Forum Moderation

[Ian.M]

Maybe register another domain: eevblog-wingnuts.com and run a separate forum over there for the politics!

[magic]

[Redacted] and [redacted] sound appealing, but come with big downsides. I realised that c1973, after reading "Cloak of [Redacted]" by Larry Niven. It is still worth speedreading, at https://chrisabraham.com/blog/cloak-of-anarchy-by-larry-niven

Sample:
[redacted]

How can we handle people derailing the "forum moderation" thread with politics?

Banning? Locking the thread? Would it make sense to have special rules here?
 

[PlainName]

How can we handle people derailing the "forum moderation" thread with politics?

Banning? Locking the thread? Would it make sense to have special rules here?
 

Post a political comment and future posts are forced through jive valspeak:

After all, fer shure, anarchy is like, ya know, only thuh last word in free enterprise. What can a government do for guys that guys can't do for themselves? Protection from other countries? If all thuh other countries are anarchies too, fer shure, you don't need armies. Police, like, maybe: but what's wrong with privately owned police?"

"Fire departments used to work that way," Jill remembered. "They were hired by thuh insurance companies. They only protected pads that belonged to their own clients."

"Right! Oh, wow! So you buy theft and murder insurance, fer shure, and thuh insurance companies hire a police force. The client carries a credit card

[McCarthy]

Besides Twitch I blocked all social media platforms on my home network. Way too much toxic garbage these days. I kept forums untouched but just reading posts around here for the past few weeks makes me question that too.

It's basically a skill issue. It's possible to use social media (and this forum) to only follow those people and topics you want to follow, and see practically nothing else, if that's what you actually desire.

Oh I'm aware. I tried for many years to moderate and control my social media consumption, and I still get sucked into the toxic crap all the time. Filtering through it is also not exactly pleasant. Call it addictive behavior... its part of me and all I can do is quitting for good.

You seem to manage a healthy balance between the online world and living an active life with outdoor activities. That being said, I read some fatigue in your recent posts too.

My only solution is to stay away all-together. I simply run into too many people that I can't get along with or fundamentally don't agree with. Throw in all the no-life trolls and I'm done for good.

I put my old 55" TV up in my garage with a Tiny ThinkCenter from eBay for 60 bucks. This still allows me to watch YouTube videos. I only used it for repair videos when I get stuck with something very specific while working on one of my cars or the AC etc. It gets too hot in the garage to watch anything else.

Anyways, see ya'll on the flip side.

[fourfathom]

I simply run into too many people that I can't get along with or fundamentally don't agree with. Throw in all the no-life trolls and I'm done for good.

Print out that "There's someone wrong on the internet!" cartoon and keep it handy.
https://xkcd.com/386/

[Nominal Animal]

Print out that "There's someone wrong on the internet!" cartoon and keep it handy.
https://xkcd.com/386/

That itself has never bothered me, but the very close variant "There's someone giving misleading advice on the internet!" always catches me.

(That is, unless they are wrong when giving advice to others on how to solve a problem, it does not bother me.)

[wilfred]

Yet there are many that passionately advocate for the entire forum to be a free-for-all, or have one big dedicated thread with no rules,

Many? There's the rub. On a look at the size of the member-list it stands at 76533. At what point do you consider you've had feedback from many of them?  If you had feedback requesting the forum become a free-for-all from a significant number of members, however that is defined, then yeah maybe it should be.

If there was a poll and it had 100 respondents with 75 in favour of a free-for-all then if you deleted those 75 you might solve all the moderation issues in one fell swoop. For a while anyway.

I personally don't really mind the politics. It is a perennial topic of human discourse and a means to resolve issues between those of different views. It will never go away. What I don't like is people who completely disregard the existence of others in a selfish quest to win an argument. Often times with weak arguments or pointless repetition. Anyone contributing some signal of value rapidly gets lost in the noise. Some threads inevitably get so sullied by arguments over smaller and smaller details that the reasonable member just can't be bothered with it and abandons the thread to the combatants.

[RoGeorge]

Even if it were to be a free for all section, that will be useless, because discussing the real problems was made illegal.  You will be literally put in jail for speaking, or even assassinated if you are a public figure.

I've seen this before, during the communist Romania before 1989.  Back then, during the Ceausescu dictatorship, there was about as much free speech in Romania as it is now in the western world.

