Hey everyone,
There's been talk about what the rules for these forums should be. Now, obviously, if there's a hole in the rules that you see it'd be good if you'd mention it, and of course if someone finds a technicality in the rules to create havoc that annoys 90% of the people who regularly use the forum, it will be immediately dealt with.
Anyway, as a very loose and casual draft (*please note, rough draft*), I was thinking of the following. Please give any and all input against and/or for any of the draft, and also anything you think should be added. Obviously some of these are obviously new, so please consider and respond.
1. No derogatory, racist, or threatening attacks against others in the forum. You can question people directly, but please refrain from using personal attacks and profanity (And questioning people directly does not include "Why are you _________(profanity goes here)?").
2. No off topic posts. Off topic posts/topics will be locked, moved, or deleted. Moderators will typically post why a topic was locked, moved, or deleted unless the offender habitually has done so. (user notification will probably drop off as the forums get larger and/or if we add a search function)
3. No redundant posts. Please take the time to view all other topics under the desired subject before posting. We have thousands upon thousands of delegates. That amazing insightful point that you have...may have already been thought of.
4. Please keep comments on topic. That means that if you hate immigration, please don't post it under a rules thread.
5. Certain topics are devoted to communicating with/asking Unity08 questions. Please keep all comments and questions for Unity08 in those threads. Otherwise, they will most likely not receive a response.
6. Use these forums for communication about illegal activities will result in a ban from the site.
7. The goal of the forum is to provide a place that fosters constructive dialogue among the American people in regard to issues that are important to them. Topics and posts not in line with the spirit of that philosophy will be deleted. (to be crystal clear, this does NOT mean posts that are extremely partisan will be deleted. It does mean that random posts that are not clearly not constructive will be deleted. This will be rare, however, if the functionality for users to rate each others posts is implemented)
8. Logins or IPs used to spam the site with commerical interests will be banned. E-mail Unity08 to request removal from a ban list.
9. Users who consistently violate the above rules will gradually lose posting abilities.
This will be edited to be more concise in the final version and will not have as much explanation. A lot of moderating (by people such as me) will NOT be necessary as we increase functionality on the board, as it is hoped that our forums will allow users to downgrade/upgrade topics and comments and their display through a voting system, so that all of the readers decide what they want to see.
Please keep suggestions to how to change the shoutbox/forum on the other topic in this thread. This should only be on input to the above draft of the forum rules.
A few thoughts:
The universal tendency of posters in forums like this is to just start posting when something spurs the passions. As more and more people come to Unity, there will be more and more posters. The more active a thread becomes, the greater the tendency to post "ASAP and often." The likelihood of the poster reading the whole thread, and other threads before posting will decrease as the size of the community increases.
The boards are destined to become a bit messy when the active user base is large. Slashdot, an old (in net years) tech site has a good decade of experience in this matter. Their solution is essentially diligent moderation and the willingness to toss users when they go out of their way to troll or mess things up.
The larger the threat that Unity poses to the two party system, the more likely we're going to have people in here that try to "disunify" us. We should have some strategy ready to go in this regard. Let's face it, we are talking about the fate of the most powerful political position in the world. Half a billion dollars are going into this effort from the established parties. The gloves are going to come off if we do our job right. They have brick-and-mortar infrastructure; we're web-based. This site will be a target sooner or later since it's our one and only piece of infrastructure.
The language above suggests that you'll be considering some sort of moderating system. You might want to check out Slashdot's method as it's pretty good. Active posters are randomly granted a handful of moderation points now and again. When they have points they can only moderate. They can't post until the points have been spent.
Grass root efforts are on the way. Chapters are being established right now. The more we have, the more solid our organization will become. You are right about attacks on this site but they can be battled at the local level with chapters.
Betty McLeod
PA 06
Betty327@ptd.net
Thanks for the idea. I'll pass on the slashdot point moderation system suggestion to our actual tech people and they'll see what they can do.
-A
I am not sure what "slashdot" means, and I have no idea what a "drupal template" is, nor do I care. I am finding Shoutbox to be very confusing (what is it we are deferring 'til later?) and dominated by a few voices.
Just my opinion....
Joe - 5th Congressional District, Pennsylvania
I found a wikipedia search very informative. In a nutshell Slashdot is software that would add poster moderation capability. Drupal is another software for forum community management that allows poster plugins. My first impression is that Drupal would allow the poster to deconstruct the focus of the founding website, but I'll leave that to the Web Team...no dummies there.
Bill"for what we are together"
bill713.unity08@sbcglobal.net
Please give any suggestions that you think may improve the forum. Many may already be in the process of being implemented, and some may not be able to be implemented, but we want this feature to be as useful as possible to our delegates.
-A
No sooner did I finish my thought than you have a moderation system in place! Good timing I guess. Keep up the good work!
