Temporary Forum Closures (including DISCUSS RULES)

constance · May 26, 2007

for example, you contact a staffer you trust. they look and see that someone has done something they shouldn't. They would contact Meh or Tawny. In the very hypothetical case that they didn't feel Meh or Tawny was the right person to talk to, they could choose someone else. All you have to do is bring an issue to someone you trust on staff, and I am just asking you to have a modicum of trust that there is at least one honest person who will right wrongs and take people to task.

Remember, this is staff discipline we are talking about. I don't know a single thing about conciliator discipline - and I don't want to.

Miracle Storm · May 26, 2007

meh · May 26, 2007

Crazy Liz said:
So you're suggesting people find an Admin they trust and ask them a question the Admin can't answer?

It would really help if I didn't just say them and they over and over without specifying who I'm thinking of, wouldn't it?

A member is concerned and thinks something fishy might be going on with the approving/unapproving of posts in a thread. That member doesn't like Support staff, so they seek out a member of staff they do know and trust. They say to the mod, "Hey...I think something is going on in this thread in DR. Could you check it out?"

The mod then checks out the thread and also thinks something fishy might be going on. So they either come to us, or- if they don't like us, either- go to their Admin or other senior staffer they trust and say, "A member had a concern about this thread, so I looked at it. I think something fishy might be going on as well because of A, B, C. Could you check into this?"

That's what I was trying to say. I think I got it out right this time

Crazy Liz · May 26, 2007

meh said:
It would really help if I didn't just say them and they over and over without specifying who I'm thinking of, wouldn't it?

A member is concerned and thinks something fishy might be going on with the approving/unapproving of posts in a thread. That member doesn't like Support staff, so they seek out a member of staff they do know and trust. They say to the mod, "Hey...I think something is going on in this thread in DR. Could you check it out?"

The mod then checks out the thread and also thinks something fishy might be going on. So they either come to us, or- if they don't like us, either- go to their Admin or other senior staffer they trust and say, "A member had a concern about this thread, so I looked at it. I think something fishy might be going on as well because of A, B, C. Could you check into this?"

That's what I was trying to say. I think I got it out right this time

OK. That makes a bit more sense.

But the member who makes that contact can never expect to get a response, can they?

constance · May 26, 2007

I don't think that's a good assumption. I have in the past apologized for staff actions and told members that things had been done to address the problem.

Are we going to hand you the mod's HR file? Give you a bushel of tomatoes and tie her to a pillory? Put her in the stocks so people can laugh at her? No. But we will do what is appropriate.

I realize that there are people on staff who you may not trust. Maybe some people distrust everyone on staff, but I'm fairly sure that you trust at least one person on staff.

There is a very good chance that when general statements of distrust are made, the people in this conversation who are on staff, and who have been working very hard to make this a good and positive change, may feel that they aren't trusted.

Petunia · May 26, 2007

nyj said:
http://www.christianforums.com/showthread.php?p=35090011

I like this idea too.

constance said:
I realize that there are people on staff who you may not trust. Maybe some people distrust everyone on staff, but I'm fairly sure that you trust at least one person on staff.

Some of us have good reason not to trust some staff.

But I trust most of you.

Crazy Liz · May 26, 2007

constance said:
I don't think that's a good assumption. I have in the past apologized for staff actions and told members that things had been done to address the problem.

Are we going to hand you the mod's HR file? Give you a bushel of tomatoes and tie her to a pillory? Put her in the stocks so people can laugh at her? No. But we will do what is appropriate.

For about the 100th time, I don't want to see anybody's DISCIPLINARY RECORD. There is a whole lot of secrecy around here that doesn't involve anybody's privacy. I want the staff member at least to be able to tell me whether or not something fishy was, in fact, going on. I'd like to have some idea what procedures are being followed by the staff.

I'm also afraid that, "Things have been done to address the problem," doesn't really give any helpful information at all. You don't need to identify the staff member, but you could say, "We have made a policy of ___________ to make sure this never happens again, and if it looks like it continues to happen, please contact ___________, who is responsible for investigating such problems." There's no confidentiality breach there. No pillory. No tomatoes. Just a specific answer, rather than a general assurance that "the problem has been addressed."

I realize that there are people on staff who you may not trust. Maybe some people distrust everyone on staff, but I'm fairly sure that you trust at least one person on staff.

There is a very good chance that when general statements of distrust are made, the people in this conversation who are on staff, and who have been working very hard to make this a good and positive change, may feel that they aren't trusted.

This is true. The biggest cause of this is Rule 3.8, which prevents member from stating specific problems. If individual staff members want to be assured that postings in the Support forums do not apply to them, there is an easy way to make that happen. Eliminate Rule 3.8, so members can say who they are talking about and the other staff members don't have to feel like maybe these posts apply to them.

