Do we want a Community run/owned forum “in spirit” or would we rather that be “in fact”?

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The Accountability Problem:

It is oft touted by Mods that this is a “Community run” forum – I do not believe this to be strictly correct. The argument used to substantiate this claim, appears to me to be so weak that it could just as easily be used by Kim Jong Il, in order to claim North Korea is a “Community run” country. “I am North Korean and I hand picked the Govt from the North Korean community……therefore it is a community run country.” It makes no difference whether this is 1 person, or a small group to my mind……propaganda really….
My understanding is that it is privately owned by an individual Mod who runs it with the other mods. (who between them also drew up the laws of the land that the Community are expected to submit to). As mentioned previously, obeying these laws is not any guarantee you can remain on the forum though– the Mods can banish for any reason at any time.
If on the other hand, it is claimed by Community members that Mods themselves do not adhere to the same laws, there appears to be nowhere to go to, other than the “Central authority” of the mods. My personal experience of this system is probably exactly what I’d expect from such a system tbh.
There appears to be no clear Appeal procedure or way to remove Mods etc……without asking Mods themselves – it seems to be a closed system that does not involve the larger Community at all. I’m sure we may be told, “Start a petition”, “use a different forum if you don’t like it” etc, but I think we can do better than that.
Just to relate my own latest experience of being suspended for a week for……well, for sod all, let’s be honest. It is maintained by mods that warnings were issued, however I can honestly say I have no recollection of any warnings being given (again what for I don’t know or when – is there some secret colour coding system where you are supposed to stop defending yourself from accusations or get banned?) Seriously……no idea there were any warnings, never been shown any or anything.,not that it matters really…lol. The bigger issue is that nothing was mentioned on the thread, the mods had their say, then they just disappeared me, so I couldn’t reply/defend myself. The larger community had no idea I had just been disappeared – it left the impression that the mods argument was reasonable and I just walked away – It wasn’t and I didn’t.
It is only because I insist on being transparent, that I refuse to deal with mods by PM – mods generally prefer and advise to use PM.

A suggested solution:

I think we can start making the modding system more accountable to the community – (as I believe was the original intention of Maidsafe/The Community.
The first step would be to ask the Community to propose others from the forum community to become Mods. Names could go forward for election etc, maybe a fixed term, can be booted off and replaced quickly and easily by community consensus etc. I’d expect most people to vote for others with earned reputations for fairness, consistency of principle, ethics, reasoned arguments, sticking to guidelines etc.
I also envision a public appeals process, judged by the community (not Mods) and the powers of Mods and security of tenure to be drastically reduced. This way, many more members of the community get a chance at modding and it will actually mean they have an incentive to behave – not having been “knighted” permanently.
The other thing is that I don’t think it is ideal having an individual owning the forum (Maidsafe’s call though as they are paying the Bill – the choice is between carrying on with a privately owned forum, or registering as Maidsafe or Foundation I think)
Both owning the forum and being a Mod is also a potential conflict of interest too I think.
I think I’ve given a few ideas of how a properly community run forum could begin to evolve naturally from now on and improve on the current model.
Any further ideas about how to make modding processes more transparent and accountable to the wider community would be greatly appreciated.

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typing on iPad so:

