How should VHS Talk be moderated?

This topic has come up a bunch of times, ever since moving from mailing lists to a modern forum, in September of 2014.

There has been the occasional discussion coming into this subject in the side, but nothing to ever address head on in a public fashion.

So given that we have had two years to test the waters, how is it going?

Here is the first indication I have seen that we might want to change things up a little:

Along with a summary of the vague strategy that has been in use:

There’s an automatic list of anyone with mod bit here.

It’s been an ad hoc thing - ask.

The process for locking a thread has usually been to go on slack and go “holy shit, this thread seems headed for the cliff, any objections to locking it?”.
if the rough consensus is that it’s already devolved past the point of no return, lock it, before people start being instructed to self immolate, or other quaint VHS traditions like that.

It’s not a one-way process, and threads can trivially be unlocked.

So I guess this discussion can be split up into a few topics:

1) Does anybody have any issues, questions or suggestions for the admin list?

Would anyone like to be made an admin, or want someone to be removed? PMing me (or any other admin) is totally okay.
It’s worth noting that our forum software, Discourse, keeps logs of every admin action, and everything is reversible. Posts can be undeleted, settings can be reverted, everything. It looks like this:

Over the last two years, there has been one single minor admin abuse, and the person responsible has had access quietly revoked.

2) Political topics?

This is obviously directly related to this thread, and while I don’t agree with its locking, I do agree with it being moved to the members-only category. Would someone like me to unlock it? Or would somebody like me to move it back to General?

Political threads and general discussions have been gone over in this thread, which is a good summary on my personal thoughts. Again, that is what I personally think, but I don’t have any more say into how VHS is run than you, dear reader.

3) How open to the public?

Much like the mailing list, it was decided to make this forum open to public indexers, and posters. Because this community is more than just the people paying for physical access.

Here is a (very) early thread discussing that.


So how do we feel about all of this? Not being seen as a heavily-moderated space where people can share opinions without judgements is important, along with balancing that with shutting down goliath flamewars that accomplish nothing, and burn everything out. Where are we falling on that line? What changes should we make?

edit:
I totally thought there was a thread about this already, but couldn’t find it. Just found a private message between me, Ty, and Jon about it in February 2015 (5 months after Talk was started) where nothing conclusive was resolved, but it was obviously on our minds. I wrote:

So I think there’s a bit of an elephant in the room regarding moderation for Talk.

While it’s been pretty reasonable and good so far, the whole idea of censorship is somewhat antithetical to the idea of VHS.

A topic entitled “How should moderation on Talk be handled” would be a good idea, in my opinion. The topic above, along with “who gets to be a moderator” and “what should people do if they feel there is an abuse”

That thread never got created, but perhaps I should have at that time. My apologies.

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I can only speak for myself, but I’ve tried to at least warn/keep a discussion on topic or tried to keep it from derailing in the past.

It might be good to implement system that’s similar to our CoC that requires warnings to be issued before actually closing a thread.

I think my closing post on that thread may have over emphasized the political side of things, which wasn’t really my intent.

I don’t believe that (politics/religion/OS preferences/command line text editors/etc) are inherently topics that need to be (or should be) avoided on talk. I do think that that style of thread has an unpleasant history of degenerating and going off the rails, so should be handled with a little more pro-active response than most threads.

It seemed to me (and, on discussion on the VHS Slack, others) that the recently closed thread had passed the point of constructive discourse.

It’s certainly fine to re-open the thread, but if any feel the need to continue the conversation, I’d suggest opening a new thread, and trying to steer it to avoid the potholes, instead - it can help re-set the discussion in productive ways.


Moderation in general:

VHS … doesn’t have a great history when it comes to keeping discussions constructive, and not resorting to personal attacks. We recently had another painful reminder of that, but things have, on the whole, gotten a lot more welcoming around VHS[0]. I do think it’s beneficial to actively try and apply the brakes to conversations that are headed in bad places.

For concrete suggestions, I’d suggest that moderation in public topic categories [1], should err on the side of keeping things civil, while in more private areas a more hands off approach is appropriate?

I don’t think a protracted warnings system is sensible for discussion board threads - closing an initial thread applies some brakes to the discussion, but it does nothing to prevent the conversation from continuing under a different thread, so I see a thread close as a fairly mild action, more akin to a warning than a ban or anything like that.

I’ve seen different approaches used by different communities, setting out expectations here is a good thing.


[0] No-one’s been instructed to self-immolate in months!
[1] Currently anything not under the VHS Members Only category, or its children.

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Actually, the original intent was to see a discussion develop about the different varieties (?) of hackers, based on global locations… Like, specializations, humour, threats, general usefulness, etc… The election and its results were just a good occasion for a poke at the nest. What could have possibly gone wrong…I got dragged in too near said nest and got stung, LOL!

I apologize for now creating work for some. My bad.

Sometimes we need to disagree to learn. I fundamental think we should not avoid
dangerously emotional political topics. But instead we need to leave our ego
locked when we engage in them. I feel there is fear that peoples egos are
going to get hurt and that we don’t have the maturity to walk away and
carefully pick our fights.

Perhaps Jon and others are sadly correct, but I like to hope not.

P.S. I work with a emacs user and I am vi user. We will never agree his
muscle memory prevents him from using vi. And i map my caps lock to escape.
He loses it every time uses my laptops. Sometimes politics is like that. We
are never going to agree. Because agreeing requires that we change not only
our opinion, but also our lifestyles. And that is fine. It is the
competition that prevents social mindset lock in.

“It is the competition that prevents social mindset lock in.” And that is of prime importance. Stagnation is the enemy, so to speak.

No apologies necessary! I get your intentions.

Totally agree, and I feel like we’ve been trending to that lately. A good boost is needed.

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It would be nice to know how people are picked to be admins since I haven’t seen any posts requesting such access. If it’s some kind of behind the curtain process, I think, in the name of openness, becoming an admin should be a public process such as becoming a keyholder. (ie. posted to members-only, wait for feedback, yada yada yada ).

Entirely ad hoc. No one has asked for admin privs, I don’t think, unless they needed it to perform a duty.

Here’s a couple examples from the list posted above:

  • @TyIsI does a ton of admin work on the forum software, including setting up backups, migrating domains, SSL stuff, email stuff, fixing errors and broken daemons before anyone knows something was wrong. And I do mean a lot of admin work :heart:
  • @Gibbtall is handling membership co-ordination duties right now and needs access to add people to the members category
  • @ashley was running 3D printer training and was deleting posts off the list of trainees when they were complete. He’s been busy with his business in 2016, so I’ll spring-clean that for now
  • @Adam_Barlev was a director a couple years ago, but he’s in grad school hell now, I think, I can spring clean that, too

The long and the short of it is that it shouldn’t be considered a status thing, just another infrastructure tool. If you need access - Just ask.

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It’s totally not a status thing. I can’t remember how I got admin rights but it was because it enabled me to do something easily. I think I was wanting to set up a channel on here or something when we first installed discourse and moved over from the mailing list. We’re a hackspace not a hierarchy. :slight_smile:

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@Jarrett Tried to spring clean myself but couldn’t work out how, pls remove it from me.

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