Bottom line: The cure for general statements of distrust involves 2 things:

1) Allow specific statements instances to be discussed, so members are not required to raise problems only in vague generalities.

2) Make staff's assurances as specific as possible, only omitting details that are truly personal and disciplinary in nature.

drstevej · May 26, 2007

What is the target average time for post approval?

minutes
hours
day or more

What will happen if the delay does not meet the target? I regularly go to a local post office that has an official management sign saying, "We try to serve you in 5 minutes or less." Regularly, it takes 20-45 minutes. The sign is meaningless.

Is there a target for turnaround on post approval?
If it is not met will this idea be changed or scrapped?

If moderated fora do not have a quick turn around the result is the stiffling of discussion . If Execs do not want to stiffle discussion they should post reasonable goals and insure they are met.

drstevej · May 26, 2007

Often I edit a post for spelling or further clarification. How does the moderated feature accomodate these needs?

Naomi4Christ · May 26, 2007

drstevej said:
What is the target average time for post approval?

minutes

hours

day or more

What will happen if the delay does not meet the target? I regularly go to a local post office that has an official management sign saying, "We try to serve you in 5 minutes or less." Regularly, it takes 20-45 minutes. The sign is meaningless.

Is there a target for turnaround on post approval?
If it is not met will this idea be changed or scrapped?

If moderated fora do not have a quick turn around the result is the stiffling of discussion . If Execs do not want to stiffle discussion they should post reasonable goals and insure they are met.

Great questions! I think we would be looking at hours rather than minutes or days.

If we don't meet our targets, we will investigate the reason why. If the reasons are because of something like a holiday weekend, or forum downtime, then I think we could all agree that this is something we can all live with. If we genuinely can't approve within a reasonable time on a daily basis, then we have a strategy for solving this problem.

The main objective of the moderated forum is not to stifle discussion, but to prevent rule violations.

Part of our 2 week downtime is anticipating these issues and coming up with strategies for dealing with them.

Naomi4Christ · May 26, 2007

drstevej said:
Often I edit a post for spelling or further clarification. How does the moderated feature accomodate these needs?

I think it will probably work the same way as in the normal forums. When you spot an error in your post, you can edit it. I will double check this with the Recovery Team to see if edits have go back through the approval process, so thanks for asking

If you have a major change to make, you can always PM one of the Support Team, and we can provide you with a copy of your post so that you can ponder what changes you need to make. You can decide to abandon your first post (ask us not to approve it) and then make a brand new post, you can ask us to edit, or you can wait and edit once it's approved.

constance · May 26, 2007

I am on at varying times most days between the hours of 7am and midnight CST. it is RARE that there is not a sr. support staff member logged in when I look. I am optimistic that the support staff will be able to keep the posts rolling. We won't know though until we start testing.

DrSteveJ - regarding your question, the system doesn't unapprove posts. I would venture that if you posted "I love funny bunnies" and it was approved, and then you replaced it with a link to a prohibited website, or broke another rule, that you would receive a warning or infraction for the rule violation.

I would suggest that if someone feels their post may be brinky that they might wish to contact a support mod prior to saving their edit.

And if someone does habitually edit their posts to "sneak" posts in, I suppose they'd be subject to an FSB eventually.

"We have made a policy of ___________ to make sure this never happens again, and if it looks like it continues to happen, please contact ___________, who is responsible for investigating such problems."

CL I'm sorry if I went too far in my interpretation of your post. I can't tell you how many PMs I've gotten where a member has demanded that someone be "fired" or tender a public apology over a warning.... So I get a little tender.

I have made statements very similar to the above, although I don't know if stating the policy is necessary. I've said, "I've looked into this and [we have a new policy that should prevent this from happening again.] [have spoken with the staff member, etc.] Please let me know if you still see this happening"

drstevej · May 26, 2007

Naomi:

[1] Hours is a discouraging goal, IMO. The forum Is "Discuss" Rules not "Suggestion Box." If it takes hours for a post to clear I guarantee the result will be detrimental and many ideas will never surface.

[2] If I can edit a post without an approval what is to stop someone from posting something bland and then edit after approval with something borderline? Thus the moderation feature is rendered moot.

Edit: See how cool it is now, Constance was answering as I was typing.

constance · May 26, 2007

DrSteveJ, I guess at this point, I would perhaps look at how long it's taken for this thread to move forward - i.e. you post something, staff answers. I think that is a reasonable benchmark as to how long it might take for a post to be approved. Of course, in all these cases, the mod would have just hit approve, not have to run around trying to get the answer. So I can say that it appears that it would take less time than it is in this thread.

Your post was posted at X:09. I saw it at about X:11. I have now replied...which means this would have taken less than 5 minutes to approve.

