Moderation Policy Discussion • Page 3

I like this idea a lot.

 

I think some of this has been addressed, and I may be going off tangents/getting a bit long-winded/repeating what others have said, so please forgive me! I'm glad to be on here. Thanks Jason.

- Let's not make people feel bad for what they like or don't like. I don't really enjoy posts like *enters thread* "album is shit" *exits thread* or if someone expresses an opinion about why they don't like something, rebuttal is "WELL YOU LIKE X Y Z" / "WELL, ARTIST YOU LIKE DID THIS!" as if it's a competition. I guess that's not a MASSIVE problem, but I've noticed it recently in various threads, so when things are made to be a competition, actual discussion is hindered and it becomes personal very quickly. Less personal attacks, more open-mindedness/debate.

- Also, less of the "fuck off/fuck you" kind of responses, along with "lol" / one emoji. Not helpful.

- Too many times, the news threads have focused on one or two specific members that were obviously trolling (sometimes it's obvious with their username/their posting pattern). I think it's time we just outright ban these people instead of let the conversation go on for pages, letting the trolls get what they want. Yes I fully understand why in certain times "don't feed the troll" isn't appropriate, but I've noticed a pattern in the news threads where it's just so painfully obvious what's really going on, especially with 5 or more posters going after the same post, and the importance of the topic at hand is lost.

- Maybe certain forums/sub forums could be private from the public and only seen by registered members? Like personal/politics & religion/activism etc? Heck even general, where people post their photos or have more personal conversations in chat threads. Just a random "HURRR PRIVACY" thought. Esp since people have expressed their concerns in regards to work/school, and I'm assuming forums that aren't open to the public will not have their threads indexed in search engines? Which I think helps with the privacy.

- I noticed on the old AP that even if you're not registered, you can view a member's list of all their posts. I think that should be a no no for guests/non-registered people.

- The rule of "have this many posts before you can make a thread" is something that was abused consistently by people wanting to promote their music/website. They would come into threads essentially being spammers, posting "cool" "lol" "agreed" until they reached the threshold and then made their thread for their band and then not actually engage in forum discussion. I think not having a limit would be better, as I can't think of another way to fix this LOL.

I'm going to get VERY specific here as I've browsed the politics forum the past few months, but this does also apply to music taste/general conversations.

I 100% agree with this post. This is something that bothers me in general all the time. Yes, this is coming from me. It can become difficult to express mere opinions without worrying about the response as some people are quick to jump to sexist/racist/homophobe etc, and not actually try to have a discussion or explain why said thought may be perceived as such. It's just a quick point to blame/snap kind of response, which isn't actually, well, progressive. So, if someone genuinely believes something is bigoted in any manner, I'd rather people calmly explain why, instead of 4/5 people ganging up on said person and then being snarky/sarcastic. Let's try to understand other human beings first, and not make them feel isolated. Majority of us here are very well on the same page in regards to equal rights and intolerance of discrimination, so should any of us here have certain opinions that others don't, let's calmly discuss it instead of thinking there's some kind of alternative motive.

The politics forum got very quiet very fast and I think trying to open things up and have a discussion and challenging of ideas is important, instead of a chain reaction of "WELL HOW WILL THE BIGOTED CONSERVATIVES ACT THIS TIME?" kind of thing (not saying it can't be discussed, but when it happens multiple times, the issue at hand is lost in the process, especially when again, most of us are in agreement so it feels like an echo chamber) and ultimately shutting down any slightly different opinion or perspective. I think it's forgotten that some of us come from very unique/specific backgrounds, and different voices need to be heard. We want to have healthy debate, and it stops when everyone just wants full-on agreement and tries to deflect the topics and/or just jump right to "ERGH REPUBLICANS!" and then leaves it at that. It's incredibly personal to call people abuse enablers, manipulators, etc, so I think we need to take a step back a little in regards to these kinds of conversations and re-think how we approach them.

 

I agree with everything you said. Fuck off/fuck you is one of my fave sayings. It'll be hard but I'll stop.

 

Yeah, that would be nice.

 

Out of curiosity, is there a policy in terms of album threads in general, like on AP? Will that be relegated to music?

 

Hopefully it doesn't go to General.

 

I'll think about the first one, the prestigious forum kinda acts as this at the moment, but a more "private" just for registered users forum may be a good idea as well.

The ten post limit doesn't exist here a I have a variety of other spam detecting (and destroying) methods in place to counter act that (hopefully).

A variety of privacy options are available for all profiles to better fine tune what can be seen by members, non-members, or just people you follow (and unchecking the boxes can make the account virtually entirely private). It's not really possible to completely eliminate the ability to see a registered user's posts, because they're public. Running a search could return them basically no matter what.

I'd like album threads and band threads to both be in the "music" forum - the new prefix option and search makes it really easy to search and find specific threads, so I think this will be a better way to keep things organized.

 

I was confused by the prefix option.