  • It is a community forum, not the Community forum.
  • it’s funny to see you complain about this and you still fail to see how "sharing economy* and other mumbo-jumbo concepts are completely useless when there is no ownership
  • but at least you recognize ownership is the key
  • I don’t know if the Foundation pays or sponsors this particular community. If it does, you should send feedback to them as well
  • the way to fix an independently run community portal is to start another community portal (no offense to this portal owners, this is a general remark). There was one attempt (was it Blindsite?) but his uncensored forum crapped out quickly as it was overran by spammers, so wannabe community organizers may want to take into account the sad fate of that community
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It’s a forum the community use, yes. The community is around 1700 people strong - decisions/power is restricted to the few, not the many. I’m fine with it being a private forum with privately appointed mods - just make this clear to the community. Saying things like it’s the community’s “in spirit” is misleading and “community run” is a misnomer in my view.
The point is that the community can stay exactly where it is and simple changes could be made to the structure, especially modding. This way we can have proper community consensus, mods would be more accountable to community, have more legitimacy etc and I’d stfu. What exactly is so difficult or contentious about the mods putting themselves up for re-election against others or similar?
If the community are as happy with them as they maintain, then wtf have they got to lose? Why fight it? :smile:[quote=“janitor, post:2, topic:6691”]
it’s funny to see you complain about this and you still fail to see how "sharing economy* and other mumbo-jumbo concepts are completely useless when there is no ownership
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I’m not entirely sure what you mean tbh.[quote=“janitor, post:2, topic:6691”]
but at least you recognize ownership is the key
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lol…I don’t…what do you mean?[quote=“janitor, post:2, topic:6691”]
There was one attempt (was it Blindsite?) but his uncensored forum crapped out quickly as it was overran by spammers, so wannabe community organizers may want to take into account the sad fate of that community
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Yes, I’m only interested in reforming the current model here really as this is where the community now “lives”. I think the best thing is for the best arguments to keep current centralised model be heard against the best arguments for reforming things - without it getting all personal. Failing that, then yes, I think the end result of that argument is if current system is retained in the face of community opposition then there will be an exodus.

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Well it’s clear it’s not a Foundation site, and someone must own it, so of course the power is restricted to the few.
I also wouldn’t want to invest my money and time in running a site if it was “community”-owned (i.e. noone’s) and not mine.

Sharing economy: in different topics you and others argued how great the new sharing economy is going to be. Now you can see what happens when you don’t in fact own something. If you don’t get it, never mind, this is off topic.

If you think some revenue or other benefit can be derived from a properly functioning “community” site, follow MAID’s lead and issue a token that interested members can buy and setup a token backed community. Then - unlike MAID - organize governance around token ownership. Whatever you raise you can invest in building a new site. People would still need to trust someone (eg the owner of the issuing address, the owner of the domain, etc) but if you have decent reputation it’s doable.

But considering that such sites aren’t exactly money makers it’d mostly burn money raised from token sale, so the forum token would become worthless. If you’re okay with spending 100 hours and $100 a year to run a forum, you can skip the DAO part and do what the owners of this forum did.

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I’m not very active as a moderator and have only recently taken a close look at what’s been going on in regards to you. I’m not communicating here from some lofty moderator position. In fact, I hereby recuse myself of any moderator input in dealing with your situation as it may go forward.

@Al_Kafir, from what I can see, the only real “community opposition” to moderation comes almost exclusively from yourself.

My experience of you is that you regularly edge up to (and often step over) the lines of civil interaction in a way that baits others into emotional reaction. I don’t know if you do this on purpose or not, but I seem to remember that you have even acknowledged the tendency a time or two in the past, when you and I have bumped heads.

From the receiving end it’s often a good thing to be put through such a workout. It tests one’s reasoning in the face of adversity, when your buttons are being pushed. Cheers! As frustrating as I’ve found some of our engagements to be, overall I’ve benefited.

What’s been going on here is different. What you are engaged in here has the flavor a destructive vendetta towards a group of individuals who are very much trying to do the right thing, who are donating a lot of time and effort to be fair and act in the best interest of all concerned, and who are human, and thus get annoyed when their well-displayed integrity is assaulted in the way that you are doing.

But even through that annoyance, they are still being extremely fair with you.

If there is a “sides” situation here, I ask you to take a close look at what you, yourself, are doing to further it, if not create it. Maybe it’s not all someone else’s fault.

