I need some moderators.

[Craig]

Hey there.

As the forum has grown, my time to put into moderation of the forums has decreased.

I'm looking for a few good people who would be willing to donate their time and even keeled disposition to help out with moderation duties on fencing.net.

In the recent past, a number of topics have started out okay and then been derailed through various events. I'm hoping that by having a few more people to help moderate, we can keep topics on point and make the discussions a little more user friendly. (Who knows, maybe it will even encourage a few of the lurkers out there to register and/or post.)

Anyway - I'm looking for people to help moderate the Fencing Discussions as well as the Armory sections. Since the majority of postings are on Fencing Discussions, that's where the largest need it.

If you're interested, PM me.

Thanks,
Craig

[JEC]

After being a fencing forum moderator for a year (for the #6 world fencing site - http://www.esgrimamex.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi ), let me pass on some experience for potential moderators:
- it is a thankless job (other than great cheers from Craig)
- you take a lot of hits for closing / changing threads or when expressing your own opinion.
- it requires daily login and for this specific webforum maybe 2-3 times per day.

One aspect that I like about this site is that precisely the absence of moderators has created a culture among frequent webusers who, in some regard, "police" the site to avoid trolls or prevent the hickjacking of threads. This culture molds new users, who then become contributors. Clearly the reason why it works here is because the type of people that are attracted to fencing are not the usual trolls. Craig, if you are convinced that moderators are needed, keep "moderation" at the minimum needed. The group of frequent contributors is large enough that it does not need a large role for moderators.

[picojeff]

I think there is a place for rambling off topic posts.

I wish that place was not where I look for information and well thought out opinions.

An example of a wonderful way to keep the two together and separate simultaneously is SlashDot. Two things slashdot does, that fencing.net does not do, to make it more readable and useful:

1) Every post gets a rating, and you can set a threshold for how low quality a post you are willing to read. The ratings are done by moderators, but with the smaller community of fencing.net we could allow everyone to rate each post. (I'm only a passing slashdot reader and haven't ever been called to moderate, so I don't know if they average many ratings for each post, or rely on a rating from a single moderator, but I assume the former.)

2) Threads are trees with branches instead of one serial stream of replies under a single subject. You can follow the branches that amuse or intrigue you and ignore those that don't. Here, you have to read all the interleaved off-topic comments and their replies to get to the replies that are on-topic. Some kind of thread splitting would help immensely.

Being a programmer myself, I know it's not so simple to put in place, but I thought I would throw it out there as an ideal.

[oiuyt]

Originally posted by picojeff
An example of a wonderful way to keep the two together and separate simultaneously is SlashDot. Two things slashdot does, that fencing.net does not do, to make it more readable and useful:

1) Every post gets a rating, and you can set a threshold for how low quality a post you are willing to read. The ratings are done by moderators, but with the smaller community of fencing.net we could allow everyone to rate each post. (I'm only a passing slashdot reader and haven't ever been called to moderate, so I don't know if they average many ratings for each post, or rely on a rating from a single moderator, but I assume the former.)

I'm a daily /. reader and have been a moderator there. Moderators get 5 points which they can use to bump a particular post up or down 1 level (with a comment such as describing the post as "informative", "troll", "insightful", "flame-bait", etc.). Scores max out at 5, which would require 5 different moderators marking the post as valuable in some way. Moderators cannot both post and moderate a given topic to help prevent people using moderation points to "assist" their arguments (or downgrade counterarguments). Most posts don't get moderated at all, most posts that get moderated draw multiple points.

2) Threads are trees with branches instead of one serial stream of replies under a single subject. You can follow the branches that amuse or intrigue you and ignore those that don't. Here, you have to read all the interleaved off-topic comments and their replies to get to the replies that are on-topic. Some kind of thread splitting would help immensely.

Being a programmer myself, I know it's not so simple to put in place, but I thought I would throw it out there as an ideal.

Given that slashcode is open source.... fencing.net COULD fairly easily switch over. Not that I'd recommend it, I like what we have here.

I like /., but one of the things that make it work is the HUGE number of readers/posters. I'm not convinced that it scales down so well. Besides, can you imagine the karma-whoring that would take place here? :)

-B :)

[oiuyt]

Common term from /. slang.

On /. every user has karma which, basically, is an evaluation of their net moderation (or rather of the moderation done by others of the person-in-question's posts). Karma whoring is making posts that are very likely to get moderated up with the intention of improving one's karma (as opposed to making a point, furthering the discussion, etc.). Examples would be jokes (especially at the expense of Microsoft, or that are continuations of certain long-running (think corporal punishment of deceased equines) traditional types), an early post mirroring whatever stroy the thread is about (/. gets enough users that webservers hosting stories that get mentioned on /. have a distinct tendancy to crash due to insanely high usage loads soon thereafter, making the original story considerably harder to read).

-B :)

[Craig]

If interested, please PM me.

Other posts have been cleaned off this thread. I've left some that explain others' experience w/moderating.

Craig