| General > General Technical Chat |
| Discussing the usage of the TEA thread |
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| tautech:
--- Quote from: Cerebus on August 23, 2022, 07:58:01 pm --- --- Quote from: pcprogrammer on August 23, 2022, 07:13:18 pm --- --- Quote from: Neper on August 23, 2022, 07:07:42 pm ---First he blows everything up, then he resigns and now he wants to apologise. All this in less than 24 hours. What a remarkable achievement. How about a jolly leaving do in the garden of No. 10? --- End quote --- Is this really necessary? --- End quote --- Possibly not, but I think we're going to have to make some allowances here. There are some people very angry with gnif and biting their tongues to not be as vituperative in here as they'd like to be. Gnif has gone at the thread like a bull in a china shop, while admitting that he's not really familiar with the thread but has still charged on recklessly. So recklessly that, realising what he has done, he has felt it necessary to give up his moderating privileges. That leaves the people who care about that thread, some of them deeply, to pick up the broken pieces from the floor. So if some those people's anger and frustration leaks out then I think we have to cut them some slack. --- End quote --- Yet to gnif’s credit he has eventually listened and realised the many concerns of our TEA family and for that alone is quite an achievement. That most of the TEA OT posts were essentially harmless when some topical matters are a part of ordinary life not something only the nuts in society engage in. That we as a family have mainly self policed is pretty admirable yet some subjects seem to always trigger red flags for some members is in another way sad when they instead of bashing the Report button don’t engage to better understand the topical posters POV. For decades my recreational exercise was a walk with a rifle to get a rabbit for the cat of which I do remember a post from Dave saying how much damage wild cats do in the environment yet those land holders with rabbit problems frown on you destroying them. Interesting to see something from another POV isn’t it ? Yet if I need use my TE to repair then document and post about a chronograph, an electronic instrument used by many involved in the many types of shooting sports would I get warning for doing so ? It’s not really reasonable to expect moderators to have such a wide life experience to judge all these edge case matters to the satisfaction of all however the fact we can engage with them as we have in the last day or so to find an outcome for the good of all is pretty cool. Don’t let the last day discourage you gnif as we have all grown as a result of the path recently trod. |
| tggzzz:
Wow; what a crater! Here's my tuppence worth... I suspect there have been three classes of complaints that have irritated the mods: * standard unacceptable content such as unpleasantness, guns, politics, religion. That's simple and uncontroversial and boring; the mods have always helped. * complaints by some deeply involved TEA denizens about other denizens. By and large the denizens have been self-policing, but I'm aware of a few instances where the mods have apparently stepped in and helped * complaints from some lurkers and some denizens about posts being off topic.That final class is tricky. To some extent I agree, but I always skip over the uninteresting (to me) OT posts. That's an essential modern skill in all walks of life! If someone is bored by too many OT posts, then they can simply and easily "be elsewhere". They don't have to read any of the posts! The tricky aspect for the mods is, of course, how much notice to pay to lurkers that find the posts boring and/or OT. Can the thread be "cleaned up" and "used properly again"? I don't know. To an extent the general OT banter is part of the thread's life force that keeps it going; in that case you have either or neither. Only time will tell if removing the OT banter will remove the TEA content.Can the thread resurrect itself in Another Place? Again I don't know and only time will tell. I have little sympathy for lurkers expecting the thread to conform to their expectations. The zeitgeist is made by those that turn up and contribute. Mention has been made that it is difficult for some to follow the subset of the thread that interests them. I have some but not too much sympathy for that.... Where there is specific information that would be useful to a wider audience in years to come, I have occasionally suggested making a separate thread - and denizens have done that. But most of the other information in the TEA thread is little better than transient tweets. More importantly, bitseeker's response was to curate pointers in the first three messages in the thread. I have a great deal of sympathy for the mods. They do a thankless task as best they can, based on incomplete information/opinions that they can't make public. If they don't give reasons for their actions, they get called names. If they do give reasons, the barrack room lawyers descend to pick holes and poke at the edge cases. The mods can't win. The mods will make mistakes. While I may not agree with all his decisions, I'd be sorry if gnif completely stops moderating; he's better than most! I also give a lot of credit to anybody that puts their hand up and says "I didn't get it right". Even if the TEA thread completely dies and is reincarnated elsewhere, there is still plenty of interesting stuff on this forum. |
