h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

*spuits drivel*

shagbark wonders if a moerator could use a ,towel. and clean up that spelling

Or Indeed, a

I doubt they'd know where their towel is, to be brutally honest

'ello?
What's the official result of the trial?

Hey, look, aka's back! Or have you been back for a while?

-Spike A.

...and if the trial period went well, does it mean we might look forward to trial periods of reactively moderated URLs on unedited guide pages? Still have my fingers crossed that this is a slow slippery slope (sort of a "sticky slope," if you will) towards reactive moderation across all of h2g2, but I'm not foolish enough to hold my breath until then.

I hope this doesn't ruin the whole thing, but I have to point out that it makes for an easy workaround to any "rejected" URLs on guide pages. If my off-h2g2 homepage [URL removed by moderator] remains "unacceptable" by moderators' standards, then I can simply post it in a conversation thread attached to the guide entry where I wanted to mention it, and people can still get there. (Please note the irony: my user space gets moderated when I use that URL on it, but now I can post it on this conversation thread and it will only be moderated if a reader actively claims offense at it.)

I don't mean to seem ungrateful -- it's wonderful that we can post URLs in conversations again. But there are new, unexplored loopholes exposed by this situation, and some people can't resist poking loopholes.

Hi Subcom

URL's in conversations are checked in exactly the same way as those in Entries, so it's not a loophole that can be exploited. It's worth a try though!

The trial period went really well, so it looks like URL's in conversations are here to stay! Reactive moderation is our ideal for lots of reasons, and we are working on it, but it might be a while yet. But keep asking and we'll keep trying for it! One day maybe.

Of course, assuming that the BBC decides that it's a suitable thing to do, reactive moderation is certainly a lot easier... but hey, I'm doing fine with the system as it is, and I wouldn't want to put the Moderators out of a job

Sorry. I was under the impression that URLs in conversations were being reactively moderated. Can't remember where I got this impression.

Oh well. It's still a step in the right direction, just not as giant a step as I had thought.

If moderators really need extra work, they could search my unedited guide entries for that same "unsuitable" link that has been removed from this thread and my user space. It was passed by moderators months ago, but has been deemed "unsuitable" more recently on my userspace, and in the meantime, no one has complained about that same link still on a different page. Happy hunting.

MaW,

"and I wouldn't want to put the Moderators out of a job"

Is the global economy so bad that people should be given money for a task that is not useful? There was another time when that policy was accepted. During the Great Depression, US President Roosevelt instituted a [mostly] wonderful project called the Civilian Conservation Corps. Thousands or millions of workers were hired by the government to plant miles of trees, fight fires, create and maintain national parks. They accomplished a lot of great things. But part of the purpose of the CCC was to keep thousands or millions of young, able-bodied workers from rioting because they couldn't find work or feed their families. In some cases, when workers in the CCC ran out of useful tasks to accomplish, they would command one squad to dig holes or ditches. Later another squad would be commanded to fill in the holes. Just keeping them busy pointlessly, an excuse to give them money.

Pro-active moderation is a job that is not needed or wanted by the public. If it was, you'd see it at more websites. The majority of them are run reactively, a smaller staff of moderators taking action when they hear complaints by users. People employed as pro-active moderators are fulfilling a job similar to digging a hole and filling it again later. In fact, worse than that, more like digging holes in the middle of a road, preventing drivers from using the road the way over-sensitive moderation prevents researchers from communicating.

If the economy is so bad that we need to employ young people to prevent the public from communicating, then how about a crew of lumberjacks cutting down active telephone poles or demolishing cellular phone towers? Then repair people working for the phone company will have lots of extra work to do! Since I don't use a cellular phone, I would be fine with that system, and I wouldn't want to put the telephone demolishers out of a job

"If the economy is so bad that we need to employ young people..."

The word "employ" suggests payment for a job. As I understand it, the moderators are mostly impoverished students, and are not paid for moderating. I might be wrong on this, but it's what I've been told by a well respected Ace.

So keeping h2g2 online isn't considered by you to be useful?

This is in reply to Peta's post, #107.


YAY!

"As I understand it, the moderators are mostly impoverished students, and are not paid for moderating."

