Many thanks @moderators the intention when I created the poll was never to cause conflict.
So I feel a little guilty for unintentionally stirring the pot.
Sad that we have lost valuable members in the heat of it, hoping it is temporary.
Apologies for turmoil and thanks for taking the results to heart and making the change.
It was obviously something that needed addressing so thanks for bringing it up. Sometimes it takes a nudge to move things forward. 6,000 people are never going to agree on everything but hopefully the balance has been shifted in the right direction for most.
@jabba raises some good points here, specifically:
I, for one would love to see him back here.
Community management, itās a tricky business. :).
We love you, Jabs!
(Freaking 20 characters)
Feel free to criticize moderation. But first of all we donāt manage a community. SAFE folks are all over the place. Telegram, Reddit, Bitcointalk, The dev forum, this forum etc. I help out here as a mod/backup adming but also started a forum about EOS for example. I donāt have any control on Reddit, Telegram or the Bitcointalkforum topic about MaidSafe. So far for my āmanagingā work.
Second: You quote here about ākey forum contributorsā being driven away. Wellā¦ I would like to reply to that. When someone trolls the whatever out of moderation it most of the time doesnāt show up to the average user. Think about mods asking someone several times not to start āmoderation talkā topics on the frontpage and a troll doing exactly that even 5 minutes after weāve deleted the topic and asked him again over PM to stop trolling us. Or someone intentionally posting adult links even while we asked a user not to as weāre a family friendly forum. We no longer post details about why someone is banned/suspended but we did in the past and this is a post (Jan 2016) you might want to look at as it shows numerous cases of trolling etc. And we even let that person back to our platform after a 7 day ban. Imagine what someone has to do before we ban a month or permaban a user.
We always suspend/block someone for a week or 2 weeks after we see no other option. We might do it for a month if itās a second ban etc. But when someone keeps going over the line there is a point where we permaban someone. Hereās the list. It doesnāt show all bans (like new users posting weight loss spam) as we donāt see them as āmembersā. Soā¦ out of 7300 members weāve permabanned 7 in total. Thatās not even 0.1% (not even 1 out of 1000) of all users. And as you can see most of them used so called āsock puppetsā. We donāt really care if we see multiple accounts from the same IP (could be some family members or partner rightā¦) but in these cases they really used these accounts to reply on their own topics or to troll moderation. Overall the āSuspended members listā is filled with severe trolls, people that made physical threats or tried to scam our community by claiming loss of a private key and asking for donations by posting a maid-address. Iām quite sure that most members here (like 9 out of 10) would agree with these bans if they knew all the details.
Now, there is a small group that left this forum as they donāt like the way itās moderated. Thatās not something I like. None of mods like it. But can you please answer the following questionā¦ Letās assume we would we would try to please that groupā¦ And letās say itās a clear list of requests/proposals they want to see implemented like being more allowed to go off-topic in postsā¦ Have moderation-talk (Meta) on the frontpageā¦ Being less strict to trolling and implementing more community proposalsā¦
What do we do if another group of clear voiced people start to criticize moderation about that?? What if they have a strong opinion about moderation getting back to how it was before these changes?? What if even some long time forum members decide to leave because āMeta is back on the frontpageā and there is āway too much off topic talk on the frontpageā??? What would we do???
I hope you can really answer these questions.
Actually I canāt.
Hereās the best I got:
-
EOS is awesome. Good luck with the forum.
-
@Jabba rocks. Iād love to see him back.
As for what he was describing-- I think that anything that keeps content out of here probably isnāt the best policy. @jabba in particular strikes me as someone with his head on straight. Heās also a huge MAID supporter.
Itās not my goal to fan up any flames here. If I have a goal at all, itās to get @jabba back on the forum.
A few observations I saw was that Jabba was wanting to move the forum to reddit since he felt (right or wrong time might tell) that reddit is the place that will get most results for SAFE. This was a couple of weeks before this topic. He has not always agreed with there being (much) moderation, except for removing spam.
His time is limited and apparently this was the last straw for him. So with his limited time he decided to leave here and concentrate on reddit (and twitter I gather)
I see it as we lost him and his insights, here in this forum but reddit gained a valuable person who spends more time there.
No worry about flames, we should be good if we just talk about this forum, the governance etc. I also hope to see @jabba back. Just like several other critical voices. Weāre having a discussion in #staff now among mods as well. Are looking at things like community votes on certain topics and maybe even a whole new category focused on governance. But like I said before; itās very hard to please everyone. Change some things and other voices might speak out about that change. Weāre still looking for different options though. Next forum update should bring something new here.