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I believe this is exactly what Maidsafe intended tbh. However, they are investing money in a privately owned site by the looks of it. How much time goes into “owning” a site? Given that it is others investing the money, ie Maidsafe, then how much extra “work” or “time” is involved in actually “owning” it. There are volunteers available too, so I’m just not getting the “need” for it to be owned by an individual. Maybe there’s some reason I’m not seeing, but I’d hazard a guess the community would be happier with Maidsafe owning it. Not that they have to, but I cannot grasp the reasoning given the obvious centralisation down to 1 individual - no aspersions on @Fabrunelle here in this respect, I’m talking about the principle of the thing.
If the mods are then held more directly accountable to the larger community, then we’d have a functioning forum that could properly be described as “Community run”.[quote=“janitor, post:4, topic:6691”]
Now you can see what happens when you don’t in fact own something. If you don’t get it, never mind, this is off topic.
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I don’t need to own it myself, only that ownership should be shared as much as possible really - in this case it’s impractical to share ownership among community (I think) and failing that, or the Foundation, then Maidsafe seem appropriate to me - certainly more so than any 1 individual…whoever that may be. [quote=“janitor, post:4, topic:6691”]
If you think some revenue or other benefit can be derived from a properly functioning “community” site, follow MAID’s lead and issue a token that interested members can buy and setup a token backed community.
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I’m not interested in revenue, benefits or starting a new site - just modifying this one to make it more accountable to the community and de-centralise and democratise things, improve transparency and accountability and give community legitimacy to the modding system.
If none of this is possible because private owners/vested interests seek revenue or other benefits, then clearly any claims to being “Community run” would just be false advertising to gain these things. This is why I said there would be an exodus if this was the case. I don’t think this is the case though…surely all parties wishing to create a true community run forum would accede to community wishes. It would be shooting itself in the foot to do otherwise I think.

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Great, and I really appreciate you recognising that this is what I do - I see it as my role to start fires, be the tenth man, tread on toes, poke around etc. It is exactly as you say, generally to keep people on their toes - I actually do take some credit for the raising the level of modding…lol.

Well my main opposition is to the centralised nature of the system itself. My personal experience of modding and complaints of it are a different matter, only really concern 2 individual mods and these things keep getting conflated - I’m guilty of that myself and trying to keep the issues separate. As you say, one is emotionally charged has become personal, whereas the other is straightforward and should not be as contentious as it appears to have become.[quote=“fergish, post:5, topic:6691”]
What’s been going on here is different.
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Yes, part of it is based on the anger I am still feeling at the events leading up to my suspension. I did not do the things I was accused of and un-reasonable and dishonest arguments were used throughout. I maintain this to be true and evidenced. When you mention “vendetta”, then that’s exactly what it felt like to me at the time.[quote=“fergish, post:5, topic:6691”]
and thus get annoyed when their well-displayed integrity is assaulted in the way that you are doing.
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Yes, I am human and it was my well displayed integrity that was assaulted - not the 2 mods concerned - I disagree here.[quote=“fergish, post:5, topic:6691”]
But even through that annoyance, they are still being extremely fair with you.
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Again, this is your opinion and conclusion, mine is different.[quote=“fergish, post:5, topic:6691”]
If there is a “sides” situation here, I ask you to take a close look at what you, yourself, are doing to further it, if not create it.
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I’d ask you to take a close look at the threads and events and arguments contained therein tbh.[quote=“fergish, post:5, topic:6691”]
Maybe it’s not all someone else’s fault.
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and maybe it is… :smile:
Edit:
Tell you what, as you like to be put through the mill so to speak. How about you tell me what my next step is, if I believe I have been the victim of unreasonable mod accusations, in the face of clear evidence and reasoned refutations, then subjected to a week long ban that all mods have already stated they agree with?
How about you then tell me the argument why this is the most de-centralised, fairest, accountable and transparent system possible – then tell me what the actual problem is with any suggestions I have made to improve these areas.

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Nice way to dismiss a point you might not want to admit has merit. If you actually do not see any of your own part in creating the situation which you (and not others) are in here, then it is not surprising that your actions are becoming more destructive than positive. You’ve lost your surgical touch and are losing the patient due to hemorrhage from unnecessary incisions.

First of all, I don’t know who is making the argument that this forum is or must be, or even should be “decentralized.” MaidSafe says that the forum is “community run” as opposed to run by them. Why on earth should that possibly mean that the forum must be responsive to any person in the “community” (very indefinite term) who demands their slice of ownership.

