Reply to post: Re: What happened to Eadon??

Re: What happened to Eadon??

Trevor,

This should be interesting. Is this one to start a topic on El Reg Matters, or is discussion going to be launched with an article, in order to get all the commentards involved? You get a much smaller set of us on the non-article forums.

I can imagine it's time for a re-think. Unless I'm mistaken the volume of voting and comments has gone up massively, even in the last 6 months. For example, it was only early this year that I hit 2,000 upvotes (I wondered if my badge would turn silver), and it's now 4,300. Voting's been going for more than a couple of years - so this looks like acceleration. There also seem to be a lot more 100 post topics than there used to be.

I used to moderate on a forum for an online game, with a million users. Although most of them never posted. I don't remember ever being upset by a post on there, although I guess accidentally clicking on links to that bloody Rick Astley song counts as mentally traumatic... I've always hated those link-shortener sites since those days, as they won't let you plug the link into their site and see where it goes, before you play Russian Roulette and click on it. Hence the Rick Astley pain.

Admittedly we didn't have article authors in the same way, so there wasn't the same personal target for bile and spite. There was a game-dev forum, but I didn't moderate that, I'd imagine it suffered from those problems. I never saw a death threat, and I believe El Reg have had to put up with several of those, mostly my job was stopping the bickering getting unpleasant (for which the Scottish forums were a nightmare) and swearing (for which the Irish were worst). And spam.

Obviously you've got the legal issues as well. You don't want to be sued for something written by a commentard, and I believe there's more of a risk of that as you moderate.

As well as laying out what El Reg is thinking the options are, I think we also need to know what problems it is that these changes are meant to solve.

For example I wouldn't recommend changing policy to get rid of swearing. There's not too much on here, so I don't see it as a problem. But it opens a moderation minefield. However, if other users see that as a problem (some who browsing at work), then you'll be forced to get into it. Oh what joy...

If you're worried about not getting bad stuff off the forums quickly enough, then you could give certain users a bit of moderating-ligtht powers. Just give them a 'report post' button that temporarily hides it, until El Reg staff have had a chance to look at it. Should be easy enough to take away if they abuse it, or over-use it. Non-employee moderation is something a lot of forums do. However, I've not noticed too many bad posts, given the rough-and-tumble that is normally allowed here. But if there's a lot being modded, it may be an option to reduce the workload of paid staff, let more through and catch it afterwards.

Hmmm. Think I've gone on a bit here. So I'll shut up. Perhaps El Reg should introduce punishments for posts that are too long? Eek! Shouldn't have suggested that...