 

Basically it allows for sorting and searching really easily.

You can click a prefix from the forum list to see everything with that prefix, or using the "display options" at the bottom of the thread view you can drill down pretty quickly to find what you're looking for. IE: You can be in the entertainment forum and say, effectively, just show me all the "book" threads or "video game" threads.

 

Holy shit, that's super cool. Gonna go see if I can edit it on the one thread I made. Haha

Whoops. Apparently can't do that after.

 

I guess what I meant was, under "Group Permissions" in the Admin CP (or something along those lines, I haven't used Xenforo heh) isn't there a way to set it so that guests are unable to see member profiles, and that they can't enter threads, unless they're registered?

 

Yes, but I think member profile permissions should be up to the member.

 

oh yeah i agree there for sure

 

@Jason Tate ok i wanted to test something hehe.
i logged out, clicked on my username, and i can still see the mini profile, and i could click on the number of posts and that would link me to all the posts i made.

 

I'll make a note to look at permissions on the mini-profile and if there's a better way to handle those without too much overhead.

 

agree with lightning on the privacy concerns

 

If you use the same name/or urls people are gonna be able to find posts no matter what since Google and other search engines will index all public pages and searching by a username will still pull up the posts. The best way to avoid that is not use publicly identifiable information on the public portions of the forum and restrict them to private messages and private forums.

 

personally, i'd think it be easier for threads to be inaccessible by non-registered users, that way even if you click on a thread, you can't read it unless you log in, even if you found it via search engine. also to have the forum's actual search option be accessed by members only as well. but of course that's up to you Jason.

 

i know my posts are public, but there's a difference between being able to search for something and stumble across a post by a user and being able to go through every single one of a user's posts, imo. just feel like restricting being able to search for someone's posts to registered members (or better, people you follow) would create a small barrier to this at least. i get if you disagree or if there are other downsides to this that i'm not thinking of atm. also i know my experience is extremely specific and unlikely to be a common thing, so there's that too

 

Yeah, that's why I suggested closing off threads to guests entirely, especially if we're trying to moderate who's going to come to the forum

 

Currently I don't want to make the entire forum that private by default as it would dramatically decrease the number of people that found it, discovered it, or ever wanted to give it a shot. I believe that with the new private messaging system, privacy controls for personal information shared on a profile, and the private forums for supporters/prestigious members, that there's a good balance. The forum itself is not a private forum and it's not intended to be — there are some of those out there — and if this ever gets to the point where it is financially viable to have it be 100% member supported or invite only that is something I'd maybe look at. (Of course, those that are supporters have their own private forum anyway, so maybe that wouldn't even be requested.) For now I don't want to give a false sense of privacy to anyone that is posting on it — posts in the forum are public, private messages are private. Moving away from that simplicity complicates things in a variety of way.

If the forum becomes popular enough and financially stable enough through support to sustain an invite only like system, that's something I'll look at. (A poster could post only in the prestigious or supporters forum as those are not public forums if they didn't want any posts seen.)

 

You'd be able to type "username site:website.com" into google and see all of the posts from that user no matter what. I think that any option that makes it seem like a member's posts are more private than they really are is something that worries me. I don't want there to be any ambiguity between what is public and what is private, and I think if a post is made in one of public areas, it should be indexed for search purposes to better find posts or discussions. I think that adding any option that says like "hide my posts from unregistered members" is hard to word in a way that doesn't confuse people even more — because it doesn't actually do that on the site and there's still a really easy way to see them all via Google. I don't want anyone to think something is private that isn't and I think a good search is important to finding things in the forum to discuss or talk about as well. I'm going to look to see what privacy settings or maybe even just a basic if statement I can add to the mini-profile to not show that URL that links to the search that pulls in the last 500 or whatever posts, but I want it to be clear that totally doesn't stop anyone from seeing or finding the posts. At any time they can use google itself or search and they'll show up — or just register.

 

First up, woah another "supporter", thank you so much for signing up for that - it really does mean so much to me. Like, I know this is kinda weird but I got a little misty knowing two people have already done that, because the past few months I've been crazy nervous that maybe this is going to be a massive failure and I'll have to go do some other kind of work if it doesn't work out. So, really, truly, thank you.

The badge looks great, and the system worked without an issue! That's even more exciting.

Yeah, AP's privacy options are awful. The way they work and the control was just piss-poor. I really tried to think through all of that better here and make sure people can control what and where things are shown. So that if they only want people they follow to be able to see their Twitter name, for example, they can do that. That way someone couldn't run a search for a Twitter name and find their profile here if they don't want that.

All this talk is leading me to go spend the next hour or so double checking all the privacy things to make sure they work as intended.

 

Yep, found a bug. Shit.

 

Hey Jason I don't know if this was done intentionally or not, but I just saw that q***r (as in the q of LGBTQA+) is censored? I know in the past it's been used as a slur, but for the most part it's been reclaimed and used as an identity for a lot of people.