Does fluther have guidelines for questions and answers and did the Mods exercise a stricter interpretation of those guidelines a year ago?

Maybe they follow the “make it up as we go along” policy, which is fair enough I suppose.

There are fewer mods now, and Auggie is only part time now.

If you see something offensive, flag it. That’s the only way a mood will know, unless they just happen to read it.

They aren’t psychic.

There definitely are guidelines for both questions and answers. Here are the guidelines for questions (note the section on controversial topics). Here are the guidelines for answers in the general section. Here are the guidelines for responses in social. Here are the rules of content.

I have not noticed any fall off in the moderation or change in the moderation standards.

The question that you linked to is in meta, which has always had somewhat more relaxed moderation rules.

The rule has always been, however, that personal attacks are not allowed. Attacks on ideas or beliefs, while unfortunate, are not the same thing. “You are stupid for being a Christian” is not the same thing as “Christianity is stupid”.

And it’s the internet; if you are easily offended, then you’re going to have problems.

There are fewer mods now and as Seek said, Auggie is less available so more may slip through the cracks.

I just took a look at the question you linked to, and did see one post that needed to be removed (it was awfully flame-baity). It hadn’t been flagged, so I wasn’t aware of it until just now. And yeah, the mod team is super short-handed. <sobs>

@DaphneT I’m not exactly sure what you’re referecing, but it has seemed fairly consistant in my time here. I do with I’d read the rules first, I hate being chastised….lol

Using the chat in certain situations is actually a really good idea!

So @marinelife posted the links to the guidelines for answers. One contains the following phrases:
”...Egocentric attention-grabbing
Hateful, abusive, or bigoted
Harassment of other users”

Another contains “Be respectful; you can disagree without being disagreeable”

The first set is preceded by the phrase ”...activity isn’t allowed on Fluther” The second phrase is preceded the by the word “must”

Since the time I joined the collective, I’ve read those rules, several times, and interpreted them to mean that:
I could state my opinion in Social, but only once as repetitiveness would be considered rude, harassment, or detrimental to everyone’s enjoyment of learning. Resulting conversations would need to be kept at a minimum in the thread, or taken out of the thread via PMs or chat or some other means.

I had to give factual, verifiable answers in General, and the resulting ‘conversation’ would be for clarification purposes only, any other discussion would need to be taken out of the thread, etc.

Discussions in Meta had more of a free-form behavior because these questions are meant to give us insight into how the collective works with the current participants, how it may have worked in the past with defunct participants, how we see it working in the future as new participants join.

Therefore, I’ve tried to take the tack that this is the internet, not face-to-face: it’s like writing letters to pen-pals. Each answer should be thought out, edited and NOT treated like a flippant sound-bite as if I was doing sensationalistic news reporting.

Now, I know I haven’t been successful in applying my interpretation of the guidelines and that I’ve offended many with my comments, answers or with my lack of further participation in threads. That is clear from the lack of lurve and from the repetitive (and offensively worded) questions about who’s a troll and who’s not.

I still think the Mods should get tougher on the controversial threads. If the posters can’t be bothered to precede or end their posts with conciliatory phrases, like “I’m just trying to understand”, or “I don’t intend to offend I just don’t understand/believe/etc.” and they are into their second and third round of posts on the thread, then those posts should be flagged/edited/challenged in some way as being not consistent with the guidelines. I find it rather clear who’s worded things derisively or derogatorily.

Perhaps this could be achieved by consult with the OP as to whether they’ve gotten as much as they wanted out of the post. The OP can help by flagging those contributions that they believe have failed to satisfy their original intentions, the OP can also help by posting an answer that says when they are done with the post and the hi-jackers can have a free-for-all.

The OP can also help by posting respectfully and responsibly as well.

Fluther is Not a faith formation forum. It you are posting religious questions or political questions with the hope of having your faith in your organization’s rules, practices and beliefs validated, there are better forums for you.

Fluther is a forum for people who are in a phase of their life where they are questioning their beliefs, expanding their knowledge, trying to grow their minds and shrinking their egos.

Not everyone is in the same phase at the same time. This is the internet, not face-to-face: it’s like writing letters to pen-pals. Each answer should be thought out, edited and NOT treated like a flippant sound-bite.

@all Don’t forget, there are also regular waves of users who accuse moderators of “censorship” every time they disagree with a quip that gets moderated (especially their own).

Don’t users have some degree of responsibility for their own ‘mental health’? Why wouldn’t someone who is upset with the tone or content of a thread just “stop following”? Why is it up to the moderation to determine if a post is “nice enough”? Sure, overt attacks are easy enough to identify, but why put the moderators through the torture of deciding how much is too much vs. what is censoring? Every single person you talk to is going to have a different opinion of where that line lays.

It’s definitely a case of “You can please some of the people some of the time, all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time.”

@syz Great point!

@DaphneT We try to encourage respect and a general level of civility, but there’s just no way to enforce it through post-by-post moderation. Human moderation is already somewhat subjective, but it would be darn near impossible to find any 5 people who’d agree on the “niceness” of any particular post. So our line in the sand has to be rather high and very clear. When it’s crossed, we remove the post. When people are getting close to crossing it, we try to drop a ”[mod says]” message into the thread in an attempt to calm the waters. Unfortunately, the mods are volunteers and aren’t always around when things go awry. We’re also short-staffed at the moment. We try our best, though!

All of that said, in very rare circumstances, we may ban a member who is consistently mean, even if they don’t often cross the line into a removable personal attack. We’ve learned from experience that people like that just aren’t good for the community.

Thanks, @augustlan. I do believe that you and your Mod team do well with what you have to work with. The short of it is that I wouldn’t mind if you were tougher in threads in either of those two controversial topics.