by Otohiko » Tue Aug 04, 2009 5:50 am
-Reda-,
I’ve been passed along your feedback from before by one of the .org admins, and since I’m the one who handled your situation in the MEP forum a couple of weeks ago, I feel like it’s my duty to respond. That said, I am responding not on behalf of the administration right now, but from my own personal opinion, because I feel strongly that what you have done is wrong and your defense of your actions is totally unfounded.
First of all, there has been no concerted effort to single out anyone. On my part in this situation, all I’ve done was go in the MEP forum and observe. This is strictly the only method I have used to moderate the forums since I joined the administration a few weeks ago. I made no effort to go after you – all I had to do was check threads with posts that I hadn’t yet read, and we all know what I’ve found. Very many people’s posts were treated the same and, well, for some reason you were the only one to insist on your right to keep that post. Don’t put yourself out as a martyr for free speech. You’ve repeatedly abused your forum privileges in gross ways and I honestly don't see how you can claim a say in this. I’ve gone very leniently on you, more so than you deserved based on your behaviour. Perhaps this is because I actually believe in your ability to be a good contributing member and wanted to give you another chance.
As to the MEP forum in general, the fact that it has been lightly moderated before is simply the result of mods having limited time and having more important things to look at. This does not exempt it from rules, and they have been enforced in other forums (like General AMV) more thoroughly all along since they had higher priority in times when few moderators were available. Now that two new moderators have come on board, the administration has a bit more resources to deal with forum moderation. So, the MEP forum again gets looked at. Notice, by the way, that the vast majority of this type of spam dating back several months has now been removed from all threads where it was seen as inappropriate and abusive. And if you see some remaining and are unhappy with it, the appropriate response is not to point at it and say "I can do that too!", but to point it out to the moderators.
On the point of mods being anti-community: you know, I agreed to be mod precisely because I care about the community and want it to grow and improve. I genuinely believe in the fact that a community needs more than just an ‘object’ around which it’s built (like AMVs in our case), it needs socialization and spirit. And I have absolutely no problem if threads in any forum go a little OT. As long as it’s not the predominant mode of discourse, a bit of OT is healthy and necessary. I welcome people being a bit funny and creative. I welcome people mentioning stuff going on in their lives when they talk about MEPs. I’m fine if people occasionally want a bit of sympathy or offer it to others, and I won’t ‘raid’ an MEP thread if people spend a page of it telling someone happy birthday or something like that. But I draw a clear line between good, useful, community-building (but necessarily occasional) digressions and posts that have no value other than to draw attention, waste people’s time, display narcissism, disdain or disrespect, or just plain old offend. What value did your infamous repeating "page 69" post add? Do you seriously believe that inane memes add ANYTHING good to the community? Do you seriously believe that this is a battle of free expression versus censorship?
This to me, -Reda-, is a matter of basic respect versus disrespect for the community and the hobby. There is nothing creative or “adult” to what you have been doing with your recent MEP forum posts. You are not an advocate for creativity or free expression in this case. You are an advocate for a free right to behave anti-socially in the community, the very opposite of what makes a community healthy and mature. And I won’t stand down on this issue just because you put on a facade of rationality to conceal your own basic disrespect for other members as well as the administration of this forum. If you would like to be rational, please explain exactly how your behaviour in situations like the one you were suspended for does anything other than damage the community and erode respect for the site as a whole, and then perhaps we can reason.
There will always be issues on the forum. There will always be cases that are missed, and cases where an individual mod might not see a problem but another will. There are always going to be strange cases and grey areas. Obviously we are working to be as consistent and fair in this as we can. What I can say is that when posts have an obviously abusive purpose, they will be removed - once or repeatedly, if necessary. Just because I or another mod has missed something, somewhere else, at some other point in time, doesn't mean that we make a policy of overlooking obvious problems that require moderation. Others may have a different view of this, but as a forum moderator I see my job as regards individual posts as this: if I see a post that is obviously in violation of rules, I will deal with it. If there is another post somewhere else on the forum made at some point in time by some other member that was similar that I had not come across - well, what can I do about that? It's absurd to expect a mod to consider the whole of the forum and to dwell on context or look for examples in making his/her judgment - not to say that we do not take context into account, and I think mods have been quite sensitive to particular situations and have always been willing to talk things over when there are community issues and misunderstandings. I think administrative work in the AMV community pretty much requires mods to be well-attuned to dealing with grey areas and being diplomatic when it is called for. But when it comes to basic rules, etiquette and purpose of the forums, abusive posts should and will be deleted as quickly as possible upon being found by a mod. There is no grey area in these. And I do not feel that we need to defend our decisions in cases where posts are clearly against forum rules, even if we occasionally miss similar posts elsewhere, or if another mod in another time and another thread dealt with a similar situation differently.
It would be awfully convenient for those who insist on abusing the forum if every single mod decision had to consider the forum's history and be backed up by examples of moderation elsewhere - because then a mod would get bogged down in decisionmaking and while he/she decides whether to remove a post or not, 10 more of this nature can be made and it becomes an uphill battle where consistency is all the more unfeasible. Meanwhile, a decision that is essentially correct and in line with site policy can be made momentarily based on rules alone. This was exactly how I decided to delete several of your posts in the MEP forum. And subsequently, you were banned - not for making the post, but for insisting on it and wasting both my and others' time in repeating your pointless anti-social "feat", while also making offensive and completely inappropriate remarks. The only sense in which I considered your personal history on the forums was that I knew that you were not likely to stop then and there - you were known for previously making repeatedly-abusive posts. The ban was thus directed not at punishing you but at stopping you from wasting any more of anyone's time (including your own) that day, and giving you a cool-off period to consider the warning which you were sent prior to the ban. If this to you is an example of bad moderation, then I'm sorry but you really seem to have a strange sense of what is 'good' for the forum and its' membership.
Thanks,
-Oto