TomUK · May 26, 2007

I've been thinking about this a lot today and was reflecting back on the thread all about whether CF should have another amnesty. The senior staff rallied to say that the actual effect of this would be to actually create more work for the forum as it would mean that those members who spend most of their time flaming take longer to be banned etc. Those of us who actually (try) to abide by the forum rules and who don't have any warnings (yet ) are being punished, and those who flout the rules are simply going to be spending more time at the forum and creating more work in general for the staff.

When i was a mod of the Anglican forum there was an especially difficult period during the time of the general convention of the ECUSA and STR just turned into a complete flame fest. If i recall correctly we were getting some 30 or 40 reports a day for a time. What we had to do in the end is just state to all the users of the forum that for a limited period we were just going to have to have time of zero tolerance. In a remarkably quick time the forum settled down. My advice about about is to stop creating work for the conciliators and the support team and simply clamp on every single rule violation and ramp up the warnings to infractions as quick as possible. It wouldn't be a problem to post a sticky stating zero tolerance. Rather than wasting time with and pandering to the rule breakers they will very quickly either be banned or learn they need to get their act together or they'll be banned. That way those of us who actually want to discuss policy will be able to discuss it as these proposed arrangements will stop proper discussion from taking place.

meh · May 26, 2007

drstevej said:
What is the target average time for post approval?

minutes

hours

day or more

What will happen if the delay does not meet the target? I regularly go to a local post office that has an official management sign saying, "We try to serve you in 5 minutes or less." Regularly, it takes 20-45 minutes. The sign is meaningless.

Is there a target for turnaround on post approval?
If it is not met will this idea be changed or scrapped?

If moderated fora do not have a quick turn around the result is the stiffling of discussion . If Execs do not want to stiffle discussion they should post reasonable goals and insure they are met.

The goal is fast. I don't think we can have an official "target" until it's up and running and we see what's what. Our team has people in all different time zones.

I don't think not having the posts approved immediately upon posting will stifle anything. Ideas and thoughts will still appear- maybe just not as immediately as users would like.

If some posts are appearing and being approved and other posts are not- it's probably because there is a rule violation in which case the conciliators will contact the member.

drstevej said:
Often I edit a post for spelling or further clarification. How does the moderated feature accomodate these needs?

You will be able to edit after your post is approved. I would advise people not to use that as a way to get in a rule violation. If we approve your post on good faith, we expect good faith in return. Editing for spelling or to clarify something is fine. If it's edited to include a rule break- not fine.

Naomi4Christ · May 26, 2007

I think for most posts, we will be able to approve within the hour, but obviously could not guarantee this. I personally think that if we routinely fail to approve (or unapprove) posts within the day, then we need to look at our system.

meh · May 26, 2007

I just want to remind people of something stated in the first post of this thread. This is the way DR is going forward. Questions about how it will work are encouraged and will be answered. This isn't a thread in which to state how DR should be set up or not set up. It's a place to discuss and ask questions about how the new set-up will work, because this is the new set-up.

Naomi4Christ · May 26, 2007

Just to add another point about approval times...

The point of moving to a moderated forum is to avoid rule violations and therefore reports. Since the team will be freed from working on large numbers of the reports, we will have more time to staff DR. We anticipate that approving a post will take, basically, seconds to do in the majority of cases. Some will take longer when we are unsure of a violation (but these reports should be few), and again, it won't take too long (longer than seconds, though) to decide to pass the post to the conciliator team.

With our timezones, we pretty much have Support team members on around the clock, although we can't offer cast-iron guarantees to that. If you post at a time when we usually have just one member checking in from time-to-time, then it make take a bit longer to get your post approved.

I do think our peak time for posting in DR, will coincide with the peak time for Support Team coverage. However, if you decide to post at 3am, then don't be too surprised if your post isn't instantly approved!

On a practical level, you aren't going to get an answer to your question until there's a team member available anyway

GreenMunchkin · May 26, 2007

Humm... I understand that this is happening, and I get the reasoning, because DR as it stood was absolutely hideous, but I guess I'm slightly worried that the new system will feel a little like being a child in school who puts your arm up to speak, and you're not allowed to until the teacher gives you permission. Know what I mean?

I just don't know how much it'll do to increase, and improve, member/staff relationships, because it sort of, highlights the inherently hierarchical structure in a way. And the structure isn't the fault (?) of anyone currently on staff, so it could maybe build resentment that would be aimed at people who don't deserve it in the least.

Please may I ask a question? Hoping very much for the best... but if it doesn't work - if member/staff relationships diverge even further - will the idea be scrapped? Or tweaked? Like, will the new system have a sort of probationary period or is it permanent set-in-stone policy, regardless?

Thank you vay much

Temporary Forum Closures (including DISCUSS RULES)

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