A couple of weeks later, it had begun to worm its way into my subconscious, I think. I decided it might be fun to actually write something along those lines, and so I started putting together a Group where I could keep the various parts of the book while I wrote it. After all, I already have two that are mostly collections of my own work and another that is a diary collection, but still is run by and for me, and nobody else.
Blue-Footed Booby Bird — I wasn’t kidding, really. A tip of the hat and a thank you! to strawbale, who has a left a wondrous legacy in the Image Library.
That lasted until I was trying to decide what the name of the group should be. I swear on the feet of a Blue-footed Booby that up until I hit Enter, I thought the name of the Group was going to be The Idiot’s Guide To Being a Net Nanny On Daily Kos.
But, it’s not. It’s A Guide To Community Moderation. Because there ought to be a place where people who are trying their best to work with the experiment that kos has begun here can come and kvetch, or post their work, or send somebody for advice.
I have no grand plans for the Group, except to see what people would like it to do and, from time to time, write up a piece of The Idiot’s Guide so they can take potshots at edit and proofread it. Seems like a reasonable plan to me.
And this diary is getting written today because mettle fatigue tells me she’s introducing it in the latest installment: NewDKGroups#21. At least, I think this is the one she meant...
What’s posted so far:
There are 42 diaries currently sitting in the stack — this one will be the 43rd — beginning with Hunter’s wonderful 2006 diary on The Tao of Troll Rating, and taking you on the journey to keep the level of mayhem down to a controllable level — through Meteor Blades’ time as the one and only Authority in place, to kos’ assumption of the title while the programmers constructed a Help Desk and the Rules of the Road (and yes, it includes the original version), to the more or less working setup we have today.
I know my own diaries best, so the ones on Moderation are here, too, plus a few others. I know there are other good ones that I’ve missed — additional links will definitely be accepted.
What Grand Plans await?
I dunno. I was expecting to take another few days before I said anything much, but a week or a month from now I might still have been muddling through all the possibilities if mettle fatigue hadn’t decided to tell me it was going to be written up.
If you’re interested, drop a comment, or send me a kosmail, and say what you’d like to see. I think there are possibly 200-300 people all told who do significant moderation at the present time, and I suspect those numbers are high.
In the meantime —
I’ll be following this up with a background diary — Running the Numbers — that will eventually, I think, become an addendum to The Idiot’s Guide. As many numbers as I could come up with to describe the last year in terms of users, comments, and diaries, and that people can use as the basis for answering accusations like “How can you call this a violation of ______, when you didn’t catch one that was just as bad last week?”
That one will be updated whenever I’ve got something else that makes sense to include, and should be on the list of links in most of what I’ll be trying to write.
Anyway, that’s my introduction for the day. Think about it. The Group is open. My Introduction to the Idiot’s Guide To Being a Net Nanny On Daily Kos will be along in a day or two or three.
Comments are open.
Addendum: Topics to either write up or find a previous diary on
- Copyright law and the Rules of the Road ref: www.baylor.edu/...
- The “right” way to use flags (oh, joy...)
- What are the current rules for TimeOuts (note recent changes in admin TOs and BOJOs)
- ‘Stuff That Can Get You In Trouble (Without Meaning To)’
- Retaliatory flagging should be obvious, but clearly isn’t to many until they get awarded NR status, appropriate/inappropriate Flagging is certainly worthy of an entry in itself.
- Things like ‘Fuck you’ vs. ‘Fuck off’, which has only ever been entered into the RotR as something of a palimpset in a single comment by elfling to state that it is “quite explicitly” prohibited (when in fact ‘explicit’ has an actual dictionary definition in direct contradiction to her use of the word) might also be an interesting topic of discussion ;-