First of all, thanks to Crumhorn, Ed, Ken (and other I missed out if any) who have faith on me and who have suggested my name for moderator. I hadn't really given serious thought before. But like Sam had earlier said, I'll do it if there aren't really interested/suitable candidates, I mean, for the absolutely last and fourth mod. I would seriously like Sam to re-consider his decision.

I'll suggest these people.
Sam IV, SCK, Proloy, Ed, LittleFish, ChessFan (not in any particular order.) I'd like anyone interested who can make unbiased decision consistent within the rules stated, for the job. Not someone who can subject himself/herself to behind the scene lobbying pressure.

RB,

Thanks for the email and thanks for thinking of me, but I haven't really been reading these forums with any frequency the last couple months (and when I have been it's only been off topic stuff for a long time). So I think I'm kind of a bad choice.

Oh well. It was worth a shot. I don't think a mods needs to be extremely active. The forum itself - especially the chess part- wasn't very active the last couple of months, but these winter months are usually the off-season in chess, as well as forum activity, too. But I think it might pick up soon with Wijk, etc, and that will mean more activity even in the non-chess threads. Also, I definitely think it is fine if one mods reads the Offtopic forum or only reads the chess-related forums.

I am going to respond to the comments in the Kramnik's Interview thread here.


I disagree. I don't think CF has been given carte blanche at all. Mig has been critical of his posting habits. Of course, Mig also made it clear he doesn't think CF should be banned - and that makes perfect sense, to me at least. In any case, I don't think the next mod regime will not be able to do anything about CF after what Mig has said. There is apparently this new feature in the new forum software that allows to set a limit on how often a user may post, and Mig has even recommend using this feature on CF under certain circumstances. That is not to say it should or will ever be used on CF, but as the chess saying goes - the threat is stronger than the execution. But it appears the next mod regime will have this tool, and this functionality may be extremely useful in dealing with those who go for quantity rather than quality - and if we consider recent history, that describes Petrosianic's posting habits much better than those of CF.

Also, I don't think it is fair for you to mention Mig's "utter obliviousness to the day to day workings of this forum". Surely, he disagrees with your take on it, but it doesn't meant he doesn't know what is going on. I don't think one needs to be here daily for years to tell whether CF's posts are ban-worthy or not. There are certain people who are here regularly and who feel Mig has made the right decision by banning Petrosianic for spamming. Mig may not come here often, but he got it right on this one , IMO. I don't think the fact Mig doesn't come here often somehow hurts his chances of being an astute judge of certain things. There are also positives to that - one being the fresh perspective that Mig brings to this. (now, I don't like to suck up to Mig, but what can I do if he voiced what my exact feeling on the issues were).

Again, I disagree. TGC wasn't undercut. TGC wanted to report Petrosianic to Mig anyway, it is just that he felt CF should be reported too. The nature of the issue was such that TGC couldn't arbitrate it anyway, because mods can't ban people, so going to Mig for arbitration was the only solution. In any case, it was helpful that Mig voiced his opinion, and now that the policy toward spam and the policy towards CF-like posts are clear, it is all the better. TGC wasn't undermined by the decision Mig made, IMO. TGC went with his own interpretation of the guidelines, and Mig merely made the distinction between the two cases TGC felt were equivalent. No big deal.


Nah. It's all good With the new feature I mentioned earlier, and with the Ignore feature, it should be a much easier job than before. Remember how we had to do it without this new ("throttle"?) feature, and without the Ignore button working properly? It is all a thing of the past now.

Looking at things from the outside, that doesn't seem true. G-Cube posted an example of his e-mail being swamped by complaint notifications. One of the reasons P**r**i***c(k) apparently got banned was for excessive complaints to Mig, which I assume were also relayed to mods.

So if I interpret "active" as including the reading of multitudinous complaints, and consequently all the posts and dialogue which may have spawned them, as well as responding to the complaints (whether or not posts actually wind up being deleted), it seems like an unattractively high level of activity is required. Further, the complaints and related dialogue tend to come from posters and threads that one might ordinarily wish to avoid, which causes additional psychic stress.

Petrosianic pressed the "Notify" button whenever CF contradicted one of GC's recently restated posting guidelines. He informed GC that he was going to do this. GC, believing -- and rightly so in my opinion -- that this was the proper function of the "Notify" button, said nothing to stop him. For this Petrosianic was banned. Let me repeat that. He was banned for spamming Mig and the mods with what Mig considered frivolous notifications, not for spamming the boards with thousands of phantom posts (which you seem to find the more serious problem). Petro made a nuisance of himself and Mig banned him.

