[Discuss] time to scrap the moderated list

[Robert Croson, Jr]

On 6 Dec 2007 at 11:10, John P. Murphy wrote:

> When I unpaused my characters and rejoined the game a while back, I  
> followed the advice on the site ("we very strongly suggest you choose  
> the moderated list"), and subscribed to the moderated list.  As a  
> result, I've only sporadically gotten messages, usually so late that  
> it's impossible to contribute to the discussions, and with many  
> messages missing that should not be.

There are many reasons that a message may not make it to the modded list. 
For example:

1) It is HTML only.
2) It uses top-posting or (extremely excessive) over-quoting.
3) It is insulting or argumentative.
4) It is a FAQ.
5) It is a proposal for a frequently rejected idea. (Sea combat, non-human 
races, messages between islands, etc.)
6) The sender's mail client does not produce a plain-text friendly version. 
(Alex!)
7) The thread has devolved into people simply restating the same thing over 
and over again.
8) The message adds nothing to the discussion. (Snarky comments (unless 
they're really funny!) or "Me too" posts usually get dumped.)
9) The post is a response to any of the above. (No orphaned posts!)

Item 9 is very important to remember. If a post has been rejected for *any* 
reason, any responses to that post will also be rejected, as will responses to 
them, etc. Basically, a rejected post kills the thread.

> For the month of December so  
> far I've gotten 8 messages out of 57 sent to the list, all of them  
> today, some of them from November.  Looking through the unmoderated  
> archives, there are a number of messages that are omitted, and I see  
> no reason for the omission.  Plainly most of the list is receiving  
> the unmoderated version, because entire threads have started and  
> ended before I got a single message.

Moderators often have other things to do. (You know, the whole RL thing and 
all.)  Not only that, but the mdoerators almost always follow the policy of no 
self-moderation. This means that moderators should not mod their own 
messages, or moderate any thread in which they take part. This means that if 
someone starts a thread (or a moderator starts it) and another moderator 
replies to it, then that moderator(s) can never mod any further messages in 
that thread. And since moderators also happen to be people that like to discuss 
things...

> It was a good idea, and worth the experiment, but I think it might be  
> time to move to just one list, either moderated or unmoderated.

The moderated list serves a very important purpose. It filters out all the 
garbage that Tom doesn't want to see: All the messages arguing back and 
forth, the spam, the insults, the FAQs, the inane comments, etc. By trimming 
out all this junk, Tom can actually read the list and see only the relevant 
messages.

But if the modded list doesn't contain the posts you want, then join the 
unmodded list. The mere presence of a modded list doesn't hurt anyone.

Note that moderators do not filter posts based on what ideas they personally 
like or dislike. So long as the post does meets the (fairly loose) requirements, it 
will get passed through. It's not like the mods control access to Tom. Anyone 
can contact him directly, if they want.

If you want to discuss why a post was or was not sent through, ask the mods:
discuss-moderated-owner at news.battlemaster.org


-- 
Rob

Things you don't want to hear while in surgery:
Accept this sacrifice, O Great Lord of Darkness.




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