A place for you guys to discuss and brainstorm ways for mods to be more transparent. Personally I don't think there is much room for transparency. Most of what we talk about is should a user be infracted, or if we need a new rule for something that has come up (we don't infract ex post facto) and how we should implement it. Those kind of conversations wouldn't really reveal anything as people would figure it out via a rule change or via an infraction notification. In terms of appeals, we could make those threads public, but that could be a privacy thing with the people involved. Alternatively we could post appeals decisions (we write a multi paragraph desicion explaining the issue and our ruling and pm that to the user) which would let the site see the reasoning behind certain things, but you still run into the privacy issue. This will be my last post on the forums for awhile, but figured we could kick start a focused debate while I'm out of town NOTE this isn't an official "if x amount of people vote for this it will happen" thread, but rather an area for you guys to propose ways to make the site better.
Do you guys really care who is getting warned and/or banned. Also most of the rule changes are usually made because of you guys wanting something changed.
Everything should be transparent, however because that is impossible you should start slowly transparating and then speed up as it goes along. For instance, start with long dead threads, then end with threads being released a week after the last post. If the threads are about a user then allow the user to freely view the thread and then, if they wish, release it to the public.
All we do is discuss what's currently going on with the forums usually who's breaking rules and why it is anybody else business besides the user violating the rule and the mods. A second question why do you care who is being warned/banned?
Most of it is the, "who polices the police?" thing. We'd rather see for ourselves that mods are being reasonable and such rather than taking your word for it. Not to mention, we would not be forcfully taking privacy away from the user in question. He would be allowed to go against the publication of the thread if it involved him/her. Other than that, threads on rules(etc.) are very much so our bussiness.
Why you think that we are being unfair in enforcing the rules do you not trust us and also Stalin polices the police.
Your not being to unfair, but I don't trust you guys at all on a professional level. In fact I don't trust most "government"-esk things. But who polices Stalin? He is not completly immune to bias or something.
Self-regulation is really hard to do. Sure it's not like all at once he'll do a bunch of insane things and wreck everything, but if Stalin had handled the entire reforms situation in any other way he would've had to launch investigations into profiles and start crackingdown + censorship, most likely. And that's juts the beggining of the end, really. Honestly I think we got really lucky the whole thing didn't balloon up and pop in our faces.
This is pretty ridiculous. This used to be a site where you guys came to hang out with an LPer that you liked. Now you're calling the man who is the keystone to this community, the man who created it, the man you are all fans of and that's the reason you came, possibly corrupt on his own forum? No-one needs to "police" Stalin.
In terms of the site rules here's an example of the typical site rules discussion. "User x just did this and it pissed off users y, z, and half the forum" "Mods agree that user x shouldn't be able to do that, but that there wasn't any rule expressly prohibiting it" "We draft a rule, debate it, and enact it" "We notify people of the new rule (especially user x) and enforce it the next time it occurs" It's not really an exciting process. The last few rules change was hate speech, which was done after a skype discussion between some of the mods and Stalin. Other then that I only really remember changing the sig rules, and a new definition for necroposting. Both of those were brought up by the community.
No, I'm not advocating completly striping power from him or something, but there should be a counter-balence, like the People's Assembly, in order to make sure he doesn't do anything that the members would disprove of.
A forum is made up of members and thus should be as free for members as possible. While Stalin does have the ability to do whatever he wants, whatever he wants isn't always going to make people happy. A People's Assembly would help insure that Stalin gets his will across, while not pissing people off. Also if I'm not mistaken the forum is paid in large part via ads on the forum/site. These ads only make money because members view them and click them. So a lot of it is "paid" by the members.
It doesn't matter what he does. Stalin is above the rules and can do whatever on his forum he wants. He needs no policing. If it pisses people off the only punishment is that they possibly stop supporting him. There should be nothing else involving him. Staff, maybe. Stalin, no.
Stalin isn't some all knowing, sentiet being though. He can do whatever he wants, but not nessisarily should he do whatever he wants. Besides, it's not like there's chaos in the streets because there's a People's Assembly, and there wouldn't be chaos in the streets if you let us seem dead Mod Discussions too.
The only dead threads are the "hey I'm going to be out of town for a week" threads, or the completed appeals. The two major threads are the current events on the forums (where we post up possible infractions and discuss if they merit an infraction) and the site rules (which we periodically post in when site rules issues come uo)
This issue has come to a close. Tribunes will have access to the mods forum, but they will be limited in what they can discuss with the rest of the forum. Stalin will handle this from here.
