[Flafurs] Moderation

[Scott Garron]

      A lot has been said over the past 36 hours or so.  Some 
accusations were made.  Some inaccurate information has been conveyed. 
This is my attempt at addressing some of those issues in as uniform and 
single-message way possible.

      First and foremost, one concern made was that nobody was informed 
that people would start getting moderated due to not following etiquette 
guidelines and that the rules had never been publicly posted to the 
list.  As Carmi pointed out, requests to keep over-quoting to a minimum 
have been made on several occasions, each time citing links to mailing 
list etiquette guidelines.  The decision to not outright post a message 
to the list stating that moderation would go into effect was an attempt 
to avoid a flamewar dramafest like the one with this subject line. 
Anyone who was moderated was automatically informed by the mailing list 
management software that their post was held for moderator approval. 
Any of those posts which were rejected due to over-quoting were returned 
to the sender with an explanation of the rejection and a request to 
resubmit the post with quoted material trimmed.  Those two actions were 
deemed "informative enough" to those who were directly affected.

      To help inform the users, Yappy has added Mailing List Etiquette 
guidelines to the flafurs list subscription page located at:

http://lists.floridafurs.com/mailman/listinfo/flafurs

      They'll probably be revised a little, but they were basically just 
pulled, verbatim, from another list.

      It has been brought to my attention that at least one post was 
made that never received a response, rejection letter, or showed up on 
the list like normal.  If anyone has experienced this problem, let me 
know (off list), and I will look into why it didn't get redistributed by 
the list software.  All posts held for approval or rejected, except for 
spam submitted by non-members (ie. actual unsolicited bulk/commercial 
e-mail), would respond with notifications of those moderation actions.

      The next concern was that people were being censored.  That is 
simply not the case.  New content, that is text that was typed by the 
person submitting the post, has never been rejected or discarded.  The 
only action that earned a rejection was over-quoting.  If it included 
too much text that was not typed by the person submitting the post, it 
was rejected.  A post has never been discarded or rejected based on the 
content that the person submitting the post added to the reply.

      Another concern was that those who were moderated did not know 
when moderation would be removed and suggested that a time period be 
indicated.  This was an oversight on my part, and I apologize for not 
including that in the "held for approval" notice or the rejection 
notices.  I'll clear that up now:  After four or five consecutive 
replies from a moderated subscriber were posted to the list with proper 
trimming, I would remove their mod flag.  Because the list has been so 
quiet as of late, it seems like individuals were moderated over the span 
of several weeks.  That was true, but it's completely dependent on the 
number of posts they made after being moderated.  Because the moderation 
has stirred such controversy, I'll probably refine that practice to one 
or two properly-trimmed posts and not flag the user until after a 
warning message was sent directly to them.

      As XoaGray has pointed out, I indicated in an IRC conversation 
last night that some moderation flags have been removed.  Because there 
has been enough traffic during this discussion from several who were 
moderated to show that they are using better quoting skills, their 
moderation flags have been removed.

      One more concern was that people are unsubscribing from the list 
due to the new moderation procedures.  I receive a notice every time 
someone unsubscribes.  There have been five unsubscriptions since the 
moderation started, one of which was a person who left the state and had 
no reason to be on the list and the other four were not people who were 
moderated.

      Yet another concern was regarding this list being only for "event 
notifications" and that it is not a discussion list.  This list is, 
indeed, a discussion list.  Event notifications and information is 
welcomed, but it is not and never has been solely for that purpose.

      If any of you have any other concerns or suggestions, please 
e-mail me directly.  This thread has had far too many posts already and 
everything is getting repetitive.

-- 
Scott "Simba" Garron