david said:
When situations start to get serious, or just delve into personal attacks, I
first try to contact the person individually to ask for a change of attitude,
and if that doesn't work as expected, more public measures are attempted
(probably the strongest one is right now about to be tested, as today marks
the finish of the first two-week account blocking period for a certain user,
as you might have read about).
It's very important to accept criticism and different points of view, and
it's very important to avoid risking open participation recurring to
excessive moderation, the line for censorship lies in different places to
each one's eyes.
On the other hand, this is not just any software forum, so it's reasonable to
expect a sensible effort to be made to explain, particularly to those not
that much in-the-know, the importance of our principles (and yes, that
includes the frequently controversial naming and 'I-have-to-feed-my-children'
topics) ;-)
I think this is the right approach for these cases.
Perhaps the same tactic can be used to deal with the cases where one
disrespects the guidelines.
I think that this tactic is more useful than banning a user straight away. We
are all humans, and we can naturally make mistakes at various situations,
like when reading a post/comment. Simply banning someone after reading his
post/comment just because it's probably against the guidelines is very cruel.
We must also consider the fact that some users (like me, specially) have a
native language different from the North American English or from the
European English (and any other English variants) and, despite speaking it
relatively well, we can make mistakes sometimes.
We can also make adaptations of this tactic, like three notices (which may or
may not give a time limit for the user to justify or to correct himself),
each one followed by a temporary deactivation of his account, and after this,
if the user makes another mistake, another notice (with or without a time
limit) and a ban.
Also, I think that it's best not to have just one moderator, but 3 or 5,
which is useful because there is a possibility to get into a consensus before
doing anything. Also, if these moderators are worried about attacks of any
kind, it's useful to mask them as part of another group (like the
administrators, members, users, but not as moderators).
Another option would be to have a page listing the notices to the user, along
with the quantity of notices and account deactivations received. Each notice
could have a footnote indicating how many moderators agree or disagree with
such notice, there's no need for the to write comments here because,
theoretically, the comments have already been made. The footnote could be
like this:
“3 moderators agree with this notice, 2 don't”.
I think that the notice should not be sent to the user if a single moderator
doesn't vote, this assures that all moderators must vote, and on top of that,
that they'll be responsible for the vote.
The notification must reach the user somehow, that said, if the moderators
don't want to be exposed by sending e-mails directly to the user, it's a good
idea to place the notice in the user's profile page on this forum, and when
doing so, it's a good idea not to have a footnote like “Last edited by
ADFENO”.
Learning is like a group of mountains, some mountains can be hard to get on
top and easy to get down and vice-versa. Sometimes we can even fall from it,
and so we'll either have to start again or pass through it too fast and
forget about everything we learned.
grimlok said:
Because of this you will surely get many folks from all walks of software
life into the fold. This means a lot of differing views of what freedom in
software means. It is a debate that HAS to be made on here I feel. I
understand that some people are just plain trolls, but people questioning the
intent of Richard Stallman, or the fsf, or free software and the GNU in
general, should be allowed to question it so as to understand the view point.
grimlok said:
Maybe a way to help this, is to have a new area for such debate.
I agree.
andrew said:
4. I think non-Trisquel discussions should go in the "Troll Hole", since
there is currently no other forum for such discussions. For example, the
ethics of free software is more political than technical, so maybe that's the
best forum for it. This forum is supposed to be about Trisquel with a focus
on supporting users. In other words, I'm not suggesting that threads should
necessarily be deleted, but perhaps moved or locked if they are off-topic.
I think that the Troll Hole isn't the right place for such questions because,
by doing this, we'll eventually do something which tells the involved users
something like this: “Even if this question has been made by a new user, we
consider it as troll intent”.
Best regards, ADFENO.
Have a nice day.
