Very Disappointed With The Inaction Of The Mod Team
A few weeks ago I reported a racist post by Luke.S in the Bad Jokes Thread. The post was deleted but there didn't appear to be any further action taken. As far as I'm aware normal members can see infractions from other members - I didn't see any such infractions for Luke.S, nor did he appear to be banned from the forum for any period of time. This lack of action from the mod team annoys me - the post was clearly racist (it was even prefaced with the all too common "This is a bit racist, but...") and it was deleted, so the moderator who deleted it recognised it as racist. Is deleting the post enough of a punishment for racism?
Opinions or thoughts from anyone (but particularly the mod team) welcome.
Oh, I should clarify the reason for this post (meant to in the original post). This is not a direct attack on Luke.S (although he is the cause of it), it's a general question to the mod team on what action will be taken on racist posts. Please don't turn it into a thread about Luke.S, he doesn't deserve the attention.
Infractions are shown under posts that earned them, so if the post is deleted, you cannot see if he got it or not, only mods know that as far as I know
I chose to create a new thread rather than contact the mod team directly because I wanted to bring the issue of racism to the attention of forum members. Let's see the process the mod team went through in this case, I'm interested to see what happened.
Luke.S has been approached by at least myself and has received several infractions recently. Over time if he receives more his privileges will slowly go away. Eventually this would result in him having a banning.
These things aren't made entirely public. Doing so would be bad for several reasons and would end up with every mod decision requiring validation and discussion - and that would never work.
So, quite frankly, I'm failing to see what the problem is amp88? Do you want to be copied in on everything we do? I don't mind doing that, but I guarantee it's really, really boring..
I'll reiterate; just because you can't see what's going on doesn't mean nothing is being done.
It's also more appreciated that you contact a moderator directly, that way we don't have to publically explain things and look like complete ****s.
My problem is that someone made a clearly racist post and it appeared that nothing was done. Ok, so behind the scenes he was given an infraction, but how does the reporter (or the other people who were offended by the post) know action has been taken. From my perspective I reported the post, it was deleted and that was it. Shouldn't I (as the reporter) have been informed of any action taken? Should we have a public list of infractions so people can see what's going on? I'd say yes to both of the above, but I can see that the time taken to maintain the second would possibly outweigh what it gives to the community.
Taking this back to Luke.S (but using him as an example rather than speaking about him personally), you say he's already had several infractions before the racist post. Exactly what does someone have to do to be banned then?
You don't know how many reported posts we get... a lot!
The moderators just act quickly and do what they have to do. They aren't paid, they are volunteers who just want to keep the forum clean for the benefit of the community.
They don't want to have to write an email to every post reporter. They have enough work to do here anyway and some of it is quite frustrating. I think they do extremely well and I am amazed how calm they remain!
As Scawen says the number of reported posts some days is quite high, and especially so when it's a bad day. On these occasions it's not unusual to get several reports from multiple people about the same post. We could start doing it, but it would make the job of moderating harder than it is already is (this includes everything from being targetted by members to making decisions which are borderline - for instance how to deal with all the cruise requests in the programmers forum).
It depends on a case by case basis. I don't personally remember this racist post, nor have I gone back through the moderator log yet to see what was done. However, I do know that since I contacted Luke.S I've not personally seen[1] any posts that are near the normal unacceptable levels.
[1] This doesn't mean that he hasn't made any, keeping an eye on the entire forum is impossible, but we do our best - this is why we very much appreciate people reporting posts. It helps us inordinately sometimes
You have no idea how hard it is not to break out into an old-school taa rant sometimes
I appreciate the work the mod team do (reading my posts I seem ungrateful but I agree that generally they do a very good job for no pay and personal sacrifice).
Presumably when the mods have looked at each of the posts they keep a status log/history of the action taken if this is the case could the board software be used to automatically send a PM containing the decision to the reporter? Or could this functionality be performed directly on the forum database using an overnight task?
There is a log, but it's not structured in a way which would lend itself to automating this sort of system at present. It's more of a system which appears to have grown up over time and is more adhoc. Assuming the reporting system was enhanced or altered, or even switched so that each was track-able, then I don't see why not. However, acheiving that right now, with the current system, would be a bit hit and miss potentially.
At the end of the day that would be in Vic's ball park..
