On Mar 31, 2008, at 1:10 AM, Stephen Bain wrote:
On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com
wrote:
OK, it's March 31 as I post this message.
Wonder when you will see
it.
April 3rd, if at all?
It's still March 31st! (As David said, you are now off moderation.)
Never attribute to conspiracy what you can attribute to mods being
lazy and not promptly checking the moderation list :)
To be fair, the moderation interface is a piece of shit that is all
but designed to make moderation as difficult as humanly possible to do
effectively. We've already had to all but rebuff perfectly reasonable
requests to use moderation to decrease incivility on the list due to
the fact that the moderation system basically can't handle the task.
(Detailed griping follows)
If nobody has checked the moderation system in a few hours there are
multiple screens worth of posts to scroll through. All but 1 or 2 will
be spam. So the main task of moderation is always reading through that
list and finding those 1 or 2. They're usually relatively easy to
identify, since most are replies to existing threads and so you can
find them via the [WikiEN-l] tag in the subject line. But you do have
to watch for people starting new threads on moderated or unsubscribed
accounts. And if you screw up, the default outcome is that the message
gets deleted from the queue with no notice to the sender, meaning
messages get permanently blackholed. I have no idea what our error
rate is, because *there is no way to track that*.
More to the point, the task of moderation is, 95% of the time,
pointless. So the incentive to go do it is minimal and amounts to "how
amusing is today's penis spam." (The answer is often "hilariously,"
for what it's worth - SPERMAMAX, in particular, is a work of art -
masterful pieces of Engrish sexually explicit discussion of massive
penises. "You will be able to scratch your forehead with your penis.")
Within that list there is not even a visual distinction between
moderated subscribers and non-subscribers. Each message has a little
ticky box that, for moderated members, allows us to unmoderate, and
for non-subscribers, allows us to ban subscription. That's it - you
tell which is which by looking at the ticky box. And you don't want to
go willy-nilly clicking it, because it means virtually opposite things
in each circumstance - unsubscribed members it amounts to "Go away
forever," moderated members it amounts to "You're all right."
Furthermore, there is no information tracking whatsoever for moderated
members. From the perspective of a moderator a new subscriber who is
moderated is no different from a troll who is moderated. There's no
notes feature to say "This person is moderated for a reason," and
nothing that says "You've let four messages from this person through
and refused none." So in addition to the moderate flag being
exceedingly easy to miss, there's also no practical way to implement
it or know that it should be cleared for a given person. In theory
mods e-mail each other whenever we put someone on moderation, but it's
not like we go crawling through our e-mail to see if a person is
supposed to be moderated.
So that's why this gets screwed up on a more or less monthly basis.
-Phil