I respect the work all the mods do on behalf of the forum but I have no personal respect for one of you.
|
|
strung out
Administrator
Paul Hardyman
Joined: May 2014
Posts: 758
|
Post by strung out on Sept 8, 2014 11:46:20 GMT
I've been away with the girlfriend all weekend (lovely time, spoilt by checking the Rovers score at 5pm on Saturday), so only just come back to this, without seeing the original thread.
The serious stuff forum has been a regular bone of contention ever since Jeff, Oxon and I took over the running of the forum 18 months ago.The three of us have got quite different views on lots of things, so hopefully this isn't seen as trying to silence any one particular voice - the other moderators were also consulted on this and in agreement.
The fact is that running a football forum doesn't have to take up a great deal of time - logging in for reported posts and browsing the interesting threads only takes up a little of my day. Serious stuff threads by their very nature get an awful lot more heated and controversial though. In addition to this, with people arguing points on both sides, the bigger picture is often lost, meaning that very dodgy posts and threads slip through with alarming regularity. One example was a thread, that contained content which was not only potentially libellous, but also endangered the future of the forum and even any future court case. It was over four days after the content was posted that I happened upon it in order to remove said content.
Now I know that some people have offered to mod the forum themselves, or said that we should ban/warn users etc. The problem firstly is that as administrators of the site, we take ultimate responsibility for any content posted here. We can't just have a forum that we ignore and hope the people there behave. Secondly, the whole forum appeared to be getting worse and worse, with almost every thread disintegrating into either Israel/Palestine arguments, or conspiracy theory text-bombing. This is a Bristol Rovers forum first and foremost. We do offer extra sections for minority interests (cricket, rugby, music etc), but these don't require the level of attention that a serious forum does.
As far as possible we try to avoid censorship at all costs (hence why other threads are occasionally locked or set to fall rather than outright deleted), so rather than have to actively censor threads, this avoids that hassle completely. I understand that this will upset some people and disappoint others, but it wasn't something that was decided on a whim, we'd been thinking about it on and off for around 6 months now - perhaps longer. The additional workload of running a site with 1,200 posters right now just means that the balance has tipped into making it more effort that it's worth.
|
|
strung out
Administrator
Paul Hardyman
Joined: May 2014
Posts: 758
|
Post by strung out on Sept 8, 2014 11:50:14 GMT
I know this is going to cause more e ccusations of censorship but I have inadvertently deleted the original thread when deleting one of my own postings. Use this thread to continue the debate. Anyway, this was what I was trying to post. ______________________________________________ Moderators do not do this for a living, we are all online at differing times and we have agreed any one of us can moderate individually as required and yes, we will support every decision if it's made for the right reason, even when in hindsight it may not have been appropriate. In case my name and avatar have not given the game away, I am in New Zealand and I deleted the thread around 2:00am UK time, perhaps I should have called all 1,000 members beforehand. So what are you looking for CGS? Someone to fall on the sword perhaps? As the person who originally set up the forum and canvassed the support from others to moderate, I'll take responsibility for the locking, falling and deletion of the thread and happily resign if that's what the majority on here want. After the crap the moderators have got on this thread I'll be surprised if any of them want to hang around. Jeff I presume the question was to me. You replied why the original theard was deleted, which was absolutely fine & understandable. But it's not dealt with the cause of it being deleted, all the mods (bar one notable exception) have commented on it basically saying we stick together (fine I understand that) but then contradicting each other with the facts in some sort of cover up of individual decisions & dis ussions To put it in simple terms if I went on the thread about the Braintree player being punched saying he got what he deserved & it's a pity he wasn't knocked out I would expect my post to be deleted and to at least expect a warning from the mods if not more. Now in effect that is what strungout has got away with because he's a mod. As to the current affairs not anything I'm complaining about. I respect the work all the mods do on behalf of the forum but I have no personal respect for one of you. Paul - what have I got away with exactly? We had a complaint about a thread being insensitive, so I dealt with it by trying to avoid censorship at all costs, but allowing it to disappear quietly, while posting an explanation for the reasons. Clearly people would have rather that the thread was deleted, but that's not the decision I took. I stand by the decision, but understand if others disagree.
