Author: Pete R.
Date: 16:23:38 07/24/00
Go up one level in this thread
On July 24, 2000 at 13:04:34, Ratko V Tomic wrote: >> If I jump in here and imply that you are an >> idiot, the reason to moderate is *not* that I may harm your >> self-esteem. Maybe you and I are both very thick-skinned, >> and can amuse ourselves by hurling insults at each other >> until we die of old age. But why should the board >> allow space for that garbage? > >I was defending that type of "discussion." I agree with >your points on the manners of discussion. > >But the issue which started this thread was whether the >"best five chess programmers" topic should be censored upfront. >Any topic can be discussed in a civilized way and other ways. >Banning these kinds of rankings for fear of offending someone >(by not having as high opinion of their achievement as they >might have) is rooted in the same kind of political correctness [snip] Again, the reason is not fear of offending individuals, but the general readership. I understand your point, however in this case I think it would have been moot because the original post itself was worthy of deletion IMO. This guy says, here are my favorite programmers, and guys who haven't earned a title are basically wankers and so don't make my list. In other words, the top guys ROOL and everybody else SUX dude. At best not very insightful, at worst a blatant troll. As to the topic, is there such a thing as a topic that should not be discussed at all? Certainly, it's easy to think of many offensive topics that are not worth discussion. Is this one of them? I think it's borderline. Not something so blatant as to immediately offend anyone, but not a completely benign topic either. I certainly think at this point this topic is "done", and speculation and random offerings about who is a good chess programmer, and by omission who isn't, is not worthwhile. But generally I would agree that moderators should delete only the offensive posts within a thread if they feel the overall thread is worth keeping, but ultimately that is the point, namely that the moderators are elected to make this sort of decision. Banning a topic outright could be premature, but with some topics it will quickly and inevitably amount to the same thing over a short period of time, so the distinction might be meaningless in some cases. In this case the first sign of offense was the first post, so how much longer to wait? Ultimately one can't generalize, each case will be somewhat unique. I'm generally quite tolerant, but would have nuked the original post on sight. In cases where the DB battles rage between high profile regulars, I would probably just step in and ask people not to be childish or obnoxious when making their points, and/or simply delete anything really personal until people get the message that trying to be slick by getting in a few personal digs while making a valid point isn't going to fly. ;) E.g. I would nuke a post that said "DB couldn't have calculated to that depth because X,Y,Z, but I wouldn't expect a numbnuts of questionable education and parentage to know that", and send the poster an email that says, if you want to make your point about X,Y,Z, try again. :) I get the impression that some people believe they are being a lot slicker than they are. ;) Anyway perhaps it would be a good idea to have a Moderator Test Suite, in the same vein as chess position test suites. List a number of very specific examples, and ask each moderator candidate to explain what if any action they would take in each example, and why. This will give readers a better idea of what to expect.
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