They might well be impoverished students, but they are most definitely paid for their services. If it were free, there wouldn't be a debate about whether moderation should continue. As it is, moderation is a significant expense, so we continue to push for its removal so that money can be better spent elsewhere.

There will always be communities where the BBC will moderate - kids' sites being the most obvious - but our task is to show that a site run for adults who behave like adults (this is using adult in the 'grown up' sense, not the euphemistic 'should grow up' sense) can rely on its users to point out truly unacceptable content. As Subcom is constantly pointing out, this is how most sites on the Internet work (and how we worked before joining the BBC) and as long as we're not in Sweden*, it should be fine.

Just my opinion, of course. Sadly, I'm not the one making these decisions (and neither are any of the rest of the h2g2 team).

* http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/24352.html

They do get paid? I must have misunderstood or misheard.

MaW, you keep framing the argument as if no other options are possible than the policies BBC has implemented. Keeping h2g2 online is almost as important to me as keeping h2g2 useful. The fact that BBC decision-makers are paranoid about "protecting" the public from things we have not asked to be protected, or that they're worried about frivolous lawsuits by sensitive people, even if the lawsuits would likely have no standing or possibility of winning, does not mean that h2g2 cannot remain online with a more reasonable system of reactive moderation.

Pro-active moderation is a necessary *burden* until other BBC decision-makers come to power, but it is not useful. It is harmful and prevents h2g2 from being as useful as it once was.

If BBC announced that they wanted to cut random swaths of destruction across the website, deleting half of all conversation threads or guide entries, claiming that this was the only way they could allow h2g2 to remain, I hope no one would shrug and say that it's "useful" because at least it keeps h2g2 online." Or, "it hasn't affected me so I don't mind

I mean no disrespect to the Italics or the moderators themselves. Note that they followed a policy of reactive moderation before BBC tookover, so you can tell how they really felt about it. But it always gets my gall when someone tries to justify these policies by asking us to weep for the poor college students, when the task they're getting paid for is to prevent communication on this site. If they need money, there are much more useful tasks they could be doing instead of censoring us.

Subcom, I'm not denying the existance of other options, I'm attempting to point out the futility of complaining too much about what we already have. As you just pointed out, it could be a lot worse. And maybe it does affect some people more than me, but the only things I've EVER had moderated were either borderline cases which got restored or broken links, and there's hardly ever something I wanted to say that I've had to think "no, can't say that" - and those things are usually angry outbursts which wouldn't be allowed on any other site I'm on, and most certainly wouldn't be advisable to post in the first place. So the current system doesn't prevent me from communicating at all.

As for your example of how things could get worse - yes, I would object to that, but that's not the case and behaving as if the BBC are suddenly going to do that isn't going to help anything, because the likelihood that they are is, I'd say, very slim indeed. They've spent a lot of money on h2g2, I don't think they're stupid enough to deliberately kill it off like that. If that happened, I would leave and wouldn't look back, because h2g2 wouldn't be h2g2 anymore. However, under the current system I've seen h2g2 move from strength to strength. Nothing I do here has become any less good due to Moderation or BBC policies - and the only biggish bugbear I had, namely URLs in forums, looks like it may be gone for good.

So how, exactly, is h2g2 less useful than it once was?

The inability to illustrate a point with custom graphics/photographs, for one...

D'you know, I'd actually forgotten about that.

* hopes we won't have to wait too long for a glorious announcement about being able to upload graphics to use *

The reason we don't yet allow uploading of pictures is not because of Editorial Policy, but because we haven't got the technical capability to to allow people to upload pictures yet, or the server capacity. We've also got quite a few essential things that need adding to DNA to make it more attractive to other BBC people, and until DNA is up and running fully, we won't be able to implement picture uploading.

It is, however, on the list for the next few releases, so don't think we're ignoring it and hoping it goes away! It's very high on the list, but it's below some rather boring-sounding internal jobs that just have to be done...

So don't blame the BBC for the lack of pictures (after all, we were guilty of bandwidth-theft before we joined the Beeb) - it's down to to the people who decide what goes in each release of DNA, of which I'm one. So kick me!