Fairest, most accountable and transparent system possible? Those things DO exist in good and appropriate measure for the situation. It works well.

Because we aspire to create a decentralized network does not mean everything becomes communal in all directions. This forum has been successful because it is owned and run by people who give a damn, and respect each other, and the community at large. Will they listen when people had objections or problems? My observations say “Yes, abundantly.”

Are they required to accede to the demands of somebody who insists on carping, poking and being overtly disrespectful and insulting? I’d have to say no. But despite there being no obligation to put up with it, the patience and concern for maintaining an open, constructive forum has lead them to be very, very reasonable. Yes, my opinion. It’s also my opinion that if you can’t see it, you don’t belong here. Your inability to see it would explain almost everything.

Ownership/control in a situation like this comes from earning the trust and confidence of others in the community at large, and among those who have control. In my opinion, you have done a poor job of earning the respect and trust of much of the community, despite having been around for a long while.

And Al, just because someone can be strengthened by having to deal with people who are habitually difficult, doesn’t mean that being habitually difficult is a trait to be proud of or aspire to. (I had to work to phrase that with a G rating.:wink:)

If you really care about your participation in this forum, you might seek to understand why others could feel rationally justified in having suspended you. You might consider trying repair, rather than inflame, whatever went wrong, whether it was all someone else’s “fault” or not. I’m not talking about contrition. I’m talking about a touch of humility.

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What is? To have a site controlled by a handful of SAFE loyalists?

That it’s easy or run a community site may or may not be true, but if it is, it’s an argument in favor of my suggestion to create a new site and see how it does. You have to pay for the s/w or mess around with OS, security auditing, software updates, backups, moderation, spam-fighting, etc. - give it a try and you’ll know.

Someone has to make decisions. As Reighley said in those discussions about management, you can’t run a blockchain vote on every minor issue (should I put this box here or over there?). Even if the site had 50 owners, there wouldn’t be more mods than there is now, so I don’t think that would considerably improve your situation. And even if all 50 of those owners cared, it’d manifests more in aggregate stats (how many new members, etc. - the usual metrics that owners care about).

One can’t introduce Police State or ask for members’ tax statements to find out who in the “community” just wants to see his MAID investment triple, and who is a nice & caring person who wants to get free educational material to poor children in Africa. Maggie would say there is no such thing as community. There are groups of individuals who follow their personal interests (that happen to be somewhat aligned with other members’ interest).

I suggest you ask people who may be interested in creating another community to PM you. You provided feedback on moderation a number of times, so more of the same is unlikely to help.

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Hi @Al_Kafir,

I think you raise a lot of good points and I agree that the current moderation system is not as open, transparent, democratic and decentralized as it could be.

I am certain that there will be major improvements to the moderation system in the upcoming months and years.

On the other hand, I strongly believe that it’s currently not the right timing to make major changes to the moderation system.

The main reason is because the SAFE Network is not live yet. This has a lot of implications:

  1. We need to focus on bringing the SAFE Network to reality. If we did an election for moderators right now, I think it would be very distracting. The least we can do is to let MaidSafe focus on the development of SAFE. We can figure out the governance of the forum once the network is live. I think we as mods are doing a fairly good job and that there is no urgency to implement a new moderation system at this point in time. Instead, let’s focus on discussions that bring us closer to our goal (e.g. discussing RFCs, Dev Updates, how SAFE works, SAFE Apps, safecoin, farming, explaining SAFE to newcomers, marketing, etc.).

  2. Until the network is live, there is not a lot of incentive for people to get involved as moderators, since it’s not currently possible to benefit from SAFE (e.g. by storing files on the network). The current moderators are effectively doing their job out of pure love for MaidSafe and because of their basic understanding of how SAFE works and its great potential :slightly_smiling: In reality, being a moderator could be considered a job and we could potentially figure out a system where moderators get elected and also paid by the community. Once SAFE is live and we are actually able to use it, it will be easier for potential moderators to justify the time commitment it takes to be a moderator and for community members to bother with voting and participating in elections.