|
|
Deleted
Joined: January 1970
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 8, 2014 11:51:02 GMT
I know this is going to cause more e ccusations of censorship but I have inadvertently deleted the original thread when deleting one of my own postings. Use this thread to continue the debate. Anyway, this was what I was trying to post. ______________________________________________ Moderators do not do this for a living, we are all online at differing times and we have agreed any one of us can moderate individually as required and yes, we will support every decision if it's made for the right reason, even when in hindsight it may not have been appropriate. In case my name and avatar have not given the game away, I am in New Zealand and I deleted the thread around 2:00am UK time, perhaps I should have called all 1,000 members beforehand. So what are you looking for CGS? Someone to fall on the sword perhaps? As the person who originally set up the forum and canvassed the support from others to moderate, I'll take responsibility for the locking, falling and deletion of the thread and happily resign if that's what the majority on here want. After the crap the moderators have got on this thread I'll be surprised if any of them want to hang around. Jeff I presume the question was to me. You replied why the original theard was deleted, which was absolutely fine & understandable. But it's not dealt with the cause of it being deleted, all the mods (bar one notable exception) have commented on it basically saying we stick together (fine I understand that) but then contradicting each other with the facts in some sort of cover up of individual decisions & dis ussions To put it in simple terms if I went on the thread about the Braintree player being punched saying he got what he deserved & it's a pity he wasn't knocked out I would expect my post to be deleted and to at least expect a warning from the mods if not more. Now in effect that is what strungout has got away with because he's a mod. As to the current affairs not anything I'm complaining about. I respect the work all the mods do on behalf of the forum but I have no personal respect for one of you. Well diddums, frankly. Sites like this need good moderators, and live or die by that. They maintain a standard, tone, and remit. You need people who are sensible, good natured, tolerant, fair-minded, and impartial. This site's got that.
|
|
irishrover
Global Moderator
Joined: June 2014
Posts: 3,372
|
Post by irishrover on Sept 8, 2014 12:17:15 GMT
Closing the Current Affairs section was purely a practical consideration in the end because none of us were prepared to moderate it anymore and that is a requirement of this site. It was taking up most of our moderating time and we thought that was daft given that this is a football forum; ie none of us signed up to moderate a current affairs forum. In the previous thread that Jeff accidentally deleted Bladd said that as long as the people who use it are happy with it why close it? Well the reason is that a lot of the people clearly weren't happy with it because of the consistant stream of complaints and reported posts we were getting. Generally speaking I think most of us preferred to just ignore that section but that became impossible because of the number of reports we were getting in relation to it. We were also concerned about violating the rules of the host and copyright issues on that section. The main reason it closed is that none of the moderators were prepared to manage it anymore and the administrators (who have far more to lose here) were no longer prepared to take responsibility for it. So yes, bluntly we couldn't be bothered with it anymore. It had nothing to do with topics discussed on it or anything else. I can honestly say that in my case the only time I ever read that anything on that section was when somebody reported a post. This became so regular that it got to the point where I wasn't prepared to moderate anymore; it's simply not why I come on a Rovers site or why I want to keep it going.
The problem with Bladd's suggestion is that there's no practical way of parcelling out moderation for a specific section of the forum so moderators would still need to wade through all the issues that it generated even if we didn't have to moderate anymore. In other words, it wouldn't really solve the issue of the amount of admin time it was taking up and the reason why we eventually got fed up with it; a seperate forum linked to this one would do that which is why Jeff suggested it. Seems a reasonable compromise to me. We've discussed this issue over a long period of time, made several suggestions about how to improve things but in the end it came down to the practical consideration that no one was prepared to administrate that section anymore so it had to close because that is a condition of using the site.
On some of the other comments that were on the previous thread. There are 4 of us volunteering to do this - we have put up requests for help with moderation before and received no takers. We were dealing with an extremely sensitive topic which right from its first appearance produced a number of people reporting and complaining about the distress it was causing - from totally opposite perspectives. Given the strength of feeling involved (and trying to balance that with our general desire not to moderate or particularly delete anything) we all agreed with Strung Out's original decision to let the post drop. At the same time it was agreed that if we received further consistant complaints about distress caused then we would delete the thread once it dropped off the main page. This happened - so Jeff deleted it. In the meantime PP locked the thread on the basis that it had drifted from the original topic (which we've done before). There was no mixed messages, no contradictions. Just 4 people trying to make decisions quickly and according to some level of agreed consensus. That's about all you can hope for with this really what with everyone logging in at different times. If you want perfect consistancy in that scenario it is not going to happen and I suggest you go and look for a professionally moderated board instead. People asked for an explanation of our action and we have all now provided one. You can judge whether those actions are right or wrong but I'm pretty annoyed at people suggesting we were acting to cover mistakes and therefore questioning the intregrity of the actions we took. We agreed a general approach and we did our best, as individuals, to stick to that approach. Again 4 volunteers dealing with a complex and sensitive issue. If someone wants to volunteer to take my place as a moderator by all means do so - I was never desperate to be one in the first place, I only did it because no one else would and I wanted the forum to carry on.
|
|
|
Post by Nobbygas on Sept 8, 2014 13:00:38 GMT
I'd love to know who the people were who were 'reporting' posts on the Current Affairs forum :-)
|
|
Deleted
Joined: January 1970
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Sept 8, 2014 14:00:34 GMT
I'd love to know who the people were who were 'reporting' posts on the Current Affairs forum :-) Wondered the same thing myself. Yes, Wes is silly with all that stuff about chemtrails and micro drones, OK, the Israel threads are circular, but who exactly reported what to the admin team? Probably miles off the mark here, but it has the feel of one or more people just not liking that forum section so pressuring admin to shut it down.
|
|