Post by Scolaire Bocht on Jan 23, 2010 17:55:31 GMT
Guidelines for Moderators
It is hoped that this site will function as an an unmoderated forum, meaning that in the normal course of events people can say what they like and are responsible for what they say, not the people running the board. Therefore, normally speaking, it is pointless asking moderators to get posts removed etc. Hopefully this is the best model from the point of view of free speech and having less disputes if its clear to everybody that that is how the board is run, and of course its also easier for the moderators because they have nothing, or very little, to do.
However there will be a number of problems or exceptions to this 'unmoderated' philosophy:
1 - If you follow these boards on the net you will know that they can become the playgrounds of what are known as trolls, people who are deliberately rude or attempting to derail threads into irrelevance etc. Anyway the question is what to do about it if it is the rule that you don't ever delete posts, because its an unmoderated forum. It is proposed that we ask people to stick to 'unparliamentary language' as far as possible and simply to ignore people who stray from that into abusive terminology etc. In otherwords that's the punishment, you just ignore them and that's it. We just ask all users not to reply to those posters who are abusive like that.
What is or isn't 'unparliamentary language' - and hence would attract the punishment of a person not being replied to - is pretty obvious most of the time but it was decided to add a few terms to be included under that heading:
a) Calling a person a 'fascist' or a 'racist'. Realistically there are not that many people in modern Ireland who think Hitler etc was a great fella - thankfully! - and nobody one suspects mistakes Irish people for a master race either!, but there are legitimate issues to be addressed like immigration and nationalism that are best discussed without people resorting to abusive terminology like this.
b) Calling somebody a conspiracy theorist or a point of view a 'conspiracy theory'. Again in practice these are just abusive and insulting terms that are flung at people with abandon nowadays and just derail discussions into pointless philosophical arguments whereas if people just stuck to arguing the facts about a particular issue, without resorting to these abusive terms, maybe we would have better discussions.
c) Calling religious people superstitious or accusing them of always using 'unscientific' reasoning. Hopefully we will have many good discussions between atheists and religious people etc and we don't mean to be cut across them but at the same time there is a lot of insulting stuff said about religious people in modern Ireland which would shock our ancestors and cause a lot of arguments on the boards. So sure people can say whatever they like in criticism of all churches and their teachings but hopefully would not resort to blanket insults including that all priests or Catholics are paedophiles, or that religious people do not use 'reason' in general in their arguments. That last sweeping criticism is surely just being insulting to all those old and modern Irish who used an advanced education in logic, rhetoric and Greek philosophy in developing and learning the intricacies of theology.
In any case, as pointed out, the punishment for using that language is just that users would be encouraged to ignore posters who resort to terms like that.
2 - There is also one tool in the armory of the Moderator which could arise in the war against the trolls. Moderators can view the IP addresses of people who post on the boards and they can use that to keep an eye on the trolls. Basically if a Moderator was concerned about some particular poster on the board he/she can look up their IP number on the net (the Moderator can see a number beside the post on the forum and can search with that number on websites like these: www.dnsstuff.com/
www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation
www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp?siteid=361&channelid=P99C361S570N0B142A1D219E0000V100&clickid=10000000 00
to see where the number comes from) and then could - in rare circumstances - point out to people on the board where the poster is writing from. It is suspected that sometimes you get trolls employed by FF HQ or the government press office and if you were able to detect that from the IP number you could warn people about it on the board. But this is not to be done lightly, in fact only very rarely, because most of the time you have to respect the privacy of the poster e.g. a lot of posters could be using a company's computers to post on the net and you could get them in trouble unfairly if you exposed their IP number. But still it might be interesting to watch the IP numbers in case you can detect some obvious PR stuff or trolling coming from some paid hack in a govt office or a military base or something!
3. - Another problem is spam. Some boards are plagued with the same kind of spam that you get in emails, like financial scams, links to porn sites and advertisements for dodgy investments and pharmaceuticals etc. So that would be the exception in that hopefully moderators would delete messages like that, again that is just posts that are obviously hijacking the site like they hijack email addresses. Its not that all commercial or advertising posts would be considered spam or anything like that e.g. if somebody wanted to advertise a local band or event, even a commercial one, in Ireland or the North Midlands that would be OK, we are only talking here about the huge mass mailing type of spam.
4. - Another exception is the boards that are controlled by each individual No campaign group. These boards will have their own moderator from the different organisations, as pointed out above, and they can set up whatever moderating rules they like in their own forum. Maybe if individual moderators want to have special rules like this maybe they might point out the rules in a new thread on the forum and make it a 'sticky' - meaning that the thread will stay at the top on the list of threads on the forum.