  3. The community is not big enough. Less than 200 community members have made more than 10 posts in the last year. IMO there would need to be a lot more active community members for us to consider making significant changes to the moderation system. It’s much wiser to wait until we have a feature complete network, at which point we would likely have thousands of active community members.

  4. Very few people have raised concerns about the current moderation system. First of all you would need to find more people (e.g. 10 or 20 people) to support you. But as I said in my 3 previous points, I think that it would be counterproductive to push for changes to the moderation system while SAFE is not even live yet.

There is no single owner. Even if I manage the technical aspects of the forum, I am not more important than the other mods. We always aim to reach full consensus amongst mods when discussing issues. And even as mods, we don’t feel like the forum belongs to us. To me, it feels like it also belongs to MaidSafe as well as all the other active community members. I was elected by the community and I would be okay to step down if they think I am doing a bad job.

This a great list of suggestions and we can definitely keep them in mind for when it will be the right time to have this kind of discussion.

Cheers.

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You’d have to make a point first for me to dismiss it…lol. Either substantiate in what way I created the issue or don’t, but just saying it “might” be me deserves the same kind of unsubstantiated dismissive response.
Can I (again) request that mods refrain from spamming this thread with their opinion and personal attacks against me. I have already repeatedly answered the “disrespect” accusations with accusations of my own about the dishonest arguments that always start these situations off. This is rude and disrespectful in the first place and is against forum rules but continues unabated with certain mods. This point was also made by Blindsite - there are more ways to be “rude” than are being acknowledged and this type of thing is used to create a false impression of what a person is arguing, their character etc. This is why it is in the guidelines to use reasoned arguments.
For some reason mods seem to think being dishonest in this area is acceptable. Can anybody think of any other example in any other area of life whatsoever where dishonest behaviour does not say something about the person behaving dishonestly or when it is acceptable?
As I say start another thread for all the personal attacks and telling me in your opinion I don’t belong here as a mod. If that is true, then you better find a guideline you can contort to furnish yourself with to ban me then hadn’t you?
Absolutely disgusting behaviour for a mod, pure opinion spamming of my thread and character assassination. Are all mods of the same opinion that I do not belong here btw? This must certainly impact the impartiality and consistency of any judgements being made by any that do then, if any mods believe I do not belong here, then they should ban me, giving reasons …well done…and start another thread as you’re obviously just hijacking this one and completely off-topic…

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His point was that you brought this partly upon yourself.

…Not going to read the rest of your mental masturbation.

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Great, I was wondering when/if anybody was actually going to address what I was actually saying and it is a breath of fresh air.[quote=“frabrunelle, post:10, topic:6691”]
We need to focus on bringing the SAFE Network to reality. If we did an election for moderators right now, I think it would be very distracting. The least we can do is to let MaidSafe focus on the development of SAFE. We can figure out the governance of the forum once the network is live.
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I can accept your reasoning here and will let that matter lie until the Network is live. Now I know it is to be looked at at some future point and the points I raised properly given due consideration, I am quite satisfied with this.[quote=“frabrunelle, post:10, topic:6691”]
I think we as mods are doing a fairly good job and that there is no urgency to implement a new moderation system at this point in time.
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I would say generally, yes, though a couple are repeatedly coming up on my radar and the reasoned argument part of the guidelines really does need to be abided by by mods in particular - it is a much bigger issue with bigger potential consequences than are being acknowledged/recognised I think. This is also the cause of much conflict between mods and me. It’s like mods are being rude initially and invisibly to most, to which I respond in ways which may be construed as rude too. This is something that should be addressed internally within the mod system I think…[quote=“frabrunelle, post:10, topic:6691”]
The current moderators are effectively doing their job out of pure love for MaidSafe and because of their basic understanding of how SAFE works and its great potential
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Others may also love Maidsafe and wish to mod. The issue I have here is that understanding how Safe works and it’s great potential is also common among many others, it’s not exclusive to mods, nor is it a good reason to be employed as a mod I don’t think. It doesn’t appear to be related to the skill set required to be a mod.
The other point I would raise here is that I also don’t think it the best plan to have all the app devs as mods based on the above reasoning. It also seems to not be serving the Community’s best interest (in modding terms) to choose the mods from amongst the people busiest with other projects. This leads to mods opining about how much time they have to spend resolving disputes.[quote=“frabrunelle, post:10, topic:6691”]
In reality, being a moderator could be considered a job and we could potentially figure out a system where moderators get elected and also paid by the community.
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Yes, this sounds like a plan and they could also be sacked by the community with maybe a community run appeals system etc. [quote=“frabrunelle, post:10, topic:6691”]
The community is not big enough.
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Hmmmm…I do not agree here, or that there is an optimum size to be achieved before transparency, accountability and democratisation can occur.[quote=“frabrunelle, post:10, topic:6691”]
Very few people have raised concerns about the current moderation system.
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Long standing community members have raised concerns though - some things need to be addressed.

