Please keep all discussion, questions, and comments about moderation in the Tinkering forum

One of the main aims of permis.com is to create a useful, perennial resource about permaculture.

To this end, we ask that if you want to talk about moderation or the running of this site, please do so in the Tinkering Forum.  Any comments about moderation found outside the tinkering forum will most likely vanish without anyone (including the person it was directed to) seeing it.  

There's a very long list of complicated reasons for this.  Some of them are secret.  Most of them would take a few hours to explain.  The general conclusion is that it helps this site run smoothly if we keep all the moderation discussion in one place.

Posting here is also the most efficient way to get staff help or attention.  The senior staff monitor this forum closely and it's far more efficient than PMing random staff who may or may not be online on a given day.  

I think a big benefit to keeping moderation discussions in Tinkering, is so that when people go to read a thread about something, they read about that something, rather than pages of people talking about moderation.

We love creating and sharing knoweldge, both for those reading threads now, as well as those reading them in the future. If you search permies for how to build a deadhedge, you don't want to read 10 posts about someone not being nice--you want to learn about deadhedges. I know I came to permies because I kept finding valluable, FREE information here. If threads are full of discussion of moderation--or spam, or flame wars--that information is hard to find. Less people will come to permies...and with less people on permies, there's less knowledge.

This site is made awesome by everyone here sharing their knowledge and experience so they and others can learn. To make it that way, we need moderation discussions to happen in Tinkering, and not derailing lovely threads.

I was told to post to this forum with questions about my account details... are these messages posted publicly or only viewable by staff?  I don't want to post my account details & related questions publicly.

Kimi Brownkawa wrote:I was told to post to this forum with questions about my account details... are these messages posted publicly or only viewable by staff?  I don't want to post my account details & related questions publicly.

If you post to a public forum, then, yes, your posts are viewable by everybody.   This is usually a good thing so that others can read the answers to your questions.  After all, if you are asking a question, there is a good chance that somebody else has a similar question.  

Perhaps you can ask a general question without revealing the stuff that you wish to not reveal?

I also want to point out - if you have a question about moderation, it's better to ask in the tinkering forum where many staff can help you, rather than PMing one staff member.  

Some of the staff aren't online for days/weeks/months at a time.  Many of the times, the staff chosen had nothing to do with the event and it would take hours of their time to read through the history to find out what happened.  

If you PM a staff member and they ask you to post here, please don't pester them further.  They are simply saying "I'm busy now doing permaculture stuff, but there are lots of lovely staff happy to help you if you follow protocol."

Just a reminder, we have over 40 active staff and nearly 150 staff that pop in and out from time to time.  ALL of these people are volunteers.  They don't have to be here, they don't have to do anything they don't want to.  They donate their time because they care about the site and without them, permies would not be the place it is today.

Asking in the tinkering forum is the fastest way to get help as most of our staff have their own busy lives and things they need doing.  Asking in the forum means that many staff can help, not just one.

Asking via PM puts a lot of pressure on one person who may or may not have time to help.  

moderators naptime too

PMing one member of staff has many disadvantages.

that person may not be online that week/month

that person may not have a clue about what you are talking about

that person may not have access to the tools needed to help you

that person may not have the authority to do the thing

we don't have private messages - read the note at the top of the PM system.  The Be Nice rule applies in the PM (and the PMs have report buttons)

Starting a tinkering thread:

sends an email to all the senior staff (the people who can do things)

there is always a staff member online who can read the question

many people can help with the issue

maybe non-staff know how to help and can help faster

it creates a resource for future people to read who might have similar questions.

A reminder that moderation decisions are not made alone.

We work as a team and there are over 40 active VOLUNTEER staff members involved in keeping this place up and running.  

It is not cool to pick on one Volunteer and require they spend hours of their life explaining to your satisfaction the decisions made by a team.

This is a FREE site.  run by unpaid volunteers who do an amazing job to make this a welcoming place to talk about permaculture.  

https://permies.com/t/189707/robust-magnificent-support-social-media#1562329

Thanks for the work you guys do for the good of this place.

There is a thread that's currently invisible, that I think is probably the cause of this reminder. I mostly trust that if and when it reappears, smart and reasonably equitable things will have been done to it to maintain harmony and decrease your collective workload. But I have to admit that trust is a little harder to maintain by having witnessed an operation before it vanished that looked an awful lot like entirely correct posts that disagreed with a staff member were being disappeared. I can't pretend to know the hassle involved or what your tools are, but I think that making the thread vanish before the moderatorial surgery begins is probably a best-practice for maintaining the peace.

I'm still dealing with the fallout and haven't had a chance to look at the cause.

This is what happens when moderation discussions are all over the place.  It makes a tiny issue huge and a massive amount of time and mess to clean up.  It also makes me less inclined to be charitable when I read some of the stuff I've read today.  Picking on one person and calling them names and worse is not cool.  It's even less cool when most of this kind of thing is a result of careful discussion between several people and not taken lightly.  

Permies is a heavily moderated site.  

Some people are cool with that.  Most people aren't.  For them, the rest of the internet awaits.  

From my investigation so far, there's a lot more going on than what shows to the general permies.  

The behaviour I've seen has upset me so I need a cuppa tea before I can investigate further.    

at first glance, it looks like people wanted to talk about moderation outside the tinkering forum.

That usually results in the post vanishing without an explanation.