Rate Sciforums Moderation.!!!

Yes.
I think that's why JamesR put it to a vote.
He didn't think that mods would make the decision to permanently ban someone who had been a colleague for many years,
especially on such slight grounds.
Colleagues are not just fellow mods or fellow posters, they are both.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Six pages of infractions, mostly for attacking and insulting other members. His sexual attacks against Bells were only a part of the issue - he leveled such attacks against several people.

From the rules Sticky:

Several of those criteria were met.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Should asserting their own power be the moderators' goal?

It's certainly possible to imagine the moderators banning or otherwise running off everyone else, so that at some point the only active participants left on the board are the moderators themselves. But that wouldn't really be consistent with the owner's desire to increase the site's traffic.

The moderators should be adding value to the board, not making things worse. Their participation in threads should make discussions better than they would have otherwise been. Above all, they should be striving to make Sciforums a friendly, fun and hopefully an educational place that attracts intelligent people who are interested in science (or cognate subjects like philosophy and so on) to read the board and post regularly.

Moderators shouldn't treat the board as an opportunity to promote their own political and social agendas, and to demonize anyone who disagrees. Moderators' effectiveness shouldn't be measured in how many bans they can issue and in how many active participants they can alienate and induce to leave.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Which is why, Yazata, that many moderators will withhold any kind of action in a thread they have been active in unless the offense is egregious - we try our best to avoid any sort of action based on vested interest.

 

I'm troubled by what's currently happening in this particular thread:

http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?141802-The-Broad-Brush-Women-and-Men-Prejudice-and-Necessity

That thread, which could serve as a paradigmatic example of moderators-behaving-badly, is precisely what I was talking about when I said that sometimes discretion is the better part of valor and that some threads on this board might be best avoided by intelligent and mature people.

 

In what way, exactly? We have someone who, as a moderator, has (unfortunately) first hand experience of the subject in question... and she has been villainized and attacked for her views on it, by the same people that constantly attack pretty much any action (or inaction) she makes. If only you could see the reports and tickets about it... they are so petty and... well, in many respect, foolish as to be almost funny. I know Bells is no saint... I know she has her faults. We all do. That's where there are many mods and supermods with differing thoughts and opinions.

When you have multiple moderators who have the same opinion, with even regular members and a damned ADMINISTRATOR voicing that same opinion... I find it hard to believe that WE are ALL in the wrong.

 

Ive been askin for years what the goal of Sciforums is so i coud get behind it an help to make it work but mums the word... but here lately the obvous Sciforums goal IS mod power.!!!

Either that ant the goal of some of the mods or they just ant capable... an id say its a mixture of the two :shrug:

The curent plan seems to be to bait the posters who are deemed undesirable into bein baned... or to be so abusive that the undesirable posters will just leave... an then wit the prollem people gone Sciforums will be fixed.!!!

Hay... its a sinkin ship but interestin to observe.!!!

I understand that the owners are "very hands off"... except for... shall we say "encouraging" increases to site traffic.!!!

Surely the owners read the site on occasion... so they must be as clueluss as the ones curently in charge as to what woud make a quality discussion site wit a pleasin amount of site traffic.!!!

 

in my irrelevant opinion,
the ones who are whining about mods,
are the actual trouble makers.
get it ?

 

Congrats on the recognition of that.

Or perhaps they are law-abiding citizens who are fed up with lack of adequate or appropriate law-enforcement?
Or perhaps everyone who complains such are actually trouble makers.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Agreed. It is probably the worst example of this kind of mod behaviour on SF (which is saying something), with the problem mods actually taking up the more offensive interpretations of a concept they tried to castigate earlier. I'm of two minds about it. I will say that I get drawn into these combats - being under solid character attack will do that to you. There's no doubt, yes, that I should have avoided it after it started going off the rails badly, but then what? Every time one tries to have some other discussion, the thread will get referred back to as some kind of moral or intellectual failure. In that light, how can one possibly simply drop the discussion? I suppose that I must admit that it's impossible that one is going to actually get one of these mods to recant on their character assaults, even when they make an infinitely worse case themselves.

This all being said, this could be a useful opportunity for the site owners: release the worst examples and try new people. There's clearly fairly wide outrage over some of the mods; try some replacements a la Voltaire. If the replacements fail to calm things after a few months of trial, then the experiment can be considered a wash and they demoted back to posters also. They've really got nothing to lose by giving it a go. I could think of a few names that could do the job.

 

I think Winston Churchill said it best...

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Kittamaru, the majority of these criteria, with the exception of #11 and #12, appear to have been met in these recent Threads :

- http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?141817-The-True-Origin-of-The-Universe ; and

- http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?141869-Objectivity-in-Science-Subjectivity-on-SciForums

Kittamaru, I must also add that I agree completely with your previous observation :

Yazata expressed a very valid point also :

Also, Kittamaru, there may just be "Too Much Truth" in another of your previous observations :

 

what another joke this is.
please continue to show how ridiculous your mind functions.

" Or perhaps they are law-abiding citizens who are fed up with lack of adequate or appropriate law-enforcement? "
amusing

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

show where the bold actually occurs.
yes, you just made it obvious that you are part of these pathetic individuals with this little bold comment.
why are you even still allowed to post here(shrugs)

has anyone stop to think(even tho it appears it's difficult for them to do so)that by whining about the mods,
is nothing more than (their favorite word) trolling, as they put it?
unbelievable.
i would have banned every individual that's whining,
but that's just me.

 

i actually read and understood that example link,
i found that it's not the mods.
it's that simple.
try using the entity called " brain ", then you shall see how obvious it is.
amusing, and all these pathetic individuals presume they are intellects.

 

Be of good cheer: I doubt it will matter. The perpetrators will walk scot-free. As they do.

