Yep—balance was lost. Personally, watching the way the old FFL would *collectively* "right itself" and move past "conflicts" to different ground was always fascinating for me. Subjectively speaking, I think it would have been nice if the "mean drunk" had been thrown in the "drunk tank" for a drying out period earlier. But, it hadn't been built yet. :) (He didn't have the wherewithal to start his own gig, I guess, which given the level and type of moaning and attack about others he was engaged with, one would think he would have done. It is always a difficult decision to oust a "player." In the real world, I have been on teams where one person threatened to take down the whole group and had to be removed. And, it was messy. In the virtual world, where limits and lines on concrete don't exist in the same fashion, it all becomes a social experiment of a different nature, imho.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <awoelflebater@...> wrote : ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <emily.mae50@...> wrote : The Amma forum I was a member of for awhile was very heavily moderated and all posts were supposedly read and approved ahead of time. The moderator was pretty black-and-white clear about exactly what the purpose of that particular forum was and why she put herself and everyone else through that. I remember one of my posts got bounced once - not for language issues but because it wasn't "relevant" in the right way. Any time that level of subjective judgement is introduced into the mix, the flavor of the forum becomes a reflection of the moderator to some degree, but I was given an explanation, as I remember. I didn't disagree—what did I know about forums and also about Amma, really? Back then, given my high state of anxiety, my perceptions were colored. I was directed here and what a great thing that turned out to be for me. Thank God, I say, for the FFL that I arrived at. I needed that level of free-form and free-wheeling posting and conversation and debate. Personally, I believe there is a line that can be crossed…and I think BW crossed it and I would have ousted his butt too….if I was Queen of the forum. Would that have been permanent or temporary? I would have given him a sentence of 6 months or a year. And, then he would have been on probation. You know—standard procedure. Interesting. I am not a forum participant except for FFL and The Peak so it's all new to me. There has to be a balance between allowing space for others to speak without trolls (for lack of a better term or a more complex definition) dominating the place - like mean drunks do. It is like living with an alcoholic to have domineering trolls forever in your face trying to run the show. I know there is a fine balance between keeping a forum open enough to allow all sorts of voices but not so unregulated that the haters and "drunks" run the show. Like most things, FFL will figure itself out, even if that means it fades away. Too many of the former, more interesting voices, left even before Doug took over moderation - well before. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <j_alexander_stanley@...> wrote : Will you be informing people, either publicly or privately, that you have put them on moderated status? In my opinion, people who have been active, valid participants should at least be made aware that they've been put on moderated status. I think they deserve to know. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote : Evidently Yahoo!'s guidelines for their groups are also about fostering a self-discipline of self-moderation in civil non-violent behavior. As such some writers here by manifest basis of their willful exploitative and harassing writing relative to the Yahoo-groups guidelines are going to find newly that they have been disciplined, reduced at least to a 'moderated' membership status. 'Moderated', as in a mechanism that Yahoo! provides for active moderation and protection of their lists, meaning that composed posts sent to Yahoo-groups may be read at a leisure of moderators as to whether a writing comes well within the guidelines provided by Yahoo-groups before posts might be released to a general list [FFL in this case] for publication. It seems the expectation of Yahoo!'s Yahoo-groups guidelines for their groups are really quite civil and simple. As FairfieldLife at Yahoo-groups goes forward as a Yahoo-group take a fresh look at the Yahoo-groups guidelines and be welcome: http://info.yahoo.com/guidelines/us/yahoo/groups/ http://info.yahoo.com/guidelines/us/yahoo/groups/ -JaiGuruYou!