Yes, I would, which would be difficult to achieve in a category off the front page.
However, if the issue about reasoned arguments is not seen to have been addressed by myself in the very near future, then I will seek this support, because then I believe your equation changes and there would still be a pressing reason to reform the modding system sooner rather than later.

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I’m glad that the mods work hard to help the community (and for free!) but I’m also for lateral freedom of speech equally for everyone (i even think “spam” should be allowed here, just tagged maybe? And ppl could elect not to see certain tagged things) and I’ve had some friction with the mods about a few posts etc that I’ve not been able to solve with them. But they are attentive and make themselves accessible. But it was disappointing to not be able to reach agreements.

Just wanted to say @Al_Kafir isn’t the only one who has expressed feelings of friction and don’t want him to feel alone or be told he is. I see both sides is all

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@ moderators is the place to go. We always read your PM and we always talk about it with mods and reply. Sure we can fix most of what you point out. But we seriously need a PM with an explanation etc.

If you would only ask one mod, then he or she has to explain your case to the other mods. It’s better when you do that, because you know what the case is and why you bring it up.

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@ moderators is the place to go if you don’t agree with things we’ve done. When we get a PM we always read it and we always reply. It’s actually one of our “jobs” to respond to PM’s.

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OK, fine thanks for illustrating the accountability issue.[quote=“polpolrene, post:15, topic:6691”]
But we seriously need a PM with an explanation etc.

If you would only ask one mod, then he or she has to explain your case to the other mods. It’s better when you do that, because you know what the case is and why you bring it up.
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Would you not achieve the same goal only more transparently by requesting users use the @ moderarors thing within the thread where the problem is to attract their attention to exactly the right part of any thread and the nature and circumstances could easily be established - the matter could be dealt with more openly, even if in a linked off-topic area for “mod decisions”. Or you could keep doing things behind closed doors. :smile:
Edit:
His point was that you brought this partly upon yourself.
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No, he said maybe I did and I said maybe I didn’t. Neither of us are making any points…just suggestions/opinion. It’s like saying " maybe you’re wrong" and me replying “maybe I’m right”…literally totally pointless…without a point.[quote=“Cryptor, post:12, topic:6691”]
…Not going to read the rest of your mental masturbation.
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Good…I prefer to do it in private… :smile:

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That’s an option but that doesn’t fit all situations. When 2 people get into a personal flame war where 1 says that the other is a @#%&@ and the other replies that he and his mom both are &#&#&# we just delete both replies. Especially if that topic is about self_encryption or routing :yum:. I don’t really see why we would reply in-topic saying: “there was a personal flame-war going on here, we removed 4 replies from @userA and @userB. Use @ moderators if you don’t agree or want to comment.” It’s an extreme example but we’ve seen it. The reason most users don’t see it is because we acts quite fast on these issues. That’s also an explanation for why mods have the right to delete whatever they want (as you know is in the FG). We don’t just do that, we always reach consensus. But when the case is clear like this example there’s not really the need to have a meeting on Slack and talk about it. Same for spam accounts. We see several of them in a week. I see a lot of “Deleted another spam account” coming by on Slack. Most of them don’t even exist for an hour is my guess.