 

And when your 'enemies' are mod-troll gangmembers abusing their position to ban/disparage members who HAVE "stood up for something, sometime in their lives" (ie, against troll-mods infiltrating internet forums as 'mods' in order to carry out their anti-free-science-discourse activities)? Will you allow that your quoted remark there can also apply to VICTIMS who HAVE stood up against the bullies/gangs infesting the net, and been victimized more because of that?

By the way, Kittamaru, I have been very busy and not able to post much even though my last (troll-mod trumped-up) suspension expired days ago. I have been reading-only and came across this thread where you are beginning to come across as an apologist for troll-mod misbehavior which has just about ruined this site's reputation. Why are you letting those troll-mod gangmember types gull you into going along with their 'version' instead of actually looking at ALL the evidence in the record for yourself? Is it that you are a gullible person, or is it that you are slowly becoming one of them so that you won't become a 'victim' yourself. Make up your mind. Either you are able to stand up to such subtle peer pressure to conform to troll-mod gang 'version' of how things went down, or you are fearlessly independent and so must risk their victimizing you. You can't be all things to all 'sides'. You are either for open discourse on the merits and against 'personal' tactics/framing, or you are just another useless part of the problem. That 'paddoboy' has been allowed by you and other BIASED troll-mods to clutter up many threads with his inane cheerlaeding and parroting and opinionating even worse stuff than some 'cranks', is proof that all you are doing is biased reading and letting paddoboy off while castigating and victimizing others who have done less harm than paddo has. If you can't look at his posting record and see clearly his sycophantic and inane parroting and thread-starting using news items elsewhere, which it doesn't take any actual clue to do), then you are turning into yet another ego-captured self-serving troll-mod gangmember (without even realizing it perhaps? If so, perhaps this heads-up as to what is happening to you and your 'objectivity' may help you realize what is happening to you and so reverse the process and actually be your own man and fairer/more fully informed in your opinions/actions as mod.

Sure, there are real trolls and egregious ones on the net. But it's your responsibility as mod to distinguish between those and more genuine scientific disocursers who may be ahead of the mainstream 'pack'. For example, when I cautioned everyone not to accept all the claims by those BICEP2 'papers' ebcause I could immediately see obvious assumptive/interpretive/systemic/methodological flaws in them, I was lambasted by the troll-mod types. Now that mainstreamers have found the same flaws, these same troll-mod types who lambasted me are strangely silent. They even try to cover their anti-science comments at the time by pretending that the 'peer review' is 'working'. But when I tried to caution them to do their own due diligence and check all the BICES 'papers' treatments/claims FOR THEMSELVES, they just called me names! Where was their much vaunted 'peer review' attitude when they called me names for cautioning against accepting claims of 'evidence' from BICEP2 papers? The papers/work was obviously a 'publish or perish' offering and not a truly scientific work, since even the merest self-review by real objective scientists would have told them that there intended publication and claims were NONSENSE because their 'work' could not support those claims. But they claimed/announced anyway! Even though they should have known it was NOT 'objective science' IF their own internal peer review within their group had been even superficially done objectively. Anyhow, I don't expect these same troll-mod type bigmouths to apologize for calling me troll and worse, even though they were the ones 'blindly believing' those BICEP2 papers claims and I was the only one urging caution because of flaws evident in the 'work' which was obvious to even the most cursory examination of their 'work/claims'.

FYI, I still won't be posting much, if at all, for a while, Kittamaru, everyone; as I am very busy with you-know-what (and the usual life matters). I wish you all the best of good luck and good thinking, in science and humanity. Cheers and 'read-you-round', guys and gals!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

PS: The dynamics of group/system evolution shows that over time the group/system degenerates to the lowest common denominator OR the power-bloc gaining ascendency through the laxity and inaction of those whose responsibility is to prevent such destructive outcomes. The only solution to the present sciforums problem is blanket removal by Admin of all mods. This will effectively cut the stream of collusion/ganging behaviour which hs developed over the years across the net amongst the mod-troll 'mafia' gang types. Any new prospective mod should be carefully vetted to make sure they were not already tainted by such anti-science-discourse gang-associations/prejudices/abuses etc in the past across the net. Good luck, James R, and all those mods/admin who are still fairminded and objective despite the troll-mod gang's influence/framing over the years here and elsewhere! Bye for now.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

actually, paddoboy has shown me numerous times that he's actually interested in learning or discussing.
he even admits when he's clueless, without being embarrassed, which is exactly how it should be.
unlike most ignoramuses(who think they are some kind of intellects or something(shrugs)) around here who do nothing but instigate arguments then scream troll,(get it?)
like i had mention before, the ones who scream troll,
usually are the actual trolls.

 

We all know he is clueless, so he must admit it or be branded a self-deluded nincompoop. That wasn't the point. The point was that despite being clueless, his posts clutter the threads with his clueless and 'personality cult' chatter/opinions/cheerleading and inane linking/parroting which adds nothing to the original ideas being discussed. Just read his posting record. That will shut you up. But your record is no better, krash, and yet the mod-trolls in charge still leave your and your useless posts alone. Go figure. It couldn't be that they are biased and protect their own. Surely not! Bye, useless troll.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

actually, i read his posts a lot,
what i actually see, using my brain, not auto pilot or focused argumentative mentality, is links to accurate sources.
as for his opinion.
again, he clearly states so(which there's nothing wrong with opinions if they are educated properly, unlike most) and then provides another accurate source.
the bottom line is you are doing exactly what you are claiming others of doing(which appears to be nothing more than a personal grudge of some sort), using him.
and again,
the ones who scream troll,
usually are the actual trolls.

my post usually are " useless " only to the low level minded individuals.
which is usually posts far beyond there comprehension and what they can conceive.
it's that simple.