ok for moderating when: topics completely derail, somebody makes serious attempts to insult someone (excluding speaking out honest and factual opinions) or anything else that promotes hate violent behaviour according to the guidelines.
but anything (far) below that should not be moderated so aggressively and acts more as an insult than these posts ever could be. i feel that some actions have been taken that completely overstep a healthy sense of opinion. since you never see who flagged your post or removed it is also impossible to open a comprehensive discussion.
2 or three people having different thoughts are enough to flag and remove an utterly harmless topic quicker than one can look sounds more like a fierce dictatorship with distrust and intrigues which are the only results that can ever have.
feel free to write me in pm if you feel offended… i am not going to bite your head off.
Haven’t seen anything like that, so I guess I completely missed it.
I think McNeel does a very good job of moderating and I fully support closing threads that are going on and on to nowhereseville… or at least cutting part of it into a new topic - which is hard to do given the often completely interspersed nature of the individual posts.
If you want a comprehensive public discussion of a particular moderation decision, then you’re missing the general point of moderation. A few times in the lifetime of some online forums, they publicly chat about standards, sometimes after a particular incident, but by and large to serve its purpose it need to be a quiet, efficient process.
Who flagged it is also quite beside the point: they didn’t make the decision and do you even know that someone did flag it? If you have a genuine grievance other than slighted honor I’m sure you could raise it privately.
And sometimes such things happen and you just move on.
So what is it that you are trying to achieve with this OP?
It’s completely nonspecific, so it isn’t likely to generate a discussion about what you’re actually upset about: even the general category of moderation such as on-topic, level of respect for other posters, etc.
It’s buried in Meta on a weekend, so it may be that none of the other parties involved may even see it.
well to briefly outline it, the topic which got taken down after a mere 10 minutes related to the increasing requests with people posting one image assigning the sometimes helplessly helpful people here to solve it for them with sometimes zero explanations and zero attempts to prove or provide previous efforts with a complete lack of empathy and sometimes not even showing up anymore to say thank you or mooh or meh or whatnot
since i have the feeling that this community with all these requests lately is slowly heading towards a chat gpt or midjourny prompt, i opened a topic in a humorous attempt to discuss this with a little image which i am going to post once more because i see nothing harmful in it, titling it
in my opinion this is not enough to reflect a serious threat to the community or to anyone and entirely deleting it out of the blue with no chance for anybody to even see it other than whoever flagged such a ridiculously harmless topic is absolutely overkill.
since we are now in meta and maybe the moderator who were so frantic before might want to give this another chance, feel free to discuss the actual topic which are these requests from here on, or discuss the heavy moderating if there is anything else to contribute. or write me a pm if you need to brush it all off.
Wait… so you deliberately made an off-topic post in one of the technical subfora complaining about general post quality and got upset (“fierce dictatorship”? Really?) when a moderator agreed with you that it was off topic?
One thing they do aggressively here is shuffle things around to the places they think they fit best. I didn’t see it so I don’t have an informed opinion about whether it should have been moved to Meta rather than squished.
I mean, what’s the purpose of such a thread?
Vent session? Copy pastes of “Yeah, kids/new forum members these days just don’t respect the process!”?
Suggestion for a more productive direction to take it:
Do you have thoughts on improvements in how the community responds to such posts such as the “How to help us help you” post that often gets linked as a reply to posts that don’t supply enough information?
Maybe a quick intro, “Please take the time to reread your question before posting. Does it give others a good understanding of what you’re trying to do and what’s stopping you with a good, specific example?”?
i completely agree with you in all points, except this
that must be subject to your pretty aggressive interpretation (why ever)
off topic is entirely a question of perspective. moving to meta would have been fair but would have been also besides the entire point and would just provide evidence that somebody might be shuffling just a bit too much around wasting efforts against a topic which completely relates to it.
Well, I haven’t really noticed that, but perhaps I unconsciously filter them out. There’s no reason to flag those posts, but it might be necessary to flag a response to it if it is rude.
I had never heard of this “How to help us help you” post that is often linked, so I searched for it and found this.
The main take away I got from reading that was don’t ask tech support for help with anything but " My rhino is broken, and I need help asap… Tech is for broken stuff, forum is for how do I stuff."
Given that this forum is the place to post how do I do stuff questions… How can a “how do I stuff” question be off topic? Even if it is asked in jest to provoke a discussion.
Actually I think this is the one he’s referring to: Help Us Help You
I’d forgotten that it was originally written for grasshopper by David Rutten, but I’ve seen it referenced many times for non-Grasshopper issues as well.
@AIW found the help-us-help-you I was attempting to reference- hadn’t seen your link before.
@encephalon Yes, I was slightly aggressive in phrasing so far as me alleging your own perception of whether it was on topic or not. I apologize for that part.
FWIW, I also flagged your post as being inappropriate, by violating the guidelines. Which also suggest that users do not engage, but instead “If You See a Problem, Flag It”. It’s nice to see the system working. Especially when previous posts, like this one, gets a free pass:
it is sad to so see that you are seeking vengeance rather than trying to actually improve the quality of the forum yourself which ironically you obviously believe to have actually done. since you seem to have taken personal grief in that discussion or just generally think that i am not appropriate, i will try to briefly elaborate what happened. → in an attempt to correct your misinterpreting the wikipedia info which to be fair is indeed not fully complete, and not believing my personal experience i have assured to have, you started taking it personal, accusing me and throwing ad hominem claims towards me. i did not intend any cock fight there and you are making one out of it
still your vengeance or whatever that was, should not be enough to simply kill a topic. some admin having the same opinion about me being inappropriate is out there reading along, so rest assured you will always have back up when you are trying to wipe me out again. other than that i hope to settle this shit games and lets move on.
if you or anybody actually, still think that trying to talk about what is actually happening on the forum regarding the core aspect of my attempt should be deemed inappropriate, then please be welcomed to elaborate on your point of view. right now i can not even open a discussion in that name since the last one got killed and probably will be again, i am wondering why this one was allowed to prevail.
