Realistic forum rules

I think it's only partial disagreement.

I have a real life problem - many of my childhood favorite words are no longer allowed, and yet they are the first word that comes to mind when I see certain behaviors. The words and their meanings... Were used differently once, and are fabulously descriptive. Especially working in Hollywood, I have to zip that shit on set, because my meaning would be taken as a slur against a particular group. First world problems.

So, I am all for a very small list of words you cannot say. Something that George Carlin wouldn't immediately puke over.

Also, it's your forum too. We're all here, wherever here is.

BSN is a people, not a place.

That looks like a good list, @dustyelf.

To be fair I think any moderation team would be reasonably expected to follow a similar list.

Here's my two cents on the subject of fair rules, at least in relation to some aspects:

1. Rules should not be subjective. You make a rule and stick to it.
No vague sayings like "15-20% more moderation", that's just synonymous with "we're going to use our personal bias as a guide".

Moderators should rely on clear guidelines, not their personal biases.
In fact, if a moderator feels that a post is hitting "too close to home", they should ideally let another mod handle this issue with a clearer head.

Sure, there are on occasions some edge-cases that skirt/abuse the rules and require a "human touch",
but moderation of this sort should be kept to an absolute minimum.

2. "Hate speech".

The definition of such should be as narrow as possible.

Recently there was an attempt to make "criticism of migration" a "Hate speech" crime under the EU. I think that the attempt failed.
However, the point is that people in power CAN and WILL attempt to define any kind of "wrongthink" no matter how mild as "hate-speech".

3. Personal insults.

I found an idea that was raised elsewhere to provide an optional "PvP" area where insults moderated less stringently
(though, not an open licence to say absolutely EVERYTHING) - potentially interesting.

That said, I think that when it comes to political discussion for example, insults should be kept out as much as possible, as this tends to drag the discussion from the political into the personal. Some allowances would need to be made, but only to a mild degree.

4. Spamming.

On the subject of spamming, there should be limited tolerance.
For example in the context of political discussion, there should be a defined space intended to serve as a constant "news feed", from whichever source, be it twitter, or other sources.

With Political Discussions the emphasis should be put on the DISCUSSION part.

Likewise memes and cartoons should be tolerated only to a limited degree in such a thread.
An occasional post is one thing, a barrage of posts is another.

Another example of spamming - multiple consecutive posts.
In most discussions there's no real justification for a user to make five or eight consecutive posts.

Reading your list, @dustyelf through once more and challenging myself with the question, do I do all those things?

1. Equal standards. Yes, e.g.I made a mistake recently over sensitive communication and was firmly pulled up for it. I would expect to have my ass seriously kicked next time.
   
2. Power. Yes, we do what we do for the good of the broad community.
   
3. Equality of rules. Believe me, I have gritted my teeth NOT moderating things I disagreed with because they were allowable within the rules. But rules are rules.
   
4. Respect. Sure. I'll add that mods are human and sometimes a little snark will creep out in the face of a barrage.
   
5. Reason. Yes, though please don't confuse emotion with a 'lockdown' to assess a situation. Decisions can be walked back (or not if it was the right call).
   
6. Civil criticism. This one we certainly do. You can't say mods don't accept a little civil criticism from time to time. Most mod teams ban it (as did BSN Prime)
7. Delete & edit. Some removals are self-evident, sometimes there is collateral damage if the content contains issues. In principle, yes, but that's more complex than it appears.
   
8. Demonize. I'd not use the term 'demonize' but users that break the rules need to be dealt with, it doesn't have to be done emotionally or spuriously.
   
9. Logic. Absolutely, moderation is not simply for shits and giggles.
   
10. Annoying posters. I personally find very few posters 'annoying' but if I do that makes me more likely to double check a proposed mod-decision with other mods (which we do routinely anyway).

Yep, good list. Props.
It never hurts to calibrate.
That's why we have an 'About Moderation; thread though it is hard work sometimes.
And the mods do talk back in the mod-cave at length, boy do we talk...

Yeah. The issue with such creeps is in their inability to separate a fantasy from reality.

I always come at this from my perspective; it is genuine, I cannot guess to know the lives of others as I barely know myself.

That's where my view on doxxing comes from. However, I consider the possible perspective of others, and recognize that doxxing is absolutely not allowed. If I hadn't made that clear - well, I am very stream of consciousness sometimes, forgive me.

I'm glad to see an actual discussion going on here, and need to catch up on the thread before adding anything more. Civility breeds civility, contempt breeds contempt, flowers like being talked to, Merry Christmas!

So...

We have some established baselines. Most of them are what we do here, but some things are tweaked.

In a future post (Soon™️), I will enumerate what we have so far, so that we can compare and contrast our current forum rules with what our contributors have mostly agreed is an "ideal". Then we can talk about reality and see where things typically fall apart and discuss solutions.

Today, I want to present my ideas for things we do not have here, that would make this a better place for all of us.

...

First, the metric for traffic is simple - page views don't take much to be considered unique. So, traffic is traffic; a critical misunderstanding of our current team I think.

Why? We have no private groups, no safe spaces, for people of like minds to hash out things that are bothering them on the forum together, or discuss awesome new things that are particularly interesting to a certain group, an in-joke, etc.

Why? Because it would reduce general board traffic (uh) and divide the forum (uh lol).

So, Private Groups should be a thing. Anyone who has been on a board with them understands their value. Even a dickwad like me.

Second, PvP subforums. A place for sticky subjects to happen, with the understanding that you are entering a live fire zone and people are arguing, not being buddies because arguments don't always occur between friends. Also, my best friends as a kid were the ones I had to get into a fight with first... What happened to these life lessons? Safe spaces, when they are everywhere, is no longer a safe space. It is a prison. A prison of the mind.

So, make the general forum follow the main rules. PvP has looser and tighter moderation, but it pretty hands off overall because you knew the deal going in.... And nobody made you go there.

If you have a ticker announcing things like new posts and stuff, the PvP Sub is left out of those. It is not a forum about drama, it is a forum about gaming that allows drama to happen in its quarantine zone.

These are suggestions for any forum. I have no forum sofa, and if I decided to start a new forum I would certainly be taking ideas from this thread.

I have made some of these suggestions for this board in the past. Some of them were decided to be too separatist, and perhaps beyond ProBoards flexibility as well.

Point - this forum can migrate to different software if that was something that appealed to people, or we could integrate good ideas from this thread into the current forum as the software permits.

Nothing in the text you quoted indicates that I am talking about another forum. You choose to read that.

Not even general. They are absolutely for this forum, if they have ProBoards capability, mass appeal, moderator appeal, and finally admin appeal.

What would be pretty great is if more people had more ideas and we talked about them

To be fair, not my idea; this was the brainchild of Fen'Harel Faceman