addendum to the prior post.
While I'd like everyone to treat each other with courtesy and respect.
I'm only enforcing the things I mentioned above.
Instead I'll try to, and encourage other user to, lead by example to create the atmosphere you want the forum to have.

If you don't want to see shitty threads, don't reply to shitty threads. If enough people do so the threads will slow to a trickle. If you enjoy shitty threads, have at it.

Goodnight to everyone. I hope my pair of posts ease some of the concern about the forum moderation. Even if I am only speaking for myself.

@damian ... that's all good, if you add some internal discussions with the other mods before you take it on yourself. You should be able to sort it out better that way.

Also, it'd be good if, in step two, you use the PM system if you choose to go alone, that way you can clear up all the discrepancies with them before they come up and potentially avoid making it a public situation at all. I still maintain that that's the problem here - if these kinds of things stayed more behind the scenes, the collective wouldn't take such a big issue to changes.

This is how I see it:

Kestas and Zultar own a house. They throw a party. You show up as a guest. It's cool if you throw in some money to help with booze and snacks, but you don't even have to. This is the best party in town, and you're lucky to be here.

Some of the party guests are a little rowdy. The owners ask some of their friends to help keep an eye on things to make sure they don't get out of hand. At some point, the owners are not happy with the level of rowdiness. They feel like some of the guests they wanted to enjoy the party left because some people were being dicks. Zultar gets up on a table and says, "Attention everyone. Let's all try to be a little more civil so we can all enjoy the party. Anybody who can't handle that is going to be asked to leave."

Instead of just accepting that this is a reasonable request and they're getting the benefit of continuing to be a guest at this awesome free party, people are grumbling that:

1. The owners interrupted the party to give some vague warning.
2. Guests have some kind of rights and are owed an explanation before they get kicked out, or even asked nicely to chill pit before getting kicked out.
3. There's no precise definition of what constitutes being a reasonable party guest.
4. The owners' friends may be arbitrary or untrustworthy in making a call on who is unreasonable.
5. The owners didn't provide specific names of which guests left, which they should expect to have to do.

That's ridiculous. Enjoy the party. If the owners or the owners' friends tell you you're being a jerk and you need to shape up, do what they say. If you don't, then don't be surprised if you get kicked to the curb. The owners don't need to prove or justify anything to you. It's their house and you're a guest.

I'm certain there will be internal discussion about where the line is behind closed doors.
However I'm 98% confident that the line I've drawn is one that all of the other mods agree with. In fact I suspect it's a bare minimum line. In my first draft I had said PM, I changed it to post because we, as a mod team need to sort out forum moderation so the same person doesn't get tagged twice.

The only reason we need to make these decisions public is so that everyone is on the same page and members aren't shocked and indignant about receiving a warning. (Just indignant.)

Except it isn't a party. It's a website with easily-ignored posts by thousands of people. That's an awful analogy.

"What am I going to be looking for and asking people to stop? Ie. what do I mean by unreasonable. I'm going to be looking for instances of people hurling insults at each other which if spoken offline could be considered an accusation of a crime. Ie. the whole Draugnar the pedophile gag. Similarly statements that would be considered to be threats in person.

Consider that a basic guideline. Zultar will probably provide better details." (damian)

This is a good example of criteria that are specific enough to be enforceable yet general enough to be succinct (we don't, after all, want a multi-page legal document specifying precisely what turns of phrase are acceptable under what circumstances and in what contexts). Something of this level of specificity is, I think, what needs to be spelled out in somewhat more detail than zultar or anyone else has officially given us. I know there are the idiots who will try to skirt the line as closely as they can no matter what official guidelines you, the admin/mod team, set up, but we need something a little more concrete than "think vitriol, vile, etc." and "Be reasonable." Putting that out will make the system much easier to implement and your rulings MUCH easier to defend once the system goes into effect.

For the record, I'm not opposed to deletion of posts -- or, after several wanton offenses, of banning users -- that incite to violence, libel other members, or implicitly (or explicitly) deny the admin and his team's right to exercise final authority. Notice that I don't include criticisms of admin policy decisions in items that are okay to ban, nor do I include first-time offenses or strongly-held, popularly-unaccepted views of the world and other people. But we do need to have some idea of what's actually in and what's actually out. What we've seen so far has too much scent of the "I know it when I see it" standard for my comfort.

That said, to agree with krellin, whatever rule, in whatever form, ends up being put forward, I will do my level best to comply with it.

"or implicitly (or explicitly) deny the admin and his team's right to exercise final authority. "

Good grief, Smoker, you support petty tyranny. So long as the moderator factually does have ultimate control, what relevancy does it have whether people acknowledge it or not? Do we have to bow and scrape to the moderator-on-high now?