| tggzzz:
--- Quote from: Vince on August 23, 2022, 05:17:56 pm ---I once used to uise Groups.io, for it hosts TekScopes.... but IIRC when I stopped using it 5 years ago it was mostly because the user interface and features were painful, espeically working with images. found it orders of magnitude more convenient on EEVBlog which is why I started posting my TE repairs there, especially once I realized many of the old beard helping me on TekScope... were also subscribed to EEVblog and were helping me there as well ! --- End quote --- The TekScopes groups.io gui is poor. It isn't a web forum, but is an email reflector with storage and a web GUI. I believe how images can be used is a configuration option, but there is an issue with then the space (and cost) taken up on the server. I use TekScopes as an email reflector. I get each post as a separate email, not all posts aggregated into a single email. I read the emails in a proper old-fashioned email client, using either POP3 or IMAP. The email client automatically arranges emails in a tree, thus allowing sub-threads to be easily followed/ignored . That's better than any forum I've seen, including this one. Web browser email GUIs are uniformly awful e.g. googlemail web GUI. Just like the groups.io web GUI, and for similar reasons. |
| beanflying:
--- Quote from: Cerebus on August 23, 2022, 08:37:28 pm --- --- Quote from: sokoloff on August 23, 2022, 08:31:00 pm ---Anyone have any ideas or examples why moderating forums like this is such a thankless PITA? --- End quote --- Look at the message directly above yours. --- End quote --- Why don't you do as threatened on discord after 'I don't know whether to go and see what's happening or just leave them until the tumbleweeds start rolling and pop up with a snide remark.' then just stay there you pompous windbag! You are out of order thinking you have ANY moral grounds to critique other members opinions here based on yours and the other dribble there. The recent 'content' in the main reads like a primary school boys conversation at lunchtime figuring out who to beat up after school. I am staggered that collectively the 4 or 5 of you would have the gall to post here ever again after some of the utter trash typed and accusations and slagging off about Gnif in particular but also Dave and Halcyon. The juvenile behaviour in totally AND WILLFULLY ignoring Dave and other Mods posts in the TEA thread from what was a few weeks ago now has led to this and the noise ratio has been increasing since to try and make some sort of point about 'our playpen and our rules'. This like all forums is not a democracy and has rules which 'in general' are evenly applied. That said from when I first dropped in to the TEA thread 4 or 5 years ago there was ALWAYS a percentage of Off Topic when something in one of our lives cropped up that we thought others might find interesting or amusing. TEA or Electronics was always at 80% at a guess. It has descended to likely well under 50% as some have chosen to treat it like a chat group on their daily lives. No I haven't reported ANYONE or ANYTHING in the TEA thread and until the BS of a few weeks ago was brought to my attention afterward by another member hadn't wasted my life sifting through the weeds for months. This is a thing CAUSED by a few who couldn't pull their heads in not some sort of heavy handed policing issue. |
| gnif:
At the end of the day people can be as angry at they like at me or the way I handled this, but I will say one thing, the https://groups.io/g/tea forum I believe is a benefit to everyone on both sides of this fence. The content there already shows that the TEA group needed a larger and more flexible forum for their community and content. Seeing as the majority of posts there are what would be considered off topic for this forum (yes it's early days, and I ack there is too little data to make a fair assessment here) i'd say that it's a good move for them and their friends and I wish them the best with it. For anyone that feels that I/we tried to push this group off the server, please know you're wrong. There is/was no desire or intent to ever push the TEA group away from this forum for any reason, technical or otherwise. For anyone that felt targeted, please know that the actions I took were in my belief in the best interests of the community. Through this it seems evident that I am simply out of touch with the community in a way that prevents me from being an effective moderator here. Some have made noise that it might have been to keep the server resources down, etc... please be aware that I am fervently against culling content to reduce server load/database size, I take great professional pride in keeping large forums/sites like this running without having to make such compromises. You should also know that having a single 5000 page thread with SMF is no different to having 5000 individual posts due to the way that SMF handles threads, and things like the 'post/page count' which can cause issues (the simple act of counting them, SELECT COUNT type queries) we already have a solution for that scales. This forum is actually the 2nd largest one that I manage the hosting for, the largest being an order of magnitude larger and busier (see attached). |
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