Would you like it if Fluther provided a list of mods who are presently logged in as mods, on duty at any one time?

No, I think it would lead to finger-pointing by those who were modded. I think this potential negative outweighs the ways it could be helpful, such as you describe, unfortunately.

I think the mods would prefer to remain anonymous. They try to act in concert.

No. What’s the big rush? If you flag something it will be attended to asap. If you want immediate action then you can become a mod yourself. lol
I rarely flag anything, it would have to be an extreme situation like abusive name calling or something equally inappropriate, otherwise, live and let live is my mantra. :-)

Whenever I’m logged into Fluther I’m also logged in to my email, so if you flag something while I’m online I will see it pretty much straight away. I don’t think there’s any need for any additional functionality within Fluther. Plus, I think @wildpotato is right. Suppose you get a response of your own moderated and you can see that only one mod is online, you’d know who modded you and that’s not something we want. Too much un-necessary drama.

Not necessary as far as I can see. I often use the contact tab above for faster response.

I see what I flagged this morning, around 7, which was about 8 hours ago, (as spam) is still up. User name is Odon and it’s in general. I know the mods are usually diligent, but not in this case. It’s definitely spam.

When mods are on the site, we’re generally logged on to our email accounts, too, and see the flags right away. Unfortunately, we are occasionally all off-site at the same time.

Since you said this spam is still up, and I’m not seeing any flags that haven’t been dealt with, can you give me a link here?

Unnecessary drama? No. Drama you want to protect yourself from. Not even drama. Reasonable concerns with poorly thought through decisions. It turns into drama when mods don’t identify themselves, and then you have to deal with the entire moderator crew, most of whom know nothing.

It’s not a good system. It’s a communist system, which allows people to denounce in anonymity and for the judges to condemn in anonymity. We wouldn’t tolerate this in regular society, but since this is a private company, you can run it any way you want.

And since it is done in secret, you can tell us you are protecting us from the big bad trolls and bad spellers and no one will know if that is true or not. I’ve always advocated for a more transparent system. This place could be so much better with more transparency.

Communist? Oookay. 0-o

Nah.

Unless it included room service. Then yes.

Sigh… and the bashing begins….

I don’t think it’s a good idea. Jellies who are modded a few times by the same moderator might think they were being picked on rather than it was happenstance that the same moderator was on duty those 3 times. I think that happens anyhow, but let’s not cater to paranoid personalities. Remember Mrs Smithcrutch in 7th grad who always gave you a C when you deserved a B? You thought she didn’t like you….

@wundayatta IMO there are only just so many violations and they are spelled out pretty clearly. The times I have been modded, mostly for going off topic/unhelpful and one or two rare occasions of allowing another to rile me up that resulted in some sharp words being exchanged…well….what was there to dispute? I WAS in the wrong and I took my lumps accordingly.
If you’re in the wrong you’re in the wrong, what’s to defend except ego?

If one is clearly in violation of the guidelines I see no reason to duke it out with the mods.
99% of the time I take no offense and the 1% of the time I feel irked I just let it go.
I think comparing the fluther mods and guidelines to communism is pretty extreme. Extremely dramatic.
As always, with anything, if you don’t like it you are free to go elsewhere.

Hmmm . . . The Soviet Union vs. Fluther moderation?

Sounds like somebody’s priorities are a wee skewed.

for the record, i’ve been moderated multiple times and somehow still lived to tell the tale.

@wundayatta It’s like Stalinist Russia in here. Step out of line and you will be dragged off to the gulag holding tank

Hmm @wundayatta I think I am going to support @Coloma on this. If it were really communist you wouldn’t be able to post your opinion so blatently.

I think the mods are more then fair, I know I have flaws, i.e. typos bad grammar and rarely reread before I post. The only time I get moded is when I am asking the question.

You have the choice to leave, it’s not as if you are being captured in the night and taken away. You choose not to because while not perfect this is a good site, with good people.

I was skimming through some old posts and happened upon one by @janets, I believe, a question that involved the word flizzer and such, it had 235 GQ and a long thread.

It wasn’t modded because the large portion of people liked it, it seems, the gal only posted that one question years ago but she had awards and messages that were current, like a sort of legend. That sounds commie to me.

But if you feel compelled to rant and this seems a fairly harmless method of doing so just remember mods are people too. It never hurts to be kind.

They make mistakes sure, but without them don’t you think the quality of the site would eventually dwindle? Angry, hateful people and words, people with vendettas, questions that made no sense?

Munching on a stale crust of bread and washing it down with vodka now.

@wundayatta Just waving the word “moderation” in front of your face sets you off. It’s the same old diatribe that I have read for years. It is unfounded and untrue, and I am tired of it.

1. People cannot just turn you in here unless you have violated the guidelines.

2. The moderators do not make random actions. They just enforce the Guidelines.

3. You can take up an issue of moderation with the moderators at any time. (So cut the B.S. about facing your accusers.)

@Coloma . . . state approved potato vodka and beet bread i hope

@marinelife You can not take up issues with moderators because they are a team. You never know who modded you. So, in the end you get a committee decision (communist again), and the face of @augustlan explaining decisions that she didn’t make, although she says she agrees with them. That’s not facing your accusers. That’s dealing with the corporate face. Which is to say, no responsibility. Someone makes a decision, and everyone falls in in lockstep, no matter how bad that decision is.

The guidelines are horribly vague and open to interpretation. And we have no court system to help sort through the vaguaries and make them more consistent. And thus we are back to corporate facelessness and everyone falling into lockstep about decisions. No way to overturn them unless @augustlan decides to make nice.

People can turn you in for any reason they want. They just have to flag you. And then you are in the hands of the faceless mods.

