Thread: Posts undeleted
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Old 08-15-2007, 03:57 PM   #42
Samson
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: United Socialist States of America
Home MUD: SmaugMuds.org
Home MUD: Arthmoor MUD Hosting
Posts: 249
Samson is on a distinguished road
Re: Posts undeleted

I disagree. Someone who is truly a newbie will more likely see the unedited thread as an example of hostility toward newcomers to mudding. First impressions are everything and if that thread had been mine, despite Steve being a jerk first, the massive off-topic bickering about it that came afterward would cause me to go elsewhere. That's where good moderators come in handy and should be allowed to step in.

I don't agree with this opinion of moderation. It implies that doing so is a negative activity with no value. I think it's more of a disservice to have a question asked, rudely bumped, and then have 5 million chattering posters debating why the newbie was a jerk, and why telling him so was mean spirited and wrong. It serves no purpose other than to inflate post counts and bloat up the database with useless crap.

This kind of elitism and condecsention is exactly what drives people away and ends up breeding more and more of the same pile of troll postings and bitter flamewars to begin with. The kind of person it takes to overcome that type of treatment is often not going to then make a very good source of help for a newbie. If the goal of this site is to be informative, then one of two things needs to happen:

1. People need to shape up and behave themselves and stop bickering with each other at the drop of a hat. So far I don't see this happening on its own.

or,

2. Moderators need to step in and enforce whatever policies they deem appropriate for their sections. All I see when this comes up is resistance and talk of censorship and oppression. Which is just plain silly.

It wasn't terribly hard to understand. The tone of your challenge to Matt to take it to TMC came off like the "lets go where the evil liberal censor freaks won't be able to stop me" tone of a CNN commentator.

It is when you appoint yourself as the enforcer of those standards and you aren't a staff member for the site.

Granted, moderation policy here is inconsistent at best. But the solution is not to turn the masses loose for mob justice. The solution is to reign things in to where they should have been had the rules been enforced consistently from the start.
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