One small step for a man . . .

Written By: - Date published: 1:45 pm, July 28th, 2009 - 13 comments
Categories: blogs, dpf - Tags:

It took just a few seconds, it was reasonable and considered, yet, amazingly, a suggestion from David Slack of Island Life has achieved what The Standard and many others have been pleading for years: the cleaning up of the filth at Kiwiblog.

David Slack accurately described Kiwiblog as “a little crucible for rabid bigoted unthinking cruelty . . . and . . . a blight on on-line society that needs to be reined in”. The audio of David Slack’s piece can be heard 12:53 into the second half of The Panel discussion here.

David Slack’s comments were in response to Farrar’s defence for Kiwiblog when he claimed he was unable to monitor “500 comments a day” and there was little he could do to temper the nature of the comments that were posted. David Slack challenged this, suggesting that being “too busy” might not be an adequate defence in defamation proceedings and urged Farrar to consider adopting a moderation system and . . . hey presto!.

Farrar says that for the next four days commencing today and excluding his General Debate orgy “all other threads will be moderated/censored and posts that are even moderately offtopic, trollish, abusive will be deleted or edited”.

Well done to Farrar for responding positively and many, many thanks to David Slack.

– BLiP

[actually, David gets about 300 comments a typical weekday, like we do. It’s not so much to moderate. Initially we didn’t have moderation and we got threads that were just 200+ comment flamewars. So we sorted it: Came down hard on the vile ones at the outset. Banned who we had to. Set the spam filter for key words ‘dykocracy’,’feminazis’, that kind of thing. Comment numbers fell initially but they were soon be replaced by a better class of commentator. We have to delete very few comments these days because the rats stop bothering to try. While I wish David every success, he did try moderation a while back but it failed because he appointed partisan moderators. Hopefully, this time is better.]

13 comments on “One small step for a man . . . ”

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  1. jarbury 1
    28 July 2009 at 1:52 pm

    I haven’t noticed much change….

    He’s still letting through comments that refer to beneficiaries as “parasites”.

  2. Lew 2
    28 July 2009 at 2:01 pm

    Steady on, BLiP, it’s four DAYS, not four weeks.

    No gainfully-employed human could do that for a whole month. Did you think David was unemployed due to the recession, or something?

    L

    • BLiP 2.1
      28 July 2009 at 2:10 pm

      Ooops – my mistake, thanks for pointing it out. Maybe you could correct it? Perhaps its a case of getting too excited about “greenshoots” 🙂

      • Lew 2.1.1
        28 July 2009 at 2:14 pm

        BLiP, I think you’re mistaking me for someone with poster’s rights here.

        We have to nurture the greenshoots, not crush them under the weight of expectation 🙂

        L

    • lprent 2.2
      28 July 2009 at 7:03 pm

      Took well over 4 months to establish a reasonable degree of order here. There is always a bit of fire stomping to continue with.

      However as we all know the right are far more regimented than the left. They like obeying the ‘leaders’. Some interesting studies have been done on their sheep like behaviors. Of course that isn’t what their ideologies say, but that dysfunction between reality and ideology is pretty common.

  3. infused 3
    28 July 2009 at 2:14 pm

    Difference is, you have a lot of moderators, he doesn’t.

    • BLiP 3.1
      28 July 2009 at 3:24 pm

      And the reason he doesn’t is that few of his regulars are, in any way, moderate. I really do wish Farrar all the best in this endeavour and encourage his moderators to be fair, no one wants to silence the blog. Even filth should be protected under the principle of free speech.

    • lprent 3.2
      28 July 2009 at 6:27 pm

      Wrong…

      The most moderators we’ve ever had is when there were 3 and a bit of us once. Me, IrishBill, Tane, and Steve (rarely). Steve has gone, so has Tane.

      Most of the authors only have rights to moderate their own posts. Marty (?), Rocky and The Sprout have been known to do so with mixed results.

      Moderating is done to reduce work long term for the moderators.

      The trick is to be bloody ruthless (so arguing simply increases the penalty), moderately arbitrary (to prevent lawyering), moderately consistent (so people know what to expect), generally being un-inclined to moderate (lets the discussion run freely), and totally bloody minded vindictive when you have to exert yourself. It winds up as being People either get tossed out or self-moderate. In the end it results in having to do relatively little work, which is the intent.

      It’d be fair to say that Tane and I did the majority of the moderation because we have the required temperament that occasionally gave a training reminder as well as the bans. That meant that people survived for further moderation. Being ‘noticed’ by Irish was often equivalent of having a death sentence passed on you. However he has been getting a lot calmer recently 😈

      You don’t need many moderators – mainly to cover for people off at work, meetings, personal time etc. You just need to approach it with some level of shared strategy about what you’re trying to achieve. David’s problem is that he will have to piss off people. That is something that I personally enjoy doing to worthy recipients, and I’m not sure that he does.

  4. Tom Semmens 4
    28 July 2009 at 2:52 pm

    “…Difference is, you have a lot of moderators, he doesn’t…”

    Which is no defense whatsoever. If he can’t keep his comments section lawful, non-libelous and decent then he should close it.

    • gingercrush 4.1
      28 July 2009 at 3:05 pm

      You should keep your mouth shut considering your racist outbursts on occasions. Or your blatant trolling of Kiwiblog threads that if you did it here would find yourself banned.

  5. Swampy 5
    28 July 2009 at 11:25 pm

    Who cares, it is just anti freedom of speech, what is the big deal, I just ignore the comments that I don’t like.

    I cannot believe that some David Shand is so high and mightly about someone else’s blog, he should mind his own business, who is this David Shand anyway.

    • Lew 5.1
      28 July 2009 at 11:29 pm

      Good question, Swampy! Who is David Shand? Nobody mentioned him until you got back from the pub and started wittering about some guy called David Shand.

      Google tells me there’s one works for the TEC, one who’s a Canadian hockey defenceman, and I bet there are others. Which one are you on about?

      L

  6. randal 6
    29 July 2009 at 1:40 pm

    the funny thing is that this blog promises the liberal programme but practises the evil arts.
    that is; never defining terms, shouting down others, telling lies and saying they are the truth?