It is hoped that this site will function as an an unmoderated forum, meaning that in the normal course of events people can say what they like and are responsible for what they say, not the people running the board. Therefore, normally speaking, it is pointless asking moderators to get posts removed etc. Hopefully this is the best model from the point of view of free speech and having less disputes if its clear to everybody that that is how the board is run, and of course its also easier for the moderators because they have nothing, or very little, to do.
However there will be a number of problems or exceptions to this 'unmoderated' philosophy:
1 - If you follow these boards on the net you will know that they can become the playgrounds of what are known as trolls, people who are deliberately rude or attempting to derail threads into irrelevance etc. Anyway the question is what to do about it if it is the rule that you don't ever delete posts, because its an unmoderated forum. It is proposed that we ask people to stick to 'unparliamentary language' as far as possible and simply to ignore people who stray from that into abusive terminology etc. In otherwords that's the punishment, you just ignore them and that's it. We just ask all users not to reply to those posters who are abusive like that.
What is or isn't 'unparliamentary language' - and hence would attract the punishment of a person not being replied to - is pretty obvious most of the time but it was decided to add a few terms to be included under that heading:
a) Calling a person a 'fascist' or a 'racist'. Realistically there are not that many people in modern Ireland who think Hitler etc was a great fella - thankfully! - and nobody one suspects mistakes Irish people for a master race either!, but there are legitimate issues to be addressed like immigration and nationalism that are best discussed without people resorting to abusive terminology like this.
b) Calling somebody a conspiracy theorist or a point of view a 'conspiracy theory'. Again in practice these are just abusive and insulting terms that are flung at people with abandon nowadays and just derail discussions into pointless philosophical arguments whereas if people just stuck to arguing the facts about a particular issue, without resorting to these abusive terms, maybe we would have better discussions.
c) Calling religious people superstitious or accusing them of always using 'unscientific' reasoning. Hopefully we will have many good discussions between atheists and religious people etc and we don't mean to be cut across them but at the same time there is a lot of insulting stuff said about religious people in modern Ireland which would shock our ancestors and cause a lot of arguments on the boards. So sure people can say whatever they like in criticism of all churches and their teachings but hopefully would not resort to blanket insults including that all priests or Catholics are paedophiles, or that religious people do not use 'reason' in general in their arguments. That last sweeping criticism is surely just being insulting to all those old and modern Irish who used an advanced education in logic, rhetoric and Greek philosophy in developing and learning the intricacies of theology.
In any case, as pointed out, the punishment for using that language is just that users would be encouraged to ignore posters who resort to terms like that.
2 - There is also one tool in the armory of the Moderator which could arise in the war against the trolls. Moderators can view the IP addresses of people who post on the boards and they can use that to keep an eye on the trolls. Basically if a Moderator was concerned about some particular poster on the board he/she can look up their IP number on the net (the Moderator can see a number beside the post on the forum and can search with that number on websites like these: www.dnsstuff.com/
www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm?GetLocation
www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp?siteid=361&channelid=P99C361S570N0B142A1D219E0000V100&clickid=10000000 00
to see where the number comes from) and then could - in rare circumstances - point out to people on the board where the poster is writing from. It is suspected that sometimes you get trolls employed by FF HQ or the government press office and if you were able to detect that from the IP number you could warn people about it on the board. But this is not to be done lightly, in fact only very rarely, because most of the time you have to respect the privacy of the poster e.g. a lot of posters could be using a company's computers to post on the net and you could get them in trouble unfairly if you exposed their IP number. But still it might be interesting to watch the IP numbers in case you can detect some obvious PR stuff or trolling coming from some paid hack in a govt office or a military base or something!
3. - Another problem is spam. Some boards are plagued with the same kind of spam that you get in emails, like financial scams, links to porn sites and advertisements for dodgy investments and pharmaceuticals etc. So that would be the exception in that hopefully moderators would delete messages like that, again that is just posts that are obviously hijacking the site like they hijack email addresses. Its not that all commercial or advertising posts would be considered spam or anything like that e.g. if somebody wanted to advertise a local band or event, even a commercial one, in Ireland or the North Midlands that would be OK, we are only talking here about the huge mass mailing type of spam.
4. - Another exception is the boards that are controlled by each individual No campaign group. These boards will have their own moderator from the different organisations, as pointed out above, and they can set up whatever moderating rules they like in their own forum. Maybe if individual moderators want to have special rules like this maybe they might point out the rules in a new thread on the forum and make it a 'sticky' - meaning that the thread will stay at the top on the list of threads on the forum.