Introducing the Current Affairs/IMHO forum

Nosnon wrote: »

Hey Emmet. I'm stuck at home for the day. Could you please report any threads you think should be moved and I'll have a look.

I've just had a look at the first 4 pages and besides 3 covid threads I moved to the new forum I can see no others.

Hi N, apologies for not replying sooner, day got away from me. Not one of those posters who’s always hitting “refresh” to see if someone has posted.

My “grievance” stems more from a couple of weeks ago, the “Covid” forum has proven a excellent distraction. Back then there were a number of threads that were really more suited to the “Current Affairs” forum. One just descended into a “free for all” against trans people.

When that carry on goes “unchecked” in AH the “perpetrators” tend to take root, like weeds. Then spread out into other, more normal, threads. Real creepers. You end up with seemingly “innocuous” posts about poor dog walker behaviour getting signed off with ‘they were probably man-hating feminists anyway’.

Can I ask you where the “report thread” button is? I’ve asked about it before as I don’t feel right reporting a post when I feel like the thread, itself, belongs in CA. I, usually, put in a post suggesting the thread be moved, which is, inevitably attacked with the usual “guff” of ‘just because you don’t agree doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be moved’. Usually from the type of poster that writes “loose” when they mean “lose”.

To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t have much faith in the whole reporting “system”. I’ve only reported one post and that was when I was new to the “game”. It was over me being accused of being another user. Obviously, this got no reply and, as such, it’s become “open season” to throw that, particular, accusation about.

I find it easier to just ignore it now, along with the “cohort” who seem to follow me around like a bad smell. I actually think it would “go against” me if I were to start reporting as a couple of them appear to be quite close to the mods as it is.

But this isn’t about me, if there’s a “report thread” button do let me know. I’m mostly on my phone so using the “Touch” site, I haven’t been able to find one on the “Full Site” either though.

Thanks for taking the time.

Nosnon wrote: »

The report button is the little triangle in the lower left corner of a post. The problem with you posting in a thread is we the mods cannot and do not read every post of every thread so never see your post.



for the touch site its the flag is on the lower left


There is no report thread button but what most people do is report the opening post of the thread and just add a note like 'Think this might be better elsewhere'

Thanks for that. Duly noted.

This is it wrote: »

Not sure why you've an issue with the report function itself. One report wasn't actioned so you've no faith? It's vital to mods that posters report posts, the place would fall apart without it.

Ah, it got a bit “disheartening” to see it go unchecked for so long but I just grew a thicker skin and got on with it.

Some people seem to just get a bit “obsessed” on here and, I guess, they don’t have very much else going on in their lives.

The Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd threads have been a bit of an eye opener over the last couple of weeks.

There has been-
-Victim blaming of Floyd who had a knee compressed on his neck for 9 minutes
-Victim blaming of Arbery who was chased up and down a street for 4 minutes by gun toting men in SUVs before being murdered
-Heavy levels of whataboutery/off topic posting
- The spread of disinformation on Boards which has originated from far right and white supremacist websites
-Bad faith arguments being used as political point scoring alongside subtle racism

Im not having a go at the mods but moreso just pointing out that it is going on. Im all for broad ranging view points on topics but when you see disinformation coming from white supremacist websites being written on Boards as fact its perhaps time to reflect.

I dont envy the mods either, we are just months away from what will prove to be the most divisive election in American history and if anything it ts going to get worse. There always seems to be a link back to Trump.

Muahahaha wrote: »

The Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd threads have been a bit of an eye opener over the last couple of weeks.

There has been-
-Victim blaming of Floyd who had a knee compressed on his neck for 9 minutes
-Victim blaming of Arbery who was chased up and down a street for 4 minutes by gun toting men in SUVs before being murdered
-Heavy levels of whataboutery/off topic posting
- The spread of disinformation on Boards which has originated from far right and white supremacist websites
-Bad faith arguments being used as political point scoring alongside subtle racism

Im not having a go at the mods but moreso just pointing out that it is going on. Im all for broad ranging view points on topics but when you see disinformation coming from white supremacist websites being written on Boards as fact its perhaps time to reflect.

I dont envy the mods either, we are just months away from what will prove to be the most divisive election in American history and if anything it ts going to get worse. There always seems to be a link back to Trump.

I have to agree with you. It's as if the supposed Russian Bots have been replaced by Trump ones. As the person who suggest the CA forum, I rarely visit the horrible place that it's become.

