Thanks to Mr. J for getting the thread back on topic.

I'm a one-trick pony.

Ponyse.

lol

You're misunderstanding the point of my slashdot reference; my point was that early slashdot was a pretty anarchic place.

My friend with the forum (which is self-supporting entirely through donations by users), said I could post this:



The moderators here do exercise editorial control. They'll delete spam. They'll fork & lock threads. They'll (assuming Reverborama sometimes does what they suggested) delete posts without comment. It is not too much to ask that they actually say something about what they will moderate.

You say that people can flag posts, but the fact that no one did when many people found the post to be a problem means that we don't know what we can flag. What can we flag?

I am not asking you to change your policies (yet anyway). I am asking what they are.

I hope the policy will be, "You can flag anything you want, and we reserve the right to laugh at you."

I believe that's it. The worst thing that can happen if you flag something, is nothing. You're not going to get a spanking, but you may get a "we don't believe this post violates any forum rules."

I use it commonly to report double posts so a mod can clean them up.

At the risk of starting another argument, I think you misunderstood my point, which is that this is not slashdot.



We have said things about what we will moderate. In addition to the list you provided above, we also use our discretion to moderate if we feel that we need to.



Users can flag any post they wish.



Our policy is denoted in the Terms Of Service, with the connotation that moderators and administrators can act in their best judgement.

Well said Bjorn.

Ok. Sorry, I've been busy with the holidays and looking for work. This is just the worst time of year for jobhunting.

I care about the civility issue because I joined MBL to find people to bike with (of my non-MBL local friends, only two could keep up with me, and they travel for work a lot). But half the friends I've made here have left because of the civility problems.

First of all: I'm sorry about bringing in other sites; that didn't work as an argument, and just served as a distractor. Oops. Bad tactic, no biscuit. It's just incredibly frustrating when people say that Internet spaces are inevitably cesspools. This simply isn't true.

Reverborama said:

This is the first time I've heard anything like that (ok, Reverborama said something similar the day before, but that's the quote I found). I've asked around, and I've read the posts here. It's clearly the first time a number of people have heard it. So maybe that's the moderation stance, but it isn't widely known. People can flag anything they wish, sure, but if it's perceived to be pointless, they won't. And if the users of a site have a different view of what the moderation policy of the site is than the actual moderators -- and many of them were wishing it was more like what the moderator just said it was -- that's a problem! That means that community values are not being communicated, etc.

The terms of use forbid spam, exploiting minors, disclosing personally identifiable information about minors, illegal activity, malware, pyramid schemes, and copyright violations. All of these are legal liability issues. Civility isn't even on the radar. Hell, posting personally identifiable information about adults isn't on the radar.

So if people start flagging for civility problems, will they get a response at all? I don't mean to suggest that every such flag would be appropriate -- but what would have happened if someone had flagged "Cunty McTwat"? What will happen if someone flags something else that wouldn't be appropriate at Babes in Bikeland?