No, this is exactly the stunt that maple is trying to pull right now. The admin types tell him they don't want him acting the way he's acting and that they're going to see to it that he faces consequences if he persists, and he goes and posts a thread that says "no you won't, and you're all a bunch of brain-dead idiots for even suggesting the idea."

OutsideSmoker,

Yes, and it would be outrageous to suspend him for that. If they are going to suspend him for his other behavior anyway, they can do so (though I disagree, as I've said), but it's the attribute of petty tyrants to start suspending people for now bowing and scraping.

Or what Taos did a while ago by castigating the admin and mods for not banning someone for cheating when the mods discerned that there was, in fact, no cheating going on. But he's better than maple on this point, in that he at least knew he should stop.

All we ask is that members follow the rules, however begrudgingly.

Damian:

Firstly, I know for a fact that you all in the big bad mod corner have records galore. You can easily shoot a message around the team that says, "Hey guys (and girl if CF is still active), I just sent a message to X about their post in threadID=X which I thought crossed a line. If anyone thinks I misjudged, let me know so I can offer some sort of explanation to X and so that I don't make the same mistake in the future." That message gets recorded because it goes from personal email to mod email, and all of those are saved, or it can be written down somewhere if that email approach doesn't work. I can't give you specifics here because I don't know how you all operate, but I absolutely assure you that, given the organizational system that kestas and friends designed over the years, you will have no problem keeping track of who has been warned and for what.

Secondly, you might be confident that the line you've drawn is right in line with other mods, but clarification never hurts. You have your own ideas about these things, and maybe one day you're feeling a bit more irritable and you go after a post that usually wouldn't be so bad, but today's just a shitty day, you know? So you have a chance to go talk it over. Besides, every other person you contact is going to ask what Zultar, Jmo, or Abge thinks about it, and since you've already talked with them as well as other mods, you can relay that information quickly and resolve the situation quickly.

Lastly, I really think that PM warnings (or email - both would work the same) will lessen the "indignant" side to your job. You can talk on a more personal level and you can have civil back-and-forth conversation, whereas on the forum someone else that, let's be honest, has absolutely no fucking clue what's going on is going to jump in (probably me) and give some dumb analysis of the situation that makes you out as the villain and blows the whole thing up. When you talk one-on-one, you're not going to get ganged up on, but when you open it up to everyone, you're almost always going to have to deal with backlash and in some cases a permanent grudge which has many players right now calling "mod abuse" on a regular basis. If you talk privately, personally, and civilly, you'll still run into this, but not nearly as often.

While this may be a terrible analogy, I think it's worth considering. If you break a rule in game, the moderators never jump into the global chat to give a warning; it's typically by email so that you guys can record what's going on. You also keep other players out of the picture and that's a good thing. With PM or email, you can take the same approach toward the forum - easy to record warnings and keeps the public backlash out of it.

If something happens and a player continually disagrees with your judgment, they can still appeal to zultar/kestas, and if the mods decide that we need a public discussion about a rule, we can have a public discussion. The difference will be that in that case, the discussion won't turn toward a single incident like this one did because it won't stem from a single incident; rather, it'll be broader and about the topic at hand so you all can get an actual idea of what the community wants, not just what we think about a given situation.

Hopefully that all makes sense, but it's late, so if something's weird, I'll try to clarify.

Re: banning players -

I don't think it's even necessary to ban players over the forum. If the account was made to spam the forum (think oil paintings), that's fine, but the site is always primarily for the game, and the only bans ought to be based on in-game offenses. Permanent silences aren't at all out of the question, though.

"the only bans ought to be based on in-game offenses. Permanent silences aren't at all out of the question, though."
This is a very fine idea.

I'll say this much for your analogy, THM:

Booze and snacks would make a few of our more, um, colorful guests more entertaining. :p

I get the analogy, for the most part, I think it's good, though Chaqa does raise a good counter-point...it isn't like at a party, where it can be hard to ignore the noise level or active douche-baggery six feet in front of your face...

We have a mute button for a reason, and we have the ability to ignore people, after all.

What's more, there's another issue with that analogy--

Say a guy--let's call him Angel Clare, there's a suitable enough douche--has had way too much to drink and is being an asshole. Now, let's just say he hits on zultar's sister--um, let's call her Tess, yeah, why not, perfectly good name right?

So Angel is being a complete and total prick to Tess, and zultar kicks him out.

This is all well and good and justifiable, because Angel Clare was being a prick, and of course, Tess deserved WAY better. ;)

BUT, in the party scenario, Angel's friends could still see him again...it's not like he's been, oh, let's say...decapitated, with a black flag being risen from atop a tower as a signal of his tragic and symbolic death (which thank GOD *TESS* didn't have to suffer, right?) But folks can see Angel after he's left, chilled out, realized what a prick he was, apologized, and moved on, or just decide he's an irredeemable piece of human filth and give him all the attention he deserves--namely, none.