Gatling wrote: »

I was heavily involved in the ahmaud arbery thread , apologies any offence was caused ,

I was surprised it was allowed to develop the way it did especially considering the op was given a specific warning about his op and several after but it just seemed to encourage them to go all out to blame the victim to the point of diagnosing mental health issues around anger and authority figures ,based off a single past offence,
While is was acknowledged by the majority ahmaud arbery had a previous criminal record the one poster kept insisting he found more information from multiple sources which they refused to link ,one in particular was infact a White supremist site .

If mod action was quicker and to the point the thread would have died a natural death until the trial of the McMichaels later in the year

A lot of noise was made in that thread by dog whistling about whether his death was motivated by race.

Turns out it was. Today we learned FBI found fibers from Arbery's shirt, and handprints, on William "Roddy" Bryan's truck. Roddy admitted to investigators that Travis McMichael called Arbery a "****ing N*" after the killing, before police arrived on scene and after filming stopped. Bryan previously had claimed publicly he was not involved with the killing and only filmed it, and never mentioned Arbery coming into contact with the truck. This proves both he was an active part of the chase, and it was a hate crime where the shooter, Travis McMichael is concerned at least; FBI also confirmed he used the expletive frequently over the phone and online.

https://www.mediaite.com/news/roddie-bryan-who-filmed-ahmaud-arbery-killing-accused-of-hitting-arbery-with-his-truck-before-the-alleged-murder/

This development defeats a lot of the chaff that closed that thread, IMO.

2ndcoming wrote: »

The current "Everyday Racism" thread is an abhorrent cesspool of a thread, which reads more like 4Chan than anything I would expect to see on Boards.

As a user since 2003 I'm disappointed that this kind of ethno-nationalist circlejerk is allowed to continue with little input from any opposing views. I'd say most dissenting voices either already have most of the participants blocked or, like me, don't think it's worth the inevitable card but at some point it's not serving any purpose but dragging the site down the sewer.

It gave me the impression it was irish centric so I haven't bothered to read it much. Are you reporting cesspool posts?

Nice to see some instant action on the Floyd thread, fair play, Beasty.

Beasty wrote: »

On the question of bans being applied across both AH and CA this is something that does not happen anywhere on the site. It applies to sub-forums, but AH and CA sit alongside each other in the hierarchy. It would also appear that since the inception of CA the problems have tended to migrate over there

We do now have a bit of a track record of posters in CA, and I am conscious that a number of posters are getting close to permanent bans from the forum. Equally one poster posting some particularly nasty stuff today received a 1 month siteban, with the threat the next one will be permanent.

Might I suggest giving repeated “thread” bans as opposed to forum bans? I, personally, feel that forum bans are “counter productive” for the wider site, in general.

The forum really does an excellent job of keeping the malcontents, dribblers and the types who spell lose as loose distracted in their own little “sty”.

Forum bans will leave them “wandering” the site leaving filthy trotter marks all over the shop and causing a, general, stink.

At this point, I would like to re-affirm my opion that the “Current Affairs” forum has been a resounding success and that the moderators are doing an excellent job with it.

EmmetSpiceland wrote: »

Might I suggest giving repeated “thread” bans as opposed to forum bans? I, personally, feel that forum bans are “counter productive” for the wider site, in general.

The forum really does an excellent job of keeping the malcontents, dribblers and the types who spell lose as loose distracted in their own little “sty”.

Forum bans will leave them “wandering” the site leaving filthy trotter marks all over the shop and causing a, general, stink.

At this point, I would like to re-affirm my opion that the “Current Affairs” forum has been a resounding success and that the moderators are doing an excellent job with it.

gave me a smile anyway, good man

Myself and Beasty do the majority of the modding in the CA/IMHO and COVID-19 forum these days. Given the time difference between our two locations, we can give almost 24 hour coverage, but even with that, it's an unrelenting task. To give an idea of the workload, I logged in at 6:30am yesterday my time to three full pages of reported posts from the CA/IMHO and COVID-19 forums. That's three pages - 60 odd reported posts. In the space of a few hours where myself and Beasty or one of the other mods didn't overlap like we usually do. And given the current affairs of the world this past week or so, some of the threads have been particularly fast moving. That's not an overly unusual 6:30am for me if a mod hasn't been about the evening before, and I doubt it's an unusual evening back home for Beasty either when I'm offline.

There are a couple of factors I'd like to bring to the discussion though. A lot of the arguments put forward in feedback tend to be along the lines of "if the mods were more on point..." or "with better modding..." or "why aren't mods stamping down on <insert issue here>". I'm not saying there isn't merit to that side of the discussion, and for the most part, the responses have been courteous while pointing out genuine concerns. But IMO, there needs to be equal measure given to poster accountability too.

