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

The plans for moderation are really affected by some of the information that we can't discuss at the moment. But it does seem it will be easier than we thought.

>>>> Has anyone considered outsourcing moderation? Has that been costed? It would solve ALOT of thorny problems.

All the outsourced moderation companies would do is say 'yah or nay' to posts, they refer thorny issues to the community team anyway. They have a bunch of employees usually young people / graduates, without any special training who respond to yiksed posts with a 'yes', 'no' or 'refer to community team'. They have very clear guidelines that they follow, anything that requires judgement they refer back to the community team.

So it wouldn't solve the problems, as the problems would just come back to us. I haven't costed it formally but I have costed it enough to say that the current arrangements are too much to continue with.

Ultimately the community editors would have to deal with flame wars and the elected editorial team and the board would have to make decisions about who to ban etc.

But this raises the point that becoming community editor is something that's going to change the way that people interact with h2g2.

You'd have to be mature and sensible online, and not get into disputes with others. You'd have to be careful to be nice to everyone, even when not on duty. You'd have to have the insight to rise above from your personal feelings on flame wars and not get involved in them except as a moderator.

It would be in a way like 'taking your toy away' and that may stop a lot of people wanting to get involved.

I've already had to do that a lot with being 'chief cat herder for h2g2c2 interim committee'. I'm aware I'm now in an official role on h2g2 (it's hard work hearding s) and I can't just get involved in robust debates for fun.

I'm pretty sure there is very little moderation on h2g2 (proper moderation, that is), at least at the moment. Occasional posts that cross the line, mostly advertising by companies who sign up, that kind of thing. That's just my opinion though, based on what I see around the site.

Unfortunately until/if we get any stats from the BBC we just don't know what kind of workload we are looking at.

Outsourcing has been mentioned (albeit a long while ago). At the time nobody came down in favour, partly because of it being an additional cost and partly because our main gripes with our current batch of moderators is that they don't know what's going on with h2g2 and don't take context into consideration. You also lose the overall picture, whereas a group of Researchers can see trends and patterns better.

With serious issues, like the person you mentioned, it's the sort of thing that would probably be escalated to Editors anyway as it became a large problem.
I'm also pretty sure there are enough Researchers that don't get involved who wouldn't mind, but we do need to start finding out exactly who thinks they can offer some time to this!
We'll need to officially ask for volunteers at some point in case we win and in case it happens quickly! (I can dream, can't I?? ).

I was meaning using outsourced mods instead of volunteer ones. I didn't mean don't have the CE involvement. It seems like too much a conflict of interest. Would the community know who the moderators were?

(btw Moderation on hootoo at the moment is pretty weird. It seems even further removed from h2 context than normal. Posts are getting failed for very little reason (much worse than in the past), and often there is no email.)

Z, I agree that being a CE would change the person's relationship with the site. I think this is a very important point. One couldn't take part in those big conflict threads for instance. Not sure even on just normal heated Serious Debate threads. It's not like someone being hired into the position from outside. How does one transition from researcher to CE? How much an ordinary researcher could a CE be?

I'd like to see the Editors much more involved in the site. But there are good reasons for not doing so historically, and there is a challenge to do it diffrerenlty now.

How much part of the community were the Eds pre-bbc?

If you are one duty post with you work user name, off duty under your own name. I don't see a problem with being involved in robust debate, you can assert a strong opinion without it getting personal.

I'm in two minds. On the one hand, yes, what you say under your own name should be your own business.

On the other hand, if you are on the opposite side, and your posts start to get modded, will you be concerned that the moderators are biased?
Now, I would expect any moderator *not* to be biased, of course, but can you see how it could affect the perception of moderators' fairness if one of them participated in a thread like that?

I would want moderators to be anonymous in regards to who takes decisions and answers emails and stuff, but I don't like the idea of keeping the names secret. So if I were a moderator you would know (but you wouldn't know which decisions I had taken or when).

If you and I got into a heated debate and someone moderated one of your posts, you might believe that I did it out of spite, even though it was actually Z who had nothing to do with the conversation. If you believed that, or others around you believed that, it might undermine the trust in the moderators in general.

Have I made sense there?

Yes. There's the issue of how any individual moderator would handle boundaries between work and personal involvement in the site. And then there's the issue of perception by the rest of the community esp to do with fairness.

The other internet forums I belong to all use members for moderation. But they don't have the degree of intense debate as here, nor the very wide range of activities and roles on the site. Do we have any examples of websites with intense debate culture and using members to moderate?

Doctors.net.uk users members to moderate and there is a culture of very very intense debate there. We would rather be moderated by other doctors than by normal people, the downside is that it takes someone over 12 hours to get a moderation decision.

There is also a computer games forum that was taken over by its members that described itself as having 'members that loved to argue about everything and anything'. They are also now moderated by members.

All we'd be asking the member to do is ask if the post breaks the rules or not, or if it needs referral.

If the person who got modded didn't like the outcome then their should be an option for a second opinion.

I think moderaters should be anonymous, I think for this one job their personal space should protected by that anonyminity. (sp?)

Community editors, guide editors, committee members should have a clearly defined work space, so if I wanted to organise a community event I'd approach the community ed team on their page.

If I believed that you were yikesing my posts out of spite I'd raise the issue with the mod team or the committee to investigate.