Mod power banning people, however, is more like that black flag execution option, though--someone is gone, and gone for good, and very little chance you'd get to hear from them again, or that they'd get to make their case.

If the party's really the best in town, doesn't that speak to the OVERALL quality of the guests?

And if so, why not trust those guests to largely self-moderate (while still recognizing it's zultar and co. throwing the party and thus still in charge) and either just give that prick Angel Clare the cold shoulder until he leaves/ceases to be relevant, or just wait until he falls asleep and then draw a ton of dicks on his face before throwing him on the front lawn and locking the door?

(AND YOU DESERVED BETTER, TESS! ...Damn it...you deserved better...)

:/

My suggestion is we take maple out and beat the canadian out of him. what do you say?

Canada doesn't even acknowledge that he's one of them

He doesn't apologize enough; sOrry, Canada.

Happy Canada Day (belated).

Thanks man.

Here is something I find interesting:

If we had gone ahead and just made this shift in forum moderation without saying anything in the forum, there will certainly be people who complain that we are despots or that we play favorites or that they should have been consulted since they are a part of the community.
If we do announce it with some philosophical explanations as to why, then people say it was too damn long or vague.
If we are specific about it, then people will try to find the line and then step over it and then claim that it was to help us establish where the line is.
It wouldn't really matter what we do, someone will find some faults or create them.

It is certain that whatever we do, it is not to please everyone and it is not meant to please everyone.

One way to think about this is that we are going to do is to take a more active stance in enforcing the Site Rules and Responsibilities that have always been there (http://webdiplomacy.net/rules.php; specifically --> Use common sense and respect other players. Help the mods & admins keep our server fun.). We are not going to accept continual abuse and harassment of users or comments that, as Damian said, "if spoken offline could be considered an accusation of a crime." Some of these include death threats, explicit porn, satirizing the people's deaths, and so on. If you violate these rules, we will contact you and ask you to stop. If you persist in breaking the rules, we will silence you.

If you want to use this site and this forum, you have to abide by the rules that Kestas established and now I'm in charge of. It is that simple.

If what we are going to do somehow stifles intellectual or interesting conversations, then the forum will become stale and we can and will change our approach.

I'd like to clarify that I was not saying that any of the mods are or have been petty tyrants. They have not, in fact, adopted the policy Smoker was suggesting. I was merely saying that that policy *would constitute* that, if adopted. (And I'm not aware of any of them having suggested, at any time, that it be adopted).

Sorry for this to be so off topic on a serious thread, but I think that if the mods come up with specific forum rules, they should present it to the community in the form of a remix of I Don't Like. "A bitch dipperr that's that shit we don't like"

Why delete posts ..... if people write offensive things then by their own words we shall know them and will pass judgement accordingly as is our wont.

So just that I'm completely clear about what can and can't be done...

Illegal stuff like stealing someone's intellectual property is fine and dandy and the bedrock of the site.

Legal stuff like saying things others don't like is clamped down on.

To continue the Hanged Man's analogy, some people break into a house and hold an illegal party and then get upset when someone talks rubbish.

@synapse - if you feel anything maple or others has said is illegal then report him.

I don't want to report him, but it is a criminal offense to post grossly offensive electronic communications in the UK. Jamiet's post is incorrect, many cases have been tried over Twitter and Facebook resulting in convictions.

@synapse - I happen to agree with you that Maple's post may well be illegal in the UK. Someone was given a community service order and fined for saying "all soldiers should die and go to hell" and another was jailed for commenting on the disappearance of April Jones. Both of these took place on Facebook.

My point is that all countries have laws which are generally well thought out and their enforcement is proportionate. I just feel that if you want to be effective and prevent people like maple saying things you, or others, may not like, then use the laws that currently exist.

TheHangedMan: Very clever analogy. Apparently there really are diamonds in the rough.

Many of the rest of you make me question where our species is going...

I really don't read the forum on here. Why? Because it's garbage. I used to, until I realized that many people here don't know how to have a civilized discussion. And for the most part, even if one does have a shred of decency around here, it's still likely he's an arrogant, ignorant asshole. But ya know what, I think Zultar hit on a few key points about why the forum sucks. So maybe you all should listen to him, his house or not. Have some self-respect.

I won't comment on whether or not there ought be enforcement, nor of what type. Ban 'em, silence 'em, berate 'em, do nothing, whatever. Like I said, I only use the LIVE GAME thread anyways. I do think there is a lot that could be done to improve the forum, however. The best way being if the people who posted grew up. But that being a distant miracle, there are a minority of players making it especially vitriolic. Without them it would be a much more enjoyable...

P.S. Don't even waste your time responding to this post. I'm not going to look at the thread again anyways.There's a lotta dumb assholes on this planet and I aint got time for just about any of 'em. If you got beef, bring it to the board.

Honk out.