Additions/changes to forum rules

[mzilikazi]

Now's your chance to speak up and make your suggestions about the existing forum guidelines.

1) Some suggested additions to the existing rules:

Disciplinary Actions
- Administrators and Moderators have the authority to take more severe actions in certain situations, from temporary account suspensions to permanent bans of users who violate the above rules.
- Users subject to disciplinary actions should try discuss the matter with the Administrator / Moderator who dealt with the issue if they disagree with the decision or feel that they are being treated unfairly.
- All permanent bans must be agreed to by two Administrators / Moderators. You cannot appeal a permanent ban, as by this point you will likely have had a number of opportunities to correct your forum behavior.

2) The Offtopic forum does serve a very necessary function within these forums but I'm not so sure that the qualifications for a thread in that forum aren't too broad and as such seems to be subjected to abuse more frequently than other forums.
Thoughts on that?

3) Please bear in mind:
There are no plans of re-writing the Magna Carta into forum guidelines. Let's keep it brief and to the point. We simply do not have the desire or the time to be the judge and jury for every single grievance.

It's everyone's forum - what should the future look like?

[JohnDeere630]

Now's your chance to speak up and make your suggestions about the existing forum guidelines.

1) Some suggested additions to the existing rules:

Disciplinary Actions
- Administrators and Moderators have the authority to take more severe actions in certain situations, from temporary account suspensions to permanent bans of users who violate the above rules.
- Users subject to disciplinary actions should try discuss the matter with the Administrator / Moderator who dealt with the issue if they disagree with the decision or feel that they are being treated unfairly.
- All permanent bans must be agreed to by two Administrators / Moderators. You cannot appeal a permanent ban, as by this point you will likely have had a number of opportunities to correct your forum behavior.

Well, this all sounds well and good, and please understand, I personally harbor no ill-will to anyone here, and I am endeavoring to be objective, but the first rule is pretty self-evident. The second part only works if the mod in question actually responds to the PM, and the third part is just hot air as long as SOME banned users are free to register alt. accounts & wade right back in under a different pseudonym. However, in defense of the administration, re-registering may not be evident if the offender uses a proxy, especially if the mod in question spends little time here & doesn't really know anyone. If one gets to know the people here, it may be a little easier to identify a recycled troll. Maybe.... maybe not.

2) The Offtopic forum does serve a very necessary function within these forums but I'm not so sure that the qualifications for a thread in that forum aren't too broad and as such seems to be subjected to abuse more frequently than other forums.
Thoughts on that?

Well, it has always been a source of wonderment to me how anyone can keep a straight face whilst scolding a poster for being offtopic in a section called OFFTOPIC! If you guys don't want offtopic stuff cluttering up the forum, try renaming it to, oh, I don't know....maybe Technical Chatter. Just a thought.

3) Please bear in mind:
There are no plans of re-writing the Magna Carta into forum guidelines. Let's keep it brief and to the point. We simply do not have the desire or the time to be the judge and jury for every single grievance.

No comment here...not gonna touch that one with a ten-foot pole!

It's everyone's forum - what should the future look like?

You mean it is a forum everyone is free to use...there is a distinction.

[konfiguros]

3) Please bear in mind:
There are no plans of re-writing the Magna Carta into forum guidelines. Let's keep it brief and to the point. We simply do not have the desire or the time to be the judge and jury for every single grievance.

I specialy like the above numbah 3 mzilikazi. Sum excitable kids likes to role play on tat one me thinks. Adults of course aint got no time nor desire fer such frivalous activty.

[Mr James]

As a new member,I'm not sure it is my place to speak up or offer my thoughts on the matter. But as I am a Debian user and this I feel is the forum to which I belong, this is what I believe the forum should be:

1. A second account should be allowed only if the reason is legit - such as a banned member coming back to simply state his case - in a single thread - because his emails were ignored (never happened to me as I have not yet (hopefully never) been banned but it did to cynwulf and I take his word for it). Of course if an obvious troll is creating multiple accounts to sneak in after being banned then a perma-ban on the alt accounts is needed and the original account's ban extended.

2. Though rules should be enforced equally on all members, mods should exert some leniency on older, established, and contributing members. In other words, they should take into account the time and effort existing members have put into the board before swinging the ban hammer.

