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

I am at a total loss to understand why my entry has been hidden for several days now.

It contained nothing objectionable whatsoever and merely discussed and gave a link to a general current affairs discussion forum where I am an administrator.

If this is a reason to hide entries, then I suppose all the other entries I have seen on h2g2 will have to go too.

Has the entry been referred or actually hidden?

If it's been hidden, an email will have been sent to the address you have stored in your preferences. Should you wish further explanation, you will need to reply to that email as we wil not discuss individual moderation decisions onsite.

It has been referred and temporarily hidden.

I can't find anything in my preferences page about e-mails. I supposed the e-mail I provided when I joined the BBC forums would be used. Is this not so? I have not had any e-mails so far.

You can find your information by clicking the 'retrieve my details' tab at the top of the screen. That's where you can check or change your own email address.

Thanks, I have done so.

Because the entry has just been referred at this point, you won't receive an email just yet. Someone apparently yikesed your entry, and the moderators weren't sure whether it broke the house rules or not, and so they referred it up the chain for a decision. If those "up the chain" decide that your entry really does break the rules, then you'll receive an email explaining why. If they decide that it doesn't break the rules, the entry will appear again.

If the entry mostly consisted of a link to your own site, it's possible I guess that whoever yikesed it was worried that it broke the house rules about advertising. Having not seen the entry myself, I don't really have much of an idea, though.

Are you planning on getting involved with h2g2, or are you just using it as a place to post stuff for the other message boards you're on? Do you have any questions about h2g2 we could help answer?

Thanks a lot, Mikey, for your explanation.

I'm still looking around h2g2 and finding out how it works before diving in. I'm interested in (American and English) literature in particular.

Having seen several other pages about other forums, I thought I was doing no harm by writing about one of my own. I still can't imigine why anyone would complain about my message, unless it is a disgruntled ex-poster there.
Regards,
Rosie

In my experience, yikesing of entries is most often not anything personal -- people yikes things because they genuinely believe that something is breaking the House Rules. I wouldn't worry about it for now, though. Either the entry will reappear after being okayed, or you'll get an email message explaining why it breaks the House Rules -- and if that happens, you can respond to the email asking for clarification if you want.

Here at <./>C66</.> is the starting point for most the entries in the Edited Guide about literature. The h2g2 Post (<./>thepost</.&gt also has book reviews sometimes, as well as original literature and poetry.


Mikey

Thanks for the link, Mikey.

I am wondering now if it's worth bothering with posting on h2g2 at all, when entirely innocent messages can be blocked for so long at the whim of one poster.It's like making someone pay a fine before their case has even come up in court. Perhaps the best thing is to complain via the BBC formal complaints procedure, since I have a list of messages very simliar to my own that have not been blocked on h2g2.

Rosie, h2g2 has a different sort of moderation than some of the messageboards, so I wonder if that is part of what has you upset. Here on h2g2, the moderation is reactive -- so the moderators don't see every post, they *only* see posts that someone has yikesed. As a result, there can be several things out there on h2g2 that break the House Rules but are still visible, because no one has used the yikes button to alert the moderators yet. So if you do see something that you truly think breaks the House Rules, please hit the yikes button and let the moderators know.

However, just yikesing any entry or post that looks like the one you are upset is hidden is *NOT* a good idea -- you should only use the yikes button when you know how something is breaking the House Rules.

Was the page by any chance meant to be a discussion forum or other resource for people from other BBC messageboards?


Mikey

Mikey, I have now had an e-mail to inform me that my message has been permanently blocked because it advertises something for profit. This is not true: it gave information on a discussion forum that is run by amateurs and is entirely non-profit making.

I have sent the moderators a list of all the other contributions on h2g2 that were the same as mine, providing links to other forums, and asked them to reconsider their decision.

If this fails I will take the matter up via the formal BBC complaints procedure.

Hello Rosie,

If you've replied to the email you've sent you in in reply to the moderation decision, you've done exactly the right thing - it's the best way to draw our attention to this. We'd ask you to please be patient though - our moderation system deals with a huge volume of postings every day, and so replies aren't always sent out as quickly as we'd like them to be.

Kind regards,

h2g2 Editors