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Darmok N Jalad

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One member's feedback to the recent moderation in the GAS thread.

Dear Mod Team,
First off, I'm sorry for my OT post in the above thread and for the labor it took to move it. It was never my intent to cause harm to this site or place an undue burden on the volunteer staff, yet here I am, and I apologize.

Second, it's not what you say, but how you say it.

Right or wrong, for as long as I've been participating here, the thread in question has drifted out of the realm of photography-centric gear purchases, with an occasional rabbit-trail to utter nonsense. We have a few good laughs, and the thread always re-centers. What is hard to understand is, if this is/was wrong, it's been going on for longer than the last few days, unchecked, with no visible member complaints or OT warnings. Indeed, going OT is not how we should behave, and I fully recognize that how the site is managed is in the purview of the site owner and mods. No argument there. However, the "Mod Team" response, without any prior warnings, takes on a tone I've never witnessed here before from anyone, with terms like "scumhole" and "herding cats," with threats of suspensions and terminations. While those words weren't aimed at any one person, it sure could be implied that those "off-topic members" were getting lambasted by the "Mod Team." Best I can see, the "perpetrators" here are/were members in good standing (some even supporting financially), and I don't believe any of them were setting out to intentionally harm this site, her members, or be a disruption. It all just feels really out of line, or at least unprofessional. If we had taken tone like this with another member of this site, well, we would probably get moderated. Mercy seasons justice.

Perhaps this post risks further action or threatens the status of my account, but I thought it only fair to point out how grossly out-of-character the tone of this moderation action took. I view the collective members here as a tighter-knit, fun-loving community, but I also admit that we do and did get out of line. I get there was much labor on your part to square things up, and I don't want to diminish that frustration and effort. But to take such an ominous initial tone with such a good-natured group of participants, many of whom have actually tried to draw additional traffic here? It just sits wrong with me.

Why post this? Not because of hurt feelings, but as constructive criticism. I feel your active user base does a lot to make this place great, and I'll take the bullet and speak up for those that I feel have been mistreated.

Humbly,
Darmok
 
I agree too. Not to further rock the boat, but assuming positive intent and treating others respectfully goes a long way. Neither of those seemed present in the tone of the response the Mods gave, and something I know for a fact they wouldn’t tolerate of us (probably best you don’t ask how I know). It’s one of the reasons I’ve participated less here over the last several months, after what I viewed as a heavy handed interaction with mods, and a series of unnecessarily hostile interactions a bunch of months back. I still post pics, albeit not as many as I used to, but what’s a bigger loss to me is I’ve largely disengaged from discussion here. Hell, I’ll probably regret this discussion. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Hopefully they appreciate the apology though Mr. N. Jalad. 🖖
 
Moderator brutality? Nah I'm not seeing mods taking an overly offensive action here. Discussions can get derailed and then it is soon indeed like herding cats. Hiding behind the Mod account is less defensible, however since our mods are also participating a lot in the conversations it may be justified in this case.

Having said that, we as our own community, mods and peeps and all, should keep on honing on making this forum a more conversation-friendly place. My take? Take the convo around photographs and not these threads of technical matter...
 
One member's feedback to the recent moderation in the GAS thread.

Dear Mod Team,
First off, I'm sorry for my OT post in the above thread and for the labor it took to move it. It was never my intent to cause harm to this site or place an undue burden on the volunteer staff, yet here I am, and I apologize.

Second, it's not what you say, but how you say it.

Right or wrong, for as long as I've been participating here, the thread in question has drifted out of the realm of photography-centric gear purchases, with an occasional rabbit-trail to utter nonsense. We have a few good laughs, and the thread always re-centers. What is hard to understand is, if this is/was wrong, it's been going on for longer than the last few days, unchecked, with no visible member complaints or OT warnings. Indeed, going OT is not how we should behave, and I fully recognize that how the site is managed is in the purview of the site owner and mods. No argument there. However, the "Mod Team" response, without any prior warnings, takes on a tone I've never witnessed here before from anyone, with terms like "scumhole" and "herding cats," with threats of suspensions and terminations. While those words weren't aimed at any one person, it sure could be implied that those "off-topic members" were getting lambasted by the "Mod Team." Best I can see, the "perpetrators" here are/were members in good standing (some even supporting financially), and I don't believe any of them were setting out to intentionally harm this site, her members, or be a disruption. It all just feels really out of line, or at least unprofessional. If we had taken tone like this with another member of this site, well, we would probably get moderated. Mercy seasons justice.

Perhaps this post risks further action or threatens the status of my account, but I thought it only fair to point out how grossly out-of-character the tone of this moderation action took. I view the collective members here as a tighter-knit, fun-loving community, but I also admit that we do and did get out of line. I get there was much labor on your part to square things up, and I don't want to diminish that frustration and effort. But to take such an ominous initial tone with such a good-natured group of participants, many of whom have actually tried to draw additional traffic here? It just sits wrong with me.

Why post this? Not because of hurt feelings, but as constructive criticism. I feel your active user base does a lot to make this place great, and I'll take the bullet and speak up for those that I feel have been mistreated.

Humbly,
Darmok
Thanks for your feedback. It's not in keeping with our usual procedures to shoot down someone who speak their mind as long as they stay fair, which you have certainly done.

However, let's examine things a bit further.

The wording may have been strong, but please check your quotes: It was made clear that this forum was not a "scumhole" - on the contrary. And since some people seemed to feel they could do whatever they wanted without thinking, strong verbage was considered necessary to catch their attention - call it shouting above the din. Besides, "herding the cats" was a term another member used to describe our task just a few days ago (and we had a good laugh about it then, ironically). We just took it up to state that while it may appear funny, it's not funny if it feels as if we had to do exactly that.

Anyhow, there were people involved who have had their share of prior run-ins with the moderators before. They have had plenty of warnings but once again decided to disregard them. To make things as public and general as possible was a decision taken to prevent further members from joining in. If you've been caught up in it for the first time: That's not a bad sign.

Importantly, since you state that you've never before witnessed this kind of tone: Why do you think that is? Yes, we usually cut in if things get out of hand. For the reason you stated, we once again tried to let things run their course. But this time, people just went off topic as if it didn't matter and kept going. In similar cases before, the thread in question would have been locked and probably, in due course, removed. This was not an option with this thread. The tone was chosen to catch everone's attention - which it obviously did. In this case, we felt that our usual low-key approach was not going to work: Some people simply don't get polite hints (or cry out if contacted personally).

Again, noone has been warned (which is an official moderator function), noone has been banned. It was necessary to make people see and feel what they were doing, though. The way everyone was carrying on was really not inspiring hope anyone would stop.

Finally, "drawing additional traffic" hasn't exactly turned out to be a merit in several cases. It has caused all sorts of disruptions if the forum was misrepresented when doing so (as a "pushover" at one memorable time - or "a place you can say and do whatever you want", only recently!). It was the moderators who had to sort out things afterwards, admonishing new members and sometimes removing them again. Such incidents are unpleasant to the extreme and take a lot of time to cope with, including mending things in order to keep the forum running as it was.

So, are you still thinking it was too harsh? Maybe, quite on the contrary, it was necessary to make our irritation felt for once.

We sincerely hope we can refrain from resorting to this kind of tone, but that precludes that people respect the rules and topics without us "shouting". We'll not comment on individual cases here, but maybe some of you could examine their own actions before feeling hard done by.

Lastly, since we see the point to some extend, the original post's tone will be taken down a notch where it's possible without losing content. The "scumhole" remark will vanish. But most things will stay, if slightly modified.
 
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