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Greetings! Reiterating the "what the gently caress are the admins looking for?": Athanatos posted:Things we'd love to hear about include: I'll be around off-and-on this Friday and Saturday, and of course my PMs are open  .
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Jun 24, 2021 03:26
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 01:21 |
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Hello, I am here now to take all credit/scorn for what has been entirely Athanatos' chats with y'all while I was working, sleeping, sleeping in, doing my ASL lesson*, running errands, and deadlifting things. I probably won't a ton to say unless I'm directly asked something, as I'm generally more a lurker admin than a  admin (sup Ath), but I am reading the conversations.I appreciate the topic of "what should mods do here?" being addressed by the community. C-SPAM gets shitloads of reports (not D&D levels, but way more than, say, Games or GBS), many of which are for things like "posting bad opinions," but I've always understood this to be a relaxed rules forum where people are encouraged to post at each other about stuff and only use buttons for slurs or spamming or whatever, so hearing feedback about what y'all want a mod to do is hella useful. I'd encourage anybody else reading to add to this conversation. I will be around this evening. Thanks for having us! *If anybody else is a new ASL student and wants a practice partner, holler.
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Jun 26, 2021 03:40
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Ardennes posted:More as a illustrated example if anything else but we can move on, but that type of posting is actually a problem. Condescending antagonism from mods is also a problem, especially in a thread for community feedback.
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Jun 26, 2021 04:43
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I will add "Pohl and Ardennes have beef" to the list of stuff I've learned today, and ask that you both please move on, this time without any "sorry I'll drop it and [continues it basically]" stuff.
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Jun 26, 2021 04:54
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Spinz posted:Twoday said some really important stuff that I don't want to get lost in arguing about the covid thread. I believe them that no admin understands c-spam and so I applaud the two admins in here now. This is a busy forum, it's important to SA. I personally had only experienced C-SPAM thus far through clearing the report forum and skimming QCS, which is, like, the worst way to get to know any forum. Taking those two extremely biased samples at face value, I'd be like "so is this a forum where white people will call me a traitor to Black America because I'm lightskinned, or some poo poo?" and that's not fair to C-SPAM. Hearing people talk about why C-SPAM is important to them has been an endearing experience. I'm not sure I have the time to get all that engrossed here (I'm more of a "help with behind-the-scenes poo poo" admin and I barely have time to keep up with threads I love in other forums) but I will probably at least bookmark the fitness thread.
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Jun 26, 2021 05:39
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Good morning, 500'ish new posts! I'm gonna close this so that I can catch up on stuff. I'll open it back up in a few hours. In the meantime, you're welcome to PM me anything that can't wait or that you'd rather say in private. Thanks!
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Jun 26, 2021 21:35
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Alrighty, gonna post some observations, and then open the thread back up. Sorry for . These aren't necessarily "action items," because I don't view this endeavor as "become a C-SPAM expert in 2 days and then make sweeping changes to the community," but more me trying to get an idea of how folks feel about the forum so that I have more context for the inevitible times that I'm asked to assist a mod with C-SPAM matters (and I simply don't have time to engross myself in the forum; as I noted, I'm more a "background" admin and barely have time to keep up with threads I love in other forums). - Part of the appeal here versus D&D is the relaxed nature of the rules, so there's less focus on MLA formatting, and more focus on discussion matters using whatever words are felt appropriate for the situation, even if they aren't "decorum." It's also seen as a "safe space" for leftism and a general discussion space for leftist posters (ex. "I want to bullshit about growing tomatoes with my buddies, not with 'the experts' for help in DIY"). - Some threads aren't distinctly leftist or about leftists. There are some mixed feelings about this, but most folks either like that, or at least don't mind. - Some threads are seen as "chat threads" that are overly insular and sources of drama, forum feuds, Making Posting Enemies, etc. Personally I'm not into threads that function as essentially a forums-based Discord, but as long as they aren't leading to dumb drama, I don't have a strong opinion on them being here versus CCCC or wherever. I acknowledge that "as long as they aren't leading to dumb drama" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. - There's a line between "shitposting" and "posting casually, but still being interesting." Personally, I much prefer the latter; spamming catchphrases and played-out jokes (drnald thrunjp lol) isn't very interesting to me. I sympathize with the folks who prefer that even casual posting still go by the ancient SA standard of being "funny, informative, or interesting on any level," but I also think