3. Mods should allow some self moderation in the boards and step in only when things get out of hand - not because they feel like flexing their mod muscles. In other words, the contributing members should be allowed to very generally steer the forum in the direction they feel is right within the boundaries set by the rules.

4. Where there is a grievance, and a thread exists dealing with it, that thread should not be locked as an attempt to close the subject - it will only result in more similar threads being created or the grievance being discussed within other unrelated threads thus polluting the board.

5. In instances where a thread has moved off topic, perhaps a warning should be given by a mod for people to get back on topic before the thread get locked, unless it is obvious there is nothing more to be said worth saying on the matter.

[emariz]

1. Remove the Gerber section.
2. Narrow the scope of the Off-Topic section.
3. Ban whomever you want, but cut the whining already.

[dragonfly]

Hello All,
I am new to this Forum,but by just browsing this forum i have learnt a lot.
I hope we can all learn to tolerate each other, since we come from different
backgrounds.As Adults i think this would be easy to acheive,Debian is a great Distro.

"The World is One Country, and Mankind its Citizens"
Baha'U'llah"

[Bro.Tiag]

There is nothing wrong with the rules as they are.

[Mr James]

There is nothing wrong with the rules as they are.

Which is why I said what I said - the rules are fine but the way in which they were enforced recently was not, in my eyes.

[nadir]

Keep in mind that it is a difficult subject, and that i am not a native speaker.

Here is what i think of the OP:

a) It already is that way.
The rule of thumb is: "if in doubt the mods/admins make a decision according to the situation".
I can't see what those new rules are supposed to change.

b) The general idea is that the mod/admin is right, always, and that the user has to prove that he is wrong.
I would rather think that a mod will need to be able to explain his decision.
If one wants people to post it might be an idea to think of them as people who are able to
(if one thinks of them as people who are not able to: You really care for those?)
To give an example: taking back the completely wrong decision to ban cynwulf would probably have helped to show that one is able to do that. (including a public excuse for a very wrong decision)

c) It might be an idea to hire mods which are able to understand the rules and which are able to stand on their own feet.

d) Thinking of "we" and "them", not of us.

e) The usual behavior between humans is to ask.
Not to say: i am a moderator, i don't like that and that, i will change it ( the post).
If one wants that one needs to pay people. Those you can tell what to do, without further discussion
(they are known as slaves. A time which is long gone, and i am not sure why a forum for free-software is build on such rules.
That it is common does not make it any better)


All of that has been said very often.
A lot of very good posts about the subject are by julian67.
Most of them are amongst his last posts, and a short search will find them.

We simply do not have the desire or the time to be the judge and jury for every single grievance.

That might be one of the main problems. No desire and no time.
If, i said if, that is the case, the best approach is the one by emariz (aka power-play-moderation).
There is nothing wrong with that way of doing it. But do it, and do it fast. A clean cut. (and without any long explanations which make it sound like it was something different).

[mharrison]

Now's your chance to speak up and make your suggestions about the existing forum guidelines.

1) Some suggested additions to the existing rules:

Disciplinary Actions
- Administrators and Moderators have the authority to take more severe actions in certain situations, from temporary account suspensions to permanent bans of users who violate the above rules.
- Users subject to disciplinary actions should try discuss the matter with the Administrator / Moderator who dealt with the issue if they disagree with the decision or feel that they are being treated unfairly.
- All permanent bans must be agreed to by two Administrators / Moderators. You cannot appeal a permanent ban, as by this point you will likely have had a number of opportunities to correct your forum behavior.

I don't disagree with the above at all. That being said, however, the rules need to apply to everyone and not just who the mods see fit to punish. When we have a certain user who has 2 out of the 4 accounts he has created still active (at least 2) and one of those 2 was created for the obvious purpose of mocking a user and/or trying to get that users account ban extended for creating an alt and also continues to start flame wars and nothing has been done, it takes away from the credibility of the mods on this board when it comes to discipline. I have no problem with the rules or having rules, but the rules need to be applied fairly to everyone.

2) The Offtopic forum does serve a very necessary function within these forums but I'm not so sure that the qualifications for a thread in that forum aren't too broad and as such seems to be subjected to abuse more frequently than other forums.
Thoughts on that?