The George Floyd dies, Ahmaud Arbery, and Everyday Racism threads are particularly challenging to moderate because in order to allow for both sides of the discussion, one must first ask if a question was asked, or a point of view was put forward in bad faith. Using "nïgger" as an epithet is always hate speech. It doesn't matter if the person saying it thinks they are a racist or not, or if they think they are denigrating a whole class of people in order to insult one, they are being racist and using hate speech. But there is a lot of language in between that (In my opinion at least) requires time to break down the poster's true intent. Wanting a discussion that explores more than a binary conversation of "White cop = bad/racist, Black man = oppressed" doesn't necessarily make the poster a racist. How they go about exploring that point is the key. There is a nuanced distinction between views that are only stupid and/or ignorant, versus views that are both stupid/ignorant and offensive, which can take more than a singular post to get a measure of.

As a moderator, I find myself more and more having to draw these lines for people, and I'm not convinced that this should be a moderator's role. The purpose of the mod team isn't to play 'mammy' and replace the average poster's common sense, yet more and more I see "discussion" becoming about "winning an argument" than any genuine interest in taking onboard different points of view.

A summary of the types of reported posts we receive:

• Faux Outrage - "why was I warned to stop the bitching/whataboutery and this poster wasn't?" Not carded, or banned mind you, but asked to quit what they were doing.
  
• Death by a Thousand Reported Posts - Poster gets carded. Poster proceeds to trawl through every possible thread to report every perceived slight, as some sort of "I'll show you" to the mod team.
  
• I'll bait you, now I'll drop you in it - Poster #1 baits Poster #2 into a response. Poster #1 then reports Poster #2 to get the mods to do their dirty work for them. For bonus points, Poster #1 reports the post a second or third time, outraged that Poster #2 wasn't publicly eviscerated.
  
• Why is this thread still here - Poster#1 reports thread as being irrelevant. Poster#1 then immediately posts in thread, argues with the OP, and keeps the thread at the top of the front page until the rivers start turning to blood. This one I genuinely don't get. Given the pace of the CA forum these days, shïtposts would die off the front page in minutes, if posters weren't so hell bent in keeping them alive.

I do appreciate that there are very valid concerns being aired here, and equally, very valid reported posts coming in that we do try to address. But no matter what the mod action, there will always be a very vocal section of the community running straight to feedback with a complaint.

• Merge two threads - "OPPRESSION!!" "TRYING TO HIDE THE ISSUE AWAY!"
  
• Delete posts or thread - "OPPRESSION!!" "TRYING TO HIDE THE ISSUE AWAY!!" "****ING BIASED MODS!"
  
• Let a thread run in the hope that people respond sanely - "ALLOWING THE FAR LEFT/RIGHT TO TAKE GROUND! ALLOWING RACISM/XENOPHOBIA/TRANSPHOBIA TO FLOURISH!

^^Genuine feedback, in the last 24 hours alone.

I'm not sure there is a clear cut answer because different posters want different things from the forum. A certain tier of posters want it policed like the Politics forum, in which case, why not post in the politics forum. Others want a free for all, which will result in another Thunderdome. Anything in between results in moderators being accused of having full scope for bias and capriciousness with zero accountability.

One thing I've started doing in threads that you know are only going to go in one direction unless nipped in the bud from the outset is to have a zero tolerance policy - any breaches of the rules gets a card, accompanied by an instant, permanent threadban. OR week long forum ban, depending on the nature of the breach. So far it seems to be having an effect and it's something I plan to do a lot more of in future. Threadbans have been questioned earlier, but from the abusive PMs myself, Beasty, and no doubt the other mods have been receiving, threadbans seem to have more impact on posters than a yellow or red card. Maybe it's the psychology of being able to still read the thread, with no technical obstructions to posting in the thread other than a line of bold text from a mod - I don't know. But they seem to shake people up more than a card in my experience.

I also think ANY post where a person merely links to a video or article or blog without his/her own summary and thoughts ought to be modded. I'm not going to watch a random 30-minute video or try to negotiate the NYT firewall on the off chance I might understand your point. I'm against adding specifics to the charter as from the outset, our goal was to keep the charter simple, and depend on people using their common sense as to what 'being a dick' entailed, but this one I'm seriously considering making an exception for.

Joeytheparrot wrote: »

Agreed. Its now even gone down the route of threatening violence against children who express anti racist views.

Joey, can you please point me towards the specific post that threatens violence against children?