Should Petrosianic have been banned for making a nuisance of himself? Maybe. But his worst abuse was in interpreting GC's guidelines strictly; more strictly than GC himself would have interpreted them, to be sure, but that is a matter of personal perspective. Petrosianic followed the rules as stated explicitly by CN's head moderator and was banned for it. This undercuts GC's credibility, and the credibility of the moderators in general. If following the rules of the board to the letter as explicitly stated by the head moderator results in being banned, it is obvious that the mods have no real power here, and that their presence is merely symbolic at best.

Mig further pointed to one of CF's posts in the "Religion" thread, arguing that it was perfectly reasonable to suggest that others were going to burn in hell if they didn't convert, and fast. Okay, maybe looking at this one post out of context it can be argued that this is a reasonable position. Certainly one post in one disagreement with SCK over Christian dogma doesn't make much of a case against CF. But when almost every serious discussion with CF (or without CF in many cases) on any topic results in the same puerile (for me, although for others hurtful, annoying, exasperating) conclusion, it becomes a little more serious. People, good people, interesting people, have left CN because of CF. It's not enough to suggest, as you have, that they would have left regardless, or that they are thin-skinned. I can confirm the opposite. And GC has confirmed the opposite as well.

Can you think of even one person that has had a serious discussion with CF that didn't end up with CF: a. stating that the other person was going to hell if he didn't shape up fast; b. complaining that the other person was biased against him because of his faith; c. abandoning the discussion without a word when it became obvious that his position was untenable; or d. arguing that the conversation itself was useless because of the TRULY IMPORTANT THINGS in life? May I suggest, ever so gently, that you don't have a problem with CF partly because you have had the good wisdom -- or the lack of intestinal fortitude? -- not to engage him in conversation over the years?

Some have suggested, further, that this isn't really about CF, that this is about Petrosianic and Petrosianic alone. Wrong. Petrosianic may be a little CF obsessed, but his actions are the direct result of years of CF abusing his posting privileges with nary the faintest sniff of Mig's intervention. Moderators have bent over backwards for CF, and he's thumbed his nose at them time and again. GC is merely the latest to confirm this. Moderators have sent countless PMs and e-mails to Mig regarding "the CF problem," almost always without reply. Is it a coincidence that Mig has shown up now, only when he himself has been inconvenienced by an influx of Petrosianic inspired notifications? Obviously not.

This isn't the end of the world. This is merely a blip in CN history. And Mig, obviously, is perfectly entitled to do anything he wants, to ban whomever he wants for whatever reason. A month from now, who will care? No one, likely. But I must stand by my belief that Mig has made the wrong decision here, and has sent entirely the wrong message to the CN community.

I think the two things are actually the same thing. Petrosianic used the "Notify" button to complain about a large number of CF's posts. Apparently, the button triggers an email to all the mods (or maybe it sends a PM to all the mods, which then trigger the emails). So, TGC (who, I think perhaps tends to take the hardline on CF) posted the screenshot of the emails as an example of how many complaints there are about CF, while Mig used it as one of the reasons to ban Petrosianic for spamming. In any case, I doubt those complaints/emails are representative of how much mods have to deal with. This is just Petro trying to make some sort of point and failing.


Just to give you an idea of what the load might be: I was a mod for about 8 months and we have mostly used emails to communicate with the other mods. For those 8 months I have about 150 moderation-related emails in my email account, of which about a quarter are my own. Many emails were longish (think an average Crumhorn post-long, not an average CF post-long), but some are brief such as ("ok i agree let's do that"). Also, I had about 40 incoming PMs that were moderation-related (unless I deleted the corresponding email notifications, which I doubt I did). Maybe 40% of the PMs were complaints or follow-ups to complaints, while the rest were back-and-forth between the mods. Only a handful of emails were complaints. Anyways, I was a mod at the time the forum was rather trouble-free. Also, there was no "Notify" functionality - though I doubt it makes that big a difference.

I guess it depends on how mods choose to split the work. They can be rather random and deal with things on their own as they encounter them. Crumhorn, Ken, well-named and I did consult with each other on many, probably most of the decisions (except for the obvious ones that could be done on the spot) - hence the amount of emails.

GK: Wise choice. If you dislike discussions about religion and politics and how member A thinks member B should be censured for off-topic comments and how member B thinks member A is a whiny punk, then moderating is just not for you. If I were you I would avoid the moderating gig like the plague. At any rate, if one were interested in general in moderating, this would be the worst possible time to head into the fray. In all seriousness, I don't envy the new crop of mods in the slightest...

Apparently I misunderstood. Well, he was still kind of being a moran but not as much as I thought, although I think the stupid post wars thing was worth a bannination too. Anyway, my bad, sorry for making a bad assumption.

I'll show you sorry, buster.



So...you're not playing chess at all? Not even of the functionally obsolete correspondence variety?

I finished a correspondence game a week or so ago, but it was the first one I've played in about 6 months? I'm accepting challenges though...