The problem with the Offtopic forum IMHO is the lack of moderation, or at least the slow response of moderation. If it isn't being moderated well right now, narrowing the scope of offtopic will only create more work for the mods as you will never stop flame wars from popping up. Right now, the "Ubuntu is great" type flamewars are the only problem I can see in the Offtopic forum. If there was action taken when posts are reported for being detrimental to the forum then we might not be in this situation. I myself have reported several threads recently, as the threads have already turned into the start of a flame war, yet the reports are closed with NO action taken.

3) Please bear in mind:
There are no plans of re-writing the Magna Carta into forum guidelines. Let's keep it brief and to the point. We simply do not have the desire or the time to be the judge and jury for every single grievance.

And here lies the problem, as Nadir said. If the mods do not simply have the desire or the time to be the judge and jury, then perhaps we need mods who do have the time. I understand this is a volunteer based system, however you can't bitch about us bringing down the forum when you are admitting that you don't have the time to do your job. If it is that hard then step down and find someone else to do it who does have the time. If not, then quit bitching and do your job when you can and understand that the lack of time and desire by a mod/admin is going to mean that some chaos will happen on the board. Clean up what you can when you can. Unless you have a mod/admin who is going to police this place 24 hours a day, rules are going to be broken at some point and the users who broke them will have to be dealt with when there is a mod online who can deal with it.

I have seen the mods continue to say

If there is a problem, report it

and yet when I do just that, I am accused of being a

nuisance

for doing so. If you don't want us to report problem threads/users then, again, don't bitch when chaos happens.

It's everyone's forum - what should the future look like?

I believe I have said enough.

[Anzhr]

1) Yes.
2) Off-topic is off-topic.
3) Yes.

[Absent Minded]

Now's your chance to speak up and make your suggestions about the existing forum guidelines.

1) Some suggested additions to the existing rules:

Disciplinary Actions
- Administrators and Moderators have the authority to take more severe actions in certain situations, from temporary account suspensions to permanent bans of users who violate the above rules.
- Users subject to disciplinary actions should try discuss the matter with the Administrator / Moderator who dealt with the issue if they disagree with the decision or feel that they are being treated unfairly.
- All permanent bans must be agreed to by two Administrators / Moderators. You cannot appeal a permanent ban, as by this point you will likely have had a number of opportunities to correct your forum behavior.

I don't disagree with the above at all. That being said, however, the rules need to apply to everyone and not just who the mods see fit to punish. When we have a certain user who has 2 out of the 4 accounts he has created still active (at least 2) and one of those 2 was created for the obvious purpose of mocking a user and/or trying to get that users account ban extended for creating an alt and also continues to start flame wars and nothing has been done, it takes away from the credibility of the mods on this board when it comes to discipline. I have no problem with the rules or having rules, but the rules need to be applied fairly to everyone.

2) The Offtopic forum does serve a very necessary function within these forums but I'm not so sure that the qualifications for a thread in that forum aren't too broad and as such seems to be subjected to abuse more frequently than other forums.
Thoughts on that?

The problem with the Offtopic forum IMHO is the lack of moderation, or at least the slow response of moderation. If it isn't being moderated well right now, narrowing the scope of offtopic will only create more work for the mods as you will never stop flame wars from popping up. Right now, the "Ubuntu is great" type flamewars are the only problem I can see in the Offtopic forum. If there was action taken when posts are reported for being detrimental to the forum then we might not be in this situation. I myself have reported several threads recently, as the threads have already turned into the start of a flame war, yet the reports are closed with NO action taken.

3) Please bear in mind:
There are no plans of re-writing the Magna Carta into forum guidelines. Let's keep it brief and to the point. We simply do not have the desire or the time to be the judge and jury for every single grievance.

And here lies the problem, as Nadir said. If the mods do not simply have the desire or the time to be the judge and jury, then perhaps we need mods who do have the time. I understand this is a volunteer based system, however you can't bitch about us bringing down the forum when you are admitting that you don't have the time to do your job. If it is that hard then step down and find someone else to do it who does have the time. If not, then quit bitching and do your job when you can and understand that the lack of time and desire by a mod/admin is going to mean that some chaos will happen on the board. Clean up what you can when you can. Unless you have a mod/admin who is going to police this place 24 hours a day, rules are going to be broken at some point and the users who broke them will have to be dealt with when there is a mod online who can deal with it.