And for other issues feel free to use @ moderators in META. We’re already there on a daily basis so we do notice. But again, not all issues fit to be public and open etc. If I go on a cryptoforum somewhere and I get one of my posts deleted I would just PM the mods. If they don’t come up with a good explanation I would look for META and make my case there. But to be honest, we’ve set back some topics or replies when we had an error. And the fastest way to trigger a reply is by @ moderators. Some of us get a ping on their phones (freaks! :grinning:) when that happens.

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I really agree on this one. I also think it’s quite hard to let the forum be really owned by the whole community. Where do we draw the line, 1 person that get’s in contact with discourse when we have a technical issue, or maybe 2 persons? Or do we give 15 people the contact details to contact Discourse? And what about Admin rights. Do we need like 15 admins? And do we want them to vote on each action? Quite not doable IMO. So we have both @frabrunelle (who got a lot of support for being both mod and admin) and @ioptio who is working for Maidsafe (who pays the bills). Same for the URL and the certificates etc. If we allow 20 people to alter them it would just take 1 fool to kill the URL and link it to disney.com. We’d better be careful.

I agree. We have almost 1800 users. So when we vote on anything, how do we count? Do we want x out of 1800 to agree on an issue? Today we’ve had 109 users online. yesterday 139. That’s like 250 in 2 days. So let’s say we vote on a new mod. @satoshinakamoto offered to be a mod. We open a vote, when do we have consensus? 20? 40? half of the 1800? It would take weeks and we wouldn’t get a clear picture IMO. That way it is “democratic” but not really democratic because not even 25% of all members did a vote. I did ask a very open question about splitting topics. And we didn’t had a clear picture either:

Should we split topics that have a lot of replies?

Same for a poll. We had (I think) like 1500 users at that time. We got 99 votes. So 6,6% of the users actually made a vote. Yes good feature said 35%. No bad feature said 35% :joy:. So again, where do we draw a line? Even if 90% voted for “Yes, good feature” it was still lower than 7% of all members that made a vote. Where’s the democracy in that one?

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Being a fully 100% democratic organisation is not that easy. At least, not on a forum where not all users are around all days. I do hope we can have something close when Safenet is live. Maybe an app could send some PM’s to user that have at least 20 active posts/replies over the last 6 months, and are member of the forum for over 6 months etc. That way it should be possible using PM’s on Safenet where you get a message asking you to vote on 1 or 2 topics.

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So we shouldn’t do it because it doesn’t apply in a “flame war” situation - is that the top and bottom of your argument? Just so I’m sure, your argument is that sometimes mods have to act quickly to remove posts, so somehow this means it can’t be done more transparently?
OK, I think I grasp the point being made but not sure…a flame war is people trolling each other isn’t it - distinct from a heated debate perhaps, maybe involving personal attacks and other breaking of guidelines etc? The posts would essentially have been removed for breaking rules - as with any other case. This "flaming case"is (as you freely admit) also the “extreme” case, that you chose to use to put the argument against. It doesn’t appear in principle to be any different from any other case.[quote=“polpolrene, post:18, topic:6691”]
That’s also an explanation for why mods have the right to delete whatever they want
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Ah…I see, you’re answering something different to what was proposed again - mods deleting posts wasn’t the issue. Lol, gotta love that quote though…nah, that’s not the reason.[quote=“polpolrene, post:18, topic:6691”]
(as you know is in the FG)
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As with all other “rights” the mods have, they have given them to themselves in the Forum Guidelines that they also wrote themselves.[quote=“polpolrene, post:18, topic:6691”]
But when the case is clear like this example there’s not really the need to have a meeting on Slack and talk about it.
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I’m sorry but I really have no idea who suggested more mod huddles on Slack as a solution - quite the opposite. [quote=“polpolrene, post:18, topic:6691”]
And for other issues feel free to use @ moderators in META.
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Yeah, been there done that, told you multiple times that not doing it anymore, yet you keep repeating this to me - is this what causes flame wars? Because of my dissatisfaction with these systems I started this thread which you seem unable to remain on topic with. Why just keep repeating use @ moderators all the time?