We're psychic! :-)
Thanks!
-A
You say 'no response', why not lock,move, or delete?
The rest seems like good common sense to me.
Bill"for what we are together"
personalrights@sbcglobal.net
I only suggested no response simply because I was wondering if it'd be better to leave posts there (so maybe an author who spent a lot of time on a comment (which we currently can't move, only delete) they would realize the mistake and move it) instead of deleting someone's work. If people tend to say either move it or delete it, we can do that.
It's really up to all of you.
-A
What Army do you intend on using to enforce the rules?
-
If you do not have any reasonable suggestions, why comment? If you do not want to give this concept a chance, just go to some other blog and not waste posting space. Many of the posters are trying to make U08 work.
****
ihavehadit-CT02, unity08_ct02@yahoo.com
My suggestion was posted elsewhere, but of course I can't find it now (lolol). You have interacted with me enough to know I am one who tries to work towards a better future.
Anyhow to paraphrase ... my suggestion was that I feel that the shoutbox should be moved to a family of email lists moderated by members. That way :
a) the Army of people needed can contribute,
b) the lists are at arms length from Unity,
c) Unity has the choice of whether to advertise and offer membership in a given group on their site and
d) by using existing technology Unity08 can focus their resources on things that are more important than re-inventing the wheel on discussion groups.
My point is this, why go down the same path that has been gone down before and resulted in a shoutbox that embarrases members and certainly isn't a good advertisement for moderates. The basic problem is that there are not enough resources to moderate the discussion (i.e. no Army in place as I implied above) and there is no way to pick and choose what is reasonable or not based on the membership of a list.
If you made these "offsite" discussions lists, Unity08 could offer links to join lists that are well run and not have links to those that are not. Policing this would then come down to policing the list owners and not all the members. This is a much smaller and manageable number and could be done without an Army. Its a control thing, Unity08 needs to control what is on their site and either you control it or you don't. Sticking your toe in that water doesn't work. Saying you will better control it when you can't wont work and siphoning off resources from important work to do that which is not acheivable isn't smart.
In the now somewhat immortal words of John Milligan, "Ought Implies Can" and to say "We will better moderate the lists" implies that the resources available can to it. My point is, Unity08 can not and indeed should not as they have more important things to do.
Update -- I found the post referenced above: http://unity08.com/node/1419#comment-23740)
Hey Gea,
Thanks for the suggestion and we'll certainly look into enacting some sort of e-mail discussion groups/threads that will help. However, for the time being we're going to try to stick with existing methods (i.e. some sort of forum) but we're hoping to make it EXTREMELY user-moderated. What that means for us is that really bad, divisive, inflammatory comments will be rated lower by you and others like you, while good discussions will be rated positively. That way newcomers to the site will see the good discussions, and realize which ones are bad ones by their rating/position on the site.
Eventually we're going to have to deal with extreme numbers (since once we get millions of people, it'll be larger than almost any online community), so we'll have to reconsider. But until then, we'll be considering all input for the future, but have a general idea of how to moderate these discussions.
Let me know if you have any other comments or concerns, and thanks again for the idea, and for everyone's input on this thread!
-A
Y'all are singin' out of my hymnbook!!
Yea-uhs, yea-uhs, YEA-UHS!... :-)
OK, here is the logical challenge.
You say, "Eventually we're going to have to deal with extreme numbers ... [b]ut until then, we'll be considering all input for the future, but have a general idea of how to moderate these discussions."
Your assumption is that you will attract large numbers of politically moderate people with an unmoderated forum with often extreme viewpoints presented.
Which comes first, the large number of members or the moderation?
Let's check, are you meeting your membership number goals? If not, then your assumption may be wrong.
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Sorry I was so testy, but I was happy to see that there is some progress on the website now.
ihavehadit-CT02, unity08_ct02@yahoo.com
Given what I have seen from many posters, your thoughts about providing a suggestion rather than a simple rant are warranted.
I still believe that there will have to be a decentralization of the shoutbox moderation to effectively manage the volume, but as stated by the new Unity08 Web folks, they will deal with that if (and when) it occurs.
Have a great day!
These are good rules, but they won't mean anything if obvious spam stays up on the site for a few days.
Also, the page with polls is an obvious embarrassment at this point. If you can't come up with a new poll in six months, then just take the page down.
Any assistance that users can provide by denoting spam is appreciated. We've been going through the forums just about daily and looking at all comments, so hopefully spam will be cut down to a very small level...not to mention that our approval queue which limits spam looking posts is extremely overactive (and sometimes gets legit posts too)
-A
If you think its bad now, just wait. If it seems like you are bailing out a leaky boat with a bucket, try a ship with a thimble. It is natural for more and more spammy or crazies as the membership rises. Of course you folks must know that by now.
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