Some notes on moderation
Quick post.
As a moderator I’m increasingly finding myself having to spend time on things I shouldn’t have to eg long term commenters flouting the rules repeatedly. The biggest thing that people getting moderated fail to understand is how much moderators value our own time and hate having it wasted. Many moderation starts as a simple warning and ends up as a ban because the commenter either ignores moderation, doesn’t follow instructions, or picks a fight. Which all boils down to wasting moderator time and the moderator drawing a line under it.
From the site Policy,
- Generally wasting a moderators time is just not a good idea. We’re there to deal with isolated problems. People persistently sucking up our voluntary time won’t like the results.
So, my suggestions:
- moderation notes are inserted into the bottom of a comment using hard brackets in bold eg [moderation note – weka] or [lprent: moderation note] Moderators now usually put something like ‘mod note’ in a reply, so that the commenter can more easily see there has been a moderation.
- learn how to use the Replies list (tab in top right of screen on a desktop and the desktop version on a mobile. Not currently available on the mobile version, you can switch to desktop version at the bottom of any page). This is where you can see if moderators are telling you something you need to know. Current moderaters on TS are: Lprent, mickey savage, Mike, weka, Incognito. Authors can moderate their own posts.
- if you get moderated, pay attention to the instructions. I give clear instructions because I want to balance being fair to the commenter with demands on my time. If you don’t follow instructions as given, you may get further moderation.
- if you are unclear on how things work, ask.
- different authors moderate differently. It’s good to read other people’s moderations as they happen to get a sense of how that moderator works.
- if you choose to argue with moderation, you may get banned (because we don’t want to waste our time). It varies from mod to mod, but asking genuine questions politely is usually fine. Having a go at authors or mods isn’t.
- we protect authors here, they are far more important than individual commenters, because authors provide the posts we all comment under. Don’t attack authors or mods.
It’s also a good idea to remember that we have a site Policy and there is a requirement to read it.
My patience is now pretty thin. I remain committed to giving fair warnings before bans for most things (anything way over the top will get an instant ban), but I’m going to claw back my time from this where people should know better, so that I can spend that time writing posts and enjoying the site.
People are welcome to ask questions and discuss under this post providing they can behave themselves.