Moderating the forums

[Kurt]

With these rules in place the Audiophile forum will be shutdown in about 20 minutes.

[haunyack]

I just wonder when i see the WAF / women can't operate electronics / pick music -remarks come up again and again.

I'm a lousy shopper, can't cook, haven't a clue about sewing, hate sex in the morning, and am a fashion disaster.
However, I can turn a wrench, fix a roof, pour concrete, tube weld, spend endless hours tweaking my home audio or computer systems.
The semantics of these statements may imply sexism, but in truth they point to just a few of my many limitations/abilities.


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[Michaelwagner]

With these rules in place the Audiophile forum will be shutdown in about 20 minutes.

This goes a long distance towards explaining why I stopped reading it eons ago.

[bobkoure]

The profanity/racism/personal attacks are easy - and I think most posters know they've stepped over the line when they do that.

IMO the hard ones are the requests for help that are titled something like "Will this piece of junk ever work?". Yeah, that sounds/feels inflammatory - but the thread author is basically frustrated and about to decide that their Squeezebox was a bad idea. If that's as far as it would go, I'd be glad to see their backs - but it's not: they'll end up bad-mouthing the product(s) - and it's easy for that stuff to spread.
So... what to do?
There was a thread about inflammatory titles, and some really good responses - particularly the (paraphrasing here) "Your question makes me think of some answers but the way you phrased the question makes me want to not answer" - maybe there's a good "canned" response we can come up with that explains all this, asks the poster to ask again in more temperate language and then the thread gets locked - and maybe deleted after, say 30 days, so the poster gets a chance to read the response before the thread disappears, they get a shot at re-asking, and get to realize that that kind of title won't work here.
Does that sound reasonable? Overkill? Way too much work for moderators?

[JimC]

Do moderators have a position on sexism in posts? I just wonder when i see the WAF / women can't operate electronics / pick music -remarks come up again and again.

I know it is a hard line to draw - but whilst some may well be offended by what they call "profane" language (and others are not), perhaps there are posts that make some areas of the demographic feel equally isolated whilst seeming normal - even amusing - to the rest.

Our overall intent is to minimize the "noise" -- the stuff that detracts from the quality information here. I think everyone on the staff, and in the community, would object to blatant sexism, but this is an incredibly diverse group of people and what one culture finds objectionable, another finds normal.

There's going to be times when someone uses a little off-color humor, sexual innuendo, etc. I'd hate to see that normal human interaction diminished, even though it might offend someone. We'll use judgement -- our very best, even -- to decide what to do.

We were quite sincere about wanting to moderate as little as possible, and about being completely open to fine-tuning our moderating style. We'll try to judge what's good / bad, but we will listen to everyone's feedback and adjust as we go.

And, for the benefit of people just tuning in, we will NOT delete posts critical of our products unless they directly violate one of the general guidelines.


-=> Jim

[Michaelwagner]

Experience shows that, as the audience grows, you're going to have to contend with a more diverse audience, some of whom have less than stellar motivations. As a result, you're going to have to put up with trolls and flamebait. It might be wise to come up with a strategy now, ahead of the next incident.

[Siduhe]

I just wonder when i see the WAF / women can't operate electronics / pick music -remarks come up again and again.

I've said my piece on this a few times, but as one of the (few?) women who post on here regularly, I'd agree with what Jim and others have said. Personally, I dislike the way "WAF" can and is used, but I've never seen it as anything other than affectionate here and, as a result, can't get too wound up about it.

Where I do agree with James is that there's sometimes a general level of background chatter which is pretty off-putting to the casual female browser and does (again, in my opinion) on occasions reinforce the idea that women can't do anything other than "plug and play" technology. However, it's far from exclusive to this forum and isn't something you can moderate (IMHO).

I also think haunyack's response hits the nail on the head - in every human relationship we tend fall into roles: one welds, the other cooks, one does technology, the other pays the bills on time. If it works for you, it's hardly sexist. What's sexist is assuming that everyone else is the same way or that's the "right" way to be.

[Teus de Jong]

It might be a good idea to have a separate thread with guidelines for the forum. I've seen this in the Adobe InDesign forum (where I used to be a regular) and it works very well. Not only is there a chance people will read the guidelines, but when they do not, it is very easy to point 'offenders' to that thread.

BTW, a very good rule from those InDesign guidelines is not to offend the regulars, because in that way you are minimizing the chance you will get an adequate reply to your question.

Just an idea.

Teus

[iPhone]

Our overall intent is to minimize the "noise" -- the stuff that detracts from the quality information here. I think everyone on the staff, and in the community, would object to blatant sexism, but this is an incredibly diverse group of people and what one culture finds objectionable, another finds normal.

There's going to be times when someone uses a little off-color humor, sexual innuendo, etc. I'd hate to see that normal human interaction diminished, even though it might offend someone. We'll use judgement -- our very best, even -- to decide what to do.

We were quite sincere about wanting to moderate as little as possible, and about being completely open to fine-tuning our moderating style. We'll try to judge what's good / bad, but we will listen to everyone's feedback and adjust as we go.

And, for the benefit of people just tuning in, we will NOT delete posts critical of our products unless they directly violate one of the general guidelines.


-=> Jim

I did not read every post in this thread. Has anyone suggested that the WIKI be revisited/add to/improved by looking at the most asked questions on the Forum and revising or editing the WIKI to cover more of what gets asks repeatedly?

Is there a logical way to layout the whole sight so that new people will read or check the WIKI before posting? I know that the WIKI helped me a bunch when I first started. And I still find answers in it to little things that I have forgotten. Why can't I get it to do this? So I recheck the WIKI and it is right there in black and white. The WIKI is very useful to all users, but for me it helps keep the differences in file types as well as what my Transporter will do that my SB3s will not.

[ceejay]

Has anyone suggested that the WIKI be revisited/add to/improved by looking at the most asked questions on the Forum and revising or editing the WIKI to cover more of what gets asks repeatedly?

Well, that was the inspiration behind the Beginners Guide in the Wiki in the first place (I got fed up with the same Q&A in the forums every day!) and thats how it gets added to now: I hang out in the Beginners forum and if a question comes up more than once then I try to put the answer in the wiki somewhere.

Usually, of course, the answer is already there, which comes back to your other question about how we can make it easier for people to find (its actually not that easy if you don't know where to look ... that one little link "WIKI" at the top of the page).

Then again, if the forums are now moderated (to get back on topic), what about the wiki?? [NB I don't really mean that, we don't have a problem there yet that I've seen, but there is the risk that a disgruntled person who was prevented from saying their stuff on the forums might let rip in the wiki...]

Ceejay