A question.

[Steve Ashton]

Tobus,

You present an interesting perspective. Before I can respond may I ask a question. Have you ever flagged a post? Have you ever brought an issue to the attention of the Moderators?

[Chas]

An observation, if I may.

Steve owns the site and the name, but we the membership have 'ownership' of the content. We hear so much all over the internet about people's rights, but we never hear about their responsibilities.

I believe that we, individually and collectively, have a responsibility to each other and to the site to make and keep it the best we can. In our own towns and communities, are we like the Levites, who pass by on the other side; leaving it to others to sort out any problems. Or are we like the Samaritan and do something to help?

All we have in this place is the Rules. All that is required of us is that we keep to them. Is that such an onerous responsibility, that we cannot achieve it?

Regards

Chas

[Steve Ashton]

Just so everyone can understand where I am going with these questions.....

I really am trying to understand. You see, an internet forum is one of the only true autocracies in the world today.

Autocracy is defined as: "A system of government in which a supreme political power is concentrated in the hands of one person, whose decisions are subject to neither external legal restraints nor regularized mechanisms of popular control"

I really do have the off button. With a single click of a mouse I can turn X Marks off. I would not be required by any law to give a reason or show cause. I would not be accountable to anyone.

I can also, with a single click, make any member of this forum go away.
You see this power utilized on many forums today. A member is there one day and the next, 'poof', they are not. No explanation, no discernible reason. This was actually the way X Marks was run for almost three years back in its very early days.

Back in the days before we had any Moderators, before we even had the first Advocates. X Marks was a true autocracy. One person held all the power and was answerable to no one.

But like many of our members I simply could not live with myself if X Marks were run this way today.

My entire focus, since I took over X Marks, has been to minimize the impact any one person could have on the overall forum. It was me, and me alone, who set up our current system of checks and balances.

It was my decision. I take full responsibility for how X Marks is run today.

It is also my responsibility, as I see it, to insure that X Marks is alive and thriving in 10 or 20 years from today.

So I truly want to try and understand these accusations of "thin-skinned whiners" that some people seem to lodge every time something happens.
I truly cannot understand how someone can say that there are "flagrant and obvious examples of selective enforcement" in one post and then say "a member flagging a post should only serve to call attention to something the mods haven't seen yet" When it is this 'call of attention to something" that is actually happening.

I think that this misunderstanding of the system is due to the word "report" as it has been used here for many years. This is the word that is built into the software, it is the default word. I recently changed this word to the phrase "Raise a Flag".

I think this phrase better explains how X Marks is run.

We currently have 7 Moderators. We purposely chose Moderators from the membership with an eye to their location. Our goal was to have Moderators in as many different time zones as possible. We also tried to have as many different nationalities and personalities as we could. This serves as one of the checks and balances and also tries to have as much coverage on the forum as possible.

But the Moderators do have lives, jobs, and do need to sleep. There are many times when no member of the staff is on line. I would actually say that in the past few months, with the lives of our Moderators changing, that there are more times when no Moderator is on-line.

So the idea of having some system to alert the staff to an issue is vital. We call this system "Raising a Flag". Any member may "Raise a Flag" alerting the staff to any issue for any reason.
The first thing that happens when anyone flags a post is an email is sent to every Moderator. They know to log on and look in this particular part of the forum before looking at PM's or going to their favorite forum section. This is how this system works.

It is the Moderators, and the Moderators alone who decide if something is actually wrong. Quite often these flags are nothing more than "Hey, I made a typo in the title of my thread. Can someone fix it for me?".

But I would like to clear up any misunderstanding. The most common flag the Moderators get is something along the lines of "You may want to keep an eye on this thread. It is getting a bit heated.".

Even in the case where a Flag may say "I think this post is wrong" is responded to by the Moderators with "Can you please quote what rule you think may have been violated."

Because it is the rules and the rules only that say what is appropriate or not. There are no gray areas. It is the Moderators and the Moderators only who vote. (I don't even have a vote unless there is a tie) The Moderators vote only on "Have the limits of this rule been exceeded." They vote yes or no.

There is no "I vote no, but I don't like this person." votes.

I truly hope that you can see that on X Marks there are no secret police and there are certainly no tattle-tales.

But the Moderators cannot be on-line all the time. We truly do rely on our members to be adults and to take responsibility for their own forum. You can participate or you can leave it up to someone else to govern you.

It really is your choice.

[Tobus]

Tobus,

You present an interesting perspective. Before I can respond may I ask a question. Have you ever flagged a post? Have you ever brought an issue to the attention of the Moderators?

I have. Specifically, when one member had outrageously personally attacked another. But I don't know why this should have been necessary. Any moderator who saw it should have been able to take action without my having reported it. In my opinion, a member flagging a post should only serve to call attention to something the mods haven't seen yet. Then they can choose whether to act on it or not.