Peanut

All moderators would need clear guidelines and a clear structure and responsibility, and an accountability.

Their may even need to be a rule that you can't mod threads that you've posted in.

I think the moderators should be anonymous insofar as to the wider h2g2 membership. Of course their identity would be known to the various committee members, community and guide editors, because they would have to personally account for any individual moderation decision that was in any way questionable.


Have you thought how people might put themselves forward, if you wish them to keep their identities confidential?

Also, you will need to work out a rota, that will provide round the clock moderation. Or are we going for a band of time when there will be people in place?


I wonder how the ACEs manage to share out their time on h2g2.

Z, does everyone know on Doctors.net.uk who the moderators are and when they are involved in certain decisions?

>>We would rather be moderated by other doctors than by normal people, the downside is that it takes someone over 12 hours to get a moderation decision.

Not so different to here currenlty when a decision is referred to the Eds.


>>All we'd be asking the member to do is ask if the post breaks the rules or not, or if it needs referral.

Have you been yikesed much? Quite a large number of the posts I've had pulled it's been ambiguous as to why. Sometimes I've asked the Eds and they've not known either.

I'm sure we can do better than the bbc has, because the moderators will know the contextual stuff much better. Still, I think it's not quite that straightforward. Often the bbc will pull a post that someone is 'offended by' for instance. You know how that concept goes down amongst some hootooers.


It was mentioned in the CE thread that we wouldn't need many mods. I think the issue is more how to manage variable need over time. During the Della wars there was alot of moderation going on, both pulled posts and referrals to the Eds (it drove Jimster batty and ended with several premods simply to contain the volume I think).

Mind you, we haven't had any of those big conflicts for a long time now *touch wood*.

I wasn't thinking that we kept people's names anonymous, but that we keep the work they do anonymous. At the moment moderators never post directly on site, it's all done via email.

The system we have may be dependant on how many volunteers we have, and the time zones they cover. It will also depend on how this information comes through. We have no clue how the information gets to the current batch of mods and what systems the new owners will get.

The ACEs just pitch in when they can, which is how I envisaged this working. The current moderation system can take hours to come back so it won't be too much of a change from what we have at the moment.

A rota can be a problem as people's circumstances change, a real life emergency comes up, or someone just forgets. In that case nobody will be checking the list because 'they're not on the rota'. Better that we all check it from time to time to check we're on top of the queue, with an option to send out a message for extra help if we're getting behind!

We need a few volunteers doing a little work when they can rather than having one or two that do everything. As soon as you have the latter it becomes an onerous task, and means that when real life gets hold of them the system falls apart. With moderation we can't afford to do that.

On Doctors.net the forum moderators post using a shared account. It's not known generally who they are, but of course the site has everyone's name and GMC no.

Doctors.net is the only forum I know of where flaming can end up with you losing your job: http://www.remedyuk.org/index.php/The-Script/The-Script-9th-September-2009.html

A shared account is an interesting idea.

(and that suspension story is interesting, do you know how it turned out? I can't imagine it would be supported under employment law here).


The rota makes sense having people checking in as well as rostered on. I'd suggest that when the Brits are asleep there'd be less need for cover but that's when Taff's at work

He got back to work in the end, but it's likely to be a permanent career black mark. It was considered unprofessional behaviour to call someone a s**** and a c word on an internet forum under your own name.

I know nurses who have had formal warnings for unprofessional behaviour on facebook as well.

Hi there!
Interim Volunteer here.

Vip started a document on "Roles and Responsibilities" : http://docs.google.com/document/d/1OwlgXi4njNHCFPPpk4_EOAgGvQkjNrXvuFerUErdyFo/edit?hl=en_US&authkey=CMLM2NwK

and wrote up "Volunteers" : http://docs.google.com/document/d/1n9FDEW8AWmLCFAIDmdx-AOlu4uL-E2KY_lmUUUEFZco/edit?hl=en_US&authkey=CMvIipgJ

We have a nice drawing on Volunteers and Procesess here : http://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1sEvWFOO5HteALDWtmiL9bqxA0jSAUDT0CI7pUzwkdMU/edit?hl=en_US&authkey=CPrBujg

There is a rather elaborate chapter on Volunteers in the Great Big Document by mrs. Z (when it was available, don't know about the revised version expected to be available some undefined time in the near future).

And the subject has been debated in several threads and has it's own niche in "Magrathea's Workshop - Volunteers" ( A82661051 )

Do we need to discuss it again/anew/redundantly here ?

Oh well.

My opinion: Moderating should be done logged in as 'Moderator' and not as ones own alias. The New Powers That Will Be will have to know whom moderated what in case of dispute.
This will prevent personal disgruntlement (sp?) among Researchers because of moderations done.

I'm quite irritated by the 'do we need to discuss it again/anew/redundantly here' comment. No not really and it wasn't the point of the thread, the orginal intention was to establish if we could come to some consensus on volunteer roles and get on with filling some of them.

Apologies to Peanut et al. I was uncomfortable with the 'do we need to discuss it again/anew/redundantly here' after I hit the Post button as well.

My opinion is that after the BBC has concluded their deliberations on the sale and the results are made public and the C3 can publish their efforts we will have time to make decisions based on informed concensus.

We can whip up a survey based on the issues raised and in line with the GBD pretty durn quick and have the Aye-s and Nay-s tallied in time.