The guidelines never made sense to me. I just try to do my best to stay out of trouble, but then people flag me for who knows what reason and a comment of mine is disappeared for a reason I don’t understand and can’t do anything about. It’s enormously frustrating and unfair and there is no logic to it that I can understand. I like to think I can understand things as well as most people, but I’m clearly clueless when it comes to this system here.

I’d like to think that people are interested in what I have to say, but lately it seems that you and a number of other women are only into telling me to shut up. Well you know what? You don’t have to read anything I say about this subject. If it offends you, and you can’t flag it for whatever guideline I’m violating, and I must surely be violating some, then don’t look at it.

@rosehips You are taking the communist comment too far. It is communist in this one respect: the anonymous denunciations and faceless people making decisions about disappearing people. And maybe it’s not really communist, but totalitarian. It’s a weird mix, I guess, in that if you conform in certain ways, you can get away with saying what you have to say. But if you want to have fun, you get squashed. Face ground into the ground. And it’s all so totally unnecessary. So it makes me angry and I will talk about it every time someone brings it up.

Don’t want me to talk about moderation? Then don’t raise the subject.

^Why are you here, exactly? You apparently have nothing but disdain for the rules, the moderation, the general/social delineation, and those who disagree with you. Are you just a masochist?

@wundayatta You are twisting everything.

1. Moderating is done in consultation to ensure that everyone applies the Guidelines the same way.

2. There is logic to is; you just refuse to accept it.

3. This is not a country where user have rights. It’s a privately-owned site. You pays the piper and you call the tune.

Yet again. Mod bashing. Started by the same “disenchanted” person who starts it Every. Fucking. Time.

Fluther needs a time out corner. Maybe the big meanie poopoohead mods should get to work on that.

<bangs head on desk>

@WillWorkForChocolate Here, have some commie vodka and beet bread.

@Coloma That’s awfully sweet of you!

Get used to it, kiddies. One day you will understand. And if not, I gave it my best shot.

Understand what, exactly? That you truly enjoy being a bitter man who belittles every one and imagines yourself sitting atop a magnificent throne of convoluted wisdom? Or that you are tearing this website down with your nonstop whiny angst? Because, really, it could go either way.

Let me ask you something- With all the crying you’ve done, do you think you’re convincing the mods that they suck? Do you think Andrew and Ben will magically appear and say “Wow, that intelligent cogent Wundayatta really has a point. Let’s change Fluther to suit him!”

The throne of convoluted wisdom! Now THAT’S a keeper!

If it was my site I would have banned you years ago.

To get back to your actual question, @jca, your PM helped me find the question you were talking about, and the question isn’t actually spam. There was a spam answer in it, and we did remove that.

I’d just like to say that I think @wundayatta has a point, and that his raising it in this thread was not outside its scope. It’s funny – I went back to look through here for the post of his that I thought most cogently stated his point, which was in his second post on this thread – and I do believe that one was moderated. I see the reason – but still, it’s kind of ironic and illustrative of his point, because the post contained useful and conciliatory content as well as the bit that got it moderated. If it were an option, I’d like for that post to have been edited and reposted – but that’s a ton more work for people who are volunteers to begin with, so I understand why we don’t do stuff like that. However, I found I’d left this same page open in another tab, so I’d like to reprint, if I may, the bit I found reasonable from the modded post:

“I don’t enjoy not being able to face my accusers. I don’t enjoy not being able to defend myself. I don’t enjoy it when I am accused wrongly. I don’t enjoy it that I can’t say things I want to say because I have no idea whether the mod on duty will think it is acceptable or not. So everything is toned down and I am basically a dumb, boring writer here.”

@wundayatta That sucks, dude; I’m sorry you feel that way. I don’t think your writing is dumb or boring, despite moderation. I think your proposal for greater transparency is interesting, and might be necessary for you given your feelings. I’d love to try a site that operated this way, to see if going back and forth on moderation might be helpful. However, perhaps it is not for Fluther, given the volunteer nature of the mod positions – such an involved site would require a ton of input from mods. I think the disconnect between our viewpoints, and possibly the feeling that fuels the backlash to yours, is that I, and most of us, trust that the mods are decent people who enforce what I consider to be reasonable guidelines fairly, and that they are basically uninterested in persecuting me or any other individual – so your attack on the system appears to be an attack on them as reasonable people. But why wouldn’t they be? The system is based on goodwill, sure, but why is the presumption of goodwill such a terrible thing? I think it’s one of the things that makes this site really neat.

I often use the mobile site, so I can’t access the link to flag a comment, question or user.

I understand that having a list of active moderators would probably be a bad idea; but I’d like some way to contact any moderator. Auggie is the only one I know by name; and I don’t think using the PM system is best-suited for this purpose.

Therefore, I propose a “Contact a Moderator” link (on both the full site and mobile site) that gives the option to send a note to the Mods as a whole (so whoever’s available can act in it), or to choose one or multiples from a list (that doesn’t indicate whether they are currently online in any way).

Just a thought.

I miss the little bastard. Where for art thou Fiddle? ;-/

@hearkat I’ve always wanted a “contact a mod” button. It would simplify things greatly!

While we’re at it, how about a “Flirt with a mod” or “Offer mod a cookie” buttons?

I want a “Get whipped by Auggie” button.

@WWfC: You push the button and seconds later there’s a knock at your door as the sound of a whip-crack is heard in the distance.

@cookieman I like the “give mod a cookie” button idea.

Crack a whip over here and you will be stampeded by 2 mules and a draft horse with a combined weight of 4,300 lbs. Ya don’t want to be under those hooves when they launch. lol