On Mon, 26 Jan 2009, Andrew Ducker wrote: > To be honest, I don't think it's that necessary to "sort" this. If a > community is dying then the more proactive members will set up a new one > and people will follow them across. Sure, it might be handy to be able > to take over and "rescue" a community, but it's not the end of the world > if it doesn't work out that way.
End of the world, no. But a community that's been around for a long time is a resource, and may have thousands of members, and people may not even know there's not an active maintainer until there's a problem. The problem is not dying communities. The problem is communities that are active and working just fine, but the moderator is gone--and then you get a troll, and nobody has the power to ban them, freeze their comments, delete their posts. > Taking a community out of the hands of a maintainer within a > week (which seems to be what some people want) seems draconian > and punitive. If the maintainer of your community doesn't look > after it well then the answer isn't to take it from them, but > to form your own. A week is ridiculous. People go on vacation, although normally when I go on vacation I put someone else in charge in my absence. But an active community shouldn't fall prey to the trolls because the maintainer's AWOL and can't be located, either. If the listed maintainer hasn't logged in for months or years, and Abuse or Support should be able to verify this, then there isn't any reason why the person who cared enough to ask for help shouldn't also be given maintainer powers. It took us a long time to get the mod to come back to modest_style and make me a co-mod. Fortunately we didn't have any trolls; I just wanted a ruling about whether sales posts were OK! But trolls are a big problem in many communities and have been known to post NSFW images (including graphic sexual images, violent images, dead animals, aborted fetuses) without cuts and do other extremely offensive things that can't just be ignored. People in an active comm shouldn't have to choose between disabling all images, leaving the community or not watching it just because one person decides to be an asshole and the mod's been gone for two years. Kiri :) **************************************************************** Azalais Aranxta (~malfoy) ataniell93 on LiveJournal and Vox http://groups.yahoo.com/group/malfoymadness "I know the true world, and you know I do. But we needn't let it think we all bow down." --Christopher Fry _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