it's tricky for mods to enforce that in a relaxed rules forum, at least in a way that the community at large will agree is fair and consistent. So that strikes me as more a standard that a community needs to coalesce around or agree to disagree on, and some threads will lean more toward more serious tones, and others toward silly poo poo, and the thread IKs can deal with that as they see appropriate. But again, I'm not laying down the law on this, and it may be worth a mod posting a thread to discuss this specifically with the community and go from there. - Related to the previous point, there was some poo poo about beef poof for like 2 pages, and my eyes glazed over reading about it because it was boring and unfunny, so I have no comment on whatever that was. - Some mods have been seen as out of touch with C-SPAM's various subcultures, as they were picked from major megathreads. They then moderate other threads in a manner that clashes with the established tone and direction of that thread, and the thread regulars there are like, "who the gently caress are you, anyway?" I think it would benefit us to do a more crowdsourced approach to picking mods and IKs here, having mods nominated and hased out who overlap several major threads. Thoughts? - Most here tend to favor a light hand in moderation, which makes sense for a relaxed rules forum. Issues that I see coming up here/in PM that people generally agree should be moderated are: slurs (including racial, sexual, and ableist), excessive dogpiles/bullying, and untagged NSFW. For "relaxed rules" forums, I think this covers most modding bases. Then you get into more subjective things like "useless white noise" and such. - The dogpiling/bullying stuff is important to keep an eye on, but it's tricky because it's also pretty subjective. There are times when a person is being a dipshit and I feel that having the thread call them a dipshit is warranted (like how the YLLS General Thread has treated dogmatic Low Carbers over the years); but I can also see the concern with twitter'esque dogpiling of someone because they said something at odds with thread regulars' opinions, and instead of a discussion and exchange of ideas and perspectives, the "LET'S GET 'EM" stuff happens. At a glance, this is where I think mods/IKs (and posters!!!) with a knack for de-escalating without buttons can help, but "cool off" sixers, or maybe harsher probes for notorious poo poo-stirrers may be needed. - On that note, I'm generally a fan of communities sorting out spats themselves, and mods mostly leading by example; course-correcting with posts instead of buttons (or posting explicit threats to push buttons, which I also think is usually counterproductive). That said, I've never moderated giant, busy forums, so it's easy for me to say that as someone who just glances at YLLS and says "yup, still no reports this month" and only sometimes has to nudge threads in a more productive direction when things get too shitposty, whereas C-SPAM got like 40 reports just yesterday (most of which from people who post in C-SPAM, so it's not a "D&D lurkers trying to barge in" thing). I'd love to see more "let the community sort itself out" and have mods mostly step in to say "okay, we need to move on, y'all are going in circles over [whatever] and everybody has said what they have to say," and only use buttons when it's either a "very much against the rules" thing, or the mod otherwise feels things have gotten too far into "these are just bad posts" land. - Moderating something as a "bad post" requires a lot of community trust, hence why I think crowdsourcing mods would be especially good in C-SPAM. A risk of light-handed moderation is that threads can sometimes become very insular and toxic, perhaps getting a "holier than thou" attitude toward the rest of the forum, which then spills out and leads to slapfights where mods feel compelled to use a firmer hand than usual, which then bumps against "this is a relaxed rules forum; why are you modding conversations?" and leads to backlash and stress. It's complicated, and I don't have an answer beyond "find mods that most of the community trusts, and let them do their thing." If anybody feels like I'm misreading the poo poo out of something, then please let me know. Again, I'm not here to make C-SPAM policy. I just want to have at least a serviceable idea of the going-ons here for those times when a C-SPAM mod asks an admin for something (or a C-SPAM poster PMs me with concerns about modding).
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Jun 27, 2021 02:03
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Incidentally, I received several PMs about the Squizzle/A Loving Dog incident. I looked at those posts, and they sucked. We've removed Squizzle as a mod. I posted earlier that mods antagonizing posters is generally something to avoid, and that post (and the non-apology follow-up) was out of line. Mods antagonizing posters has been part of SA's shtick for years (and I'm certainly guilty of having done it before, especially a decade ago when aggro modding was the norm), but we need to grow past that.
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Jun 27, 2021 02:04
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euphronius posted:shine do you want feedback to your observations or just want us to all move on By all means, give me the feedback, especially if you feel I'm really misreading people's words.
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Jun 27, 2021 02:14
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 01:21 |
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My takeaway from the thread is that brackets are good.
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Jun 29, 2021 07:36
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