I have seen the mods continue to say

If there is a problem, report it

and yet when I do just that, I am accused of being a

nuisance

for doing so. If you don't want us to report problem threads/users then, again, don't bitch when chaos happens.

It's everyone's forum - what should the future look like?

I believe I have said enough.

Just because you (or others) can not see that some kind of action was taken does not mean that there was no action taken.

This forum has to allow for some leeway as we deal with people and not machines. Reporting 20 plus posts in a single thread as being off-topic is a bit excessive don't you think? As I stated to you before, a single well written report is often enough. Having to handle over 20 reports because someone got on their soap box (and not because there was a "real" problem at hand) is a bit ridicules.

[mharrison]

Just because you (or others) can not see that some kind of action was taken does not mean that there was no action taken.

This forum has to allow for some leeway as we deal with people and not machines. Reporting 20 plus posts in a single thread as being off-topic is a bit excessive don't you think? As I stated to you before, a single well written report is often enough. Having to handle over 20 reports because someone got on their soap box (and not because there was a "real" problem at hand) is a bit ridiculous.

I absolutely do not think that it is the slightest bit excessive. Since around December 2010/January 2011 we have been told nothing but to report a post if there is a problem with it or we think it breaks the rules, ect...

Are you suggesting we wait until there are 2 or 3 pages of out of line posts before we report the thread in a nice well written report? I can do that, that is not a problem to me. I do not have a soap box, I can only work with what I am given and what I have been given is inconsistency from the mods/admins. If I knew that when I reported something that I could sit back and not worry about it because it would be taken care of then I would not feel the need to report every single post, but when I can see a user with multiple alts STILL running around causing the same kind of trouble, I will continue to report every single flame worthy, trouble starting post that they make. I think you have me confused with another person as I was not a part of all that went down a month or so ago. I came back to the forums to a troll running around and causing problems and continued to see no action taken from the powers that be.

Perhaps when a report was closed if the reporter got some other form of notification to say that an action was taken it would not be a big deal. I know exactly which thread you are talking about and I reported 4, possibly 5 posts in it as not being on topic and detrimental to the thread subject. Each report was closed, yet from what I can see, no action was taken. Perhaps you PMed the offenders...how do I know that? I don't, so to me, from what I can see, nothing has been done.

This is not an attack on an individual; this is a complaint against a group. In this case, the mods. If you expect everyone to behave and follow the rules as they are written...it starts at the top and it starts with the application of the rules.


---
Edit to correct my spelling as well as AM's.

[Absent Minded]

If someone is given a warning or PM granted, it is not public knowledge and I don't feel it should be in many cases. I do not feel that a member should be banned for a problem with one post or that a whole thread should be locked over a couple posts that are not harming anyone. Granted, there are likely exceptions to things. Where I have had some error in judgment, I have tried to correct that when I have been able to see that it was indeed incorrect.

Maybe you reported the posts as they were made... it didn't look that way from the reports and a few of them seemed a bit of a stretch to me to come to the conclusions you voiced. Still, I am not saying not to report things. With as few active staff as we have user participation in making the staff aware of the problems is important. I do however think that some discretion should be used. I am one of the most active staff members here and even I do to my current situation have only been able to sign in for an our or so each day lately. Do we need more chiefs to indian ratio? Maybe under the circumstances but I have recently had discussions with a few of our members that suggest there are already too many for them to feel at ease. Unfortunately, not many of those we currently have are able to spend the amount of time needed to "police" each and every thread.

As a mod, I am glad that I am not forced (at least yet) to ban someone over one single post and to be able to have and use some discretion with things.

As for the claim that members are allowed to have multiple accounts to troll with... I am not in support of that and I do not believe any of our staff are. It does however need to be evident to me that is happining. It is not. I am sure that you would not want me to disable or to ban your account because I "thought" it looked like the same style of posting done by someone else but with no real proof of that. Your posting style does remind me of a few of our members.... should I ban the account just because one should not be allowed to have multiple accounts? No, I didn't think so. Give me (or other staff) some real proof and not just conjecture.

[mzilikazi]

Well, it has always been a source of wonderment to me how anyone can keep a straight face whilst scolding a poster for being offtopic in a section called OFFTOPIC!

The forum name may be 'Offtopic' but you still need to stay on topic within the individual thread.