Conduct unbecoming a mod?

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i bet the site is lower volume, and the he has fewer posts as both an administrator and as a member. we are a high volume site, and we post fairly often in both contexts.

I dunno, I would say that Railpage gets hit pretty hard (link to AWStats provided for convenience), but that having been said, there's an adequate amount of staff there.

you can see the traffic on WrongPlanet is much greater:

https://www.quantcast.com/wrongplanet.net

the number of topics per section on railpage is also much lower. and there doesn't seem to be as many rapid-fire chatty non-railway related topics or even an "off the wall" section for games, which can account for a high volume of moderator posts in some cases here.

When an account's signature is changed here it changes on all posts from that account featuring a signature - so using that as an "on/off duty" indicator would be accurate only at the exact time of making a post. The nearest equivalent would be to switch the signature off to indicate status, because posts made without a signature remain without a signature.
But I do see what you mean.

It could be implemeted in a very simple way, yes; I just disabled my sig in this post.

EDIT: although apparently it can be reenabled

Last edited by Shatbat on 17 Apr 2013, 10:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

Cornflake has nearly 30,000 posts, and i have over 20,000. we are high-volume posters, so that is a lot of extra box-ticking. and if we missed it one single time, it would create new conflicts

Oh, I didn't advice to actually do it, just pointing out how it could be done. I don't know ahout everybody else, but if I was a mod I bet I'd forget about it sometime

hahaha yeah i would forget for sure, definitely

I should have been more precise with how I'd described the effect of changing signatures.
If a post is made with one signature and at some time later, the signature area in the profile is changed, then the signature displayed for subsequent and pre-existing posts will change.

At the time a post is displayed, and if signature display is enabled, the current signature is simply fetched from the profile - so an existing post made with an explicit "off-duty" signature would suddenly acquire an entirely unintended "on-duty" status if that's the current "operating mode" selected.
Likewise, the reverse.

There was nothing wrong with what he said. He was commenting on a current event and expressing his views about what a vague group of people did. It would be an entirely different story if he called another member that, or a group of members that. If he did that then the OP would have a valid complaint, but as it is there is nothing wrong with what he said.

Forgot about that.

There are a few chinks in this argument, you might say that it's neither spic nor span, that it's niggardly with logic, that there's nary a nip of understanding there, and that groups who's slurs are normalized feel gyped that you don't censor on their behalf. Now I'm going to go down to the honky-tonk, which will require navigating some bad roads, you know, slopes and slants, and then I'm going to have some white bread and crackers.

Context matters, and you're completely ignoring it by simply declaring words to be racist in and of themselves, which as inanimate constructs they are quite incapable of being, it's all about usage and context. The word "n****r" is not racist (it's actual meaning is 'ignorant', and it has no particular feelings on race, period), simply uttering the word does not make one a racist, and it is completely possible to be entirely respectful while discussing the word without Bowdlerizing it.
Conversely, if someone is using the word aggressively, is anyone really going to make a distinction if they said "Effing N-words!", rather than using the actual words, as if we don't know what those stand ins mean.
I would point out that this is not a grade school, the majority of the users here are adults, and it is supremely disrespectful to the members of this community to treat us as if we are schoolchildren.

Further, you're doing exactly what Cornflake says he'd like to avoid, which is putting yourself in the position of deciding what is and is not acceptable for everyone everywhere. Kaffir is a vicious insult in some parts of the world, but to me it's a delicious lime; are you going to make me write it as "K-word lime" if someone complains? Are you going to set a "threshold of offensiveness" to determine what is and is not allowed? Dago but not Wop? Nip but not Jap? Gyped but not Jewed? Slant or Slope but not Chinese or Gook? That's an awful lot of very subjective work that you can't really support unless it's all or nothing...
(Notice that I've uttered near a dozen racial slurs without actually saying anything racist)

Finally, this really is not a matter for you to decide, but for Alex. He's the one who set up the swear filter and all it's idiosyncrasies, he's the author of the TOS and the only one who really knows what is meant by "offensive" or "racist" content, and as the website owner he's the one who has to worry about posted content reflecting on him and his brand. He makes the decisions, you carry out his wishes; not your interpretation of his rules, not his rules as adapted to your personal values, but his rules as he sees them. Last I heard, his stated policy was that the swear filter and no aggressive usage are acceptable policy, which means anything beyond that is overstepping your authority.
If he wants to clarify his policy, I'll abide by whatever he wants, it's his site and I'll follow his rules, but his is the only opinion that matters here.

i wasn't discussing swearing, i was discussing racist language. you used an example of something that you consider to be a swear but it is covered by another rule.

it does not matter if a person *intends* to be racist or not. racism is simply not allowed on the site and is quite clearly covered in the rules. it IS up to me to interpret the rules as a moderator as i have been entrusted with that task (along with the other moderators, obviously).

Last edited by hyperlexian on 18 Apr 2013, 12:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

How do I put this in the most polite way possible...

...when mods post their messages, they have the extra weight on their shoulders - that they can't just say anything they want... they have to follow the rules more closely than anyone else.

Unfortunately, they're still human. It's happened a few times in the last year that 1-2 have been very vocal about insulting anyone who believes in God to be complete ret*ds who need extermination, etc.

Another who chose sides in a personal issue and decided to arbitrarily ban the other member, though the "favorite" was clearly the aggressor. (Heck, that happened to me once too.)

And another, whom I've butted heads in the past about the whole personal agenda thing, where only SOME posts were deleted (the ones ANTI-cause) but kept up the PRO-cause ones, etc. (Haven't seen that for a while!)



I'm happy to say these extremes are pretty rare, and often don't repeat themselves once a little discussion clears up the worst of the misconceptions.
Once the heat of the moment has passed and the emotions simmer down, most of 'em will at least walk away instead of continuing a fight... but, hey, they're only human volunteers.

(All I know is, there's one just waiting for me to slip up... one post in the wrong person's thread - positive or not - and he'll ban me for life. That's just nuts.)