[abeyer]

NOTE: This message has been deleted by the forum moderator EEVblog for being against the forum rules and/or at the discretion of the moderator as being in the best interests of the forum community and the nature of the thread.
If you believe this to be in error, please contact the moderator involved.
An optional additional explanation is:

[PlainName]

NOTE: This message has been deleted by the forum moderator EEVblog for being against the forum rules and/or at the discretion of the moderator as being in the best interests of the forum community and the nature of the thread.
If you believe this to be in error, please contact the moderator involved.
An optional additional explanation is:

[abeyer]

NOTE: This message has been deleted by the forum moderator EEVblog for being against the forum rules and/or at the discretion of the moderator as being in the best interests of the forum community and the nature of the thread.
If you believe this to be in error, please contact the moderator involved.
An optional additional explanation is:

[shabaz]

NOTE: This message has been deleted by the forum moderator EEVblog for being against the forum rules and/or at the discretion of the moderator as being in the best interests of the forum community and the nature of the thread.
If you believe this to be in error, please contact the moderator involved.
An optional additional explanation is:

[MK14]

Do not argue about stuff not related to moderation here.

[shabaz]

Funny how MK always seems to wait for the dissenting responses to intolerant comments, until he posts things like that.

[PlainName]

NOTE: This message has been deleted by the forum moderator EEVblog for being against the forum rules and/or at the discretion of the moderator as being in the best interests of the forum community and the nature of the thread.
If you believe this to be in error, please contact the moderator involved.
An optional additional explanation is:

[shabaz]

NOTE: This message has been deleted by the forum moderator EEVblog for being against the forum rules and/or at the discretion of the moderator as being in the best interests of the forum community and the nature of the thread.
If you believe this to be in error, please contact the moderator involved.
An optional additional explanation is:

[EEVblog]

I repeat, this is not the place for any discussion except related to moderation. OT posts removed.

[Smokey]

The string of ...

NOTE: This message has been deleted by the forum moderator EEVblog for being against the forum rules and/or at the discretion of the moderator as being in the best interests of the forum community and the nature of the thread.
If you believe this to be in error, please contact the moderator involved.
An optional additional explanation is:

...  Is pretty funny.  My imagination thinks up stuff that was probably worse than was actually said.

It would be cool to just hide the junk posts and make the users click "unhide garbage" button to see what actually happened. 

[EEVblog]

It would be cool to just hide the junk posts and make the users click "unhide garbage" button to see what actually happened.

It would be cool to have all sorts of moderation functions on the forum, but we have to make do with that we have.
The feature I used above to nuke the comments above for example doesn't let me add a message, contrary to what it says, nor does it let me undelete it.
It's actually better if I use the option to just delete messages entirely, because then it at least puts them in a deleted message folder for reference, and can be undeleted if needed. But it doesn't alert the posted there message was deleted, to everyone concerned it's just magically gone.
The SMF software is pretty horrible for moderation.

[thm_w]

Where?

This is the first occurrence of "ublock" in this thread.

I'm not going to try to learn yet another scrotty little DSL, and the chances of me getting everything exactly right are low.

Click the "print" button in the top right and search "ublock".
If you are the only one that wants a forum feature, and you are unwilling to spend a few minutes reading about alternate solutions to it, that would tell me its not that important to you.

[magic]

Because those complaints are hardly more than a pretext to lobby for removal of anything positive written about  Elon Musk or LLMs

[EEVblog]

For those curious, Joe has not logged back in since the incident. Seems like he has left.

[BradC]

For those curious, Joe has not logged back in since the incident. Seems like he has left.

Yeah, I've been checking. On the other hand, I took a 6 month break from another forum I've been on for decades after I had "a bit of a breakdown". Sometimes a bit of willpower-enforced separation can help reset things. In my case I kept reading, but logged out and I used that time to acknowledge that while I thought I provided value to the forum, in reality I was just another small fish in a big pond and there were other people who could provide most of the feedback I'd normally jump in to provide. Perspective is important.

It'd be sad if he didn't come back, but "it is what it is".

[Cyclotron]

Looks like the current feud is spreading to other threads. https://www.eevblog.com/forum/dodgy-technology/chatgpt-suicide-coach-lawsuit/msg6114919/#msg6114919

If nothing else that reiterates a lesson from usenet: starting a cesspit thread to entice all the flies away from other threads doesn't work and does create a breeding place.

Oh well, it was worth trying.

May I repeat the observation that it's nearly exclusively longstanding members with thousands of posts who get involved in these quarrels. We are not attracting the wrong people; it's the people who have been here for years.

Maybe this forum is devolving into a "toxic marriage" setting, where some people have seen too much of each other and have been irritated about the other guy squeezing-the-toothpaste-the-wrong-way for too long? Or do we just have too many grumpy old men struggling with the fact that they are no longer important on the job, who feel the need to "make a point" here on every topic they come across?

I agree with you. I have experienced it directly, and some factions like to troll and attack people in groups.  Long-time members who are intolerant of questions or opinions that differ from theirs, and are quick to move to personal attacks.

I considered not participating but have since moved to just put them in the ignore list.

[ME]

The problem is the mods acting like the taliban, are they traffic wardens in real life or pcso's ?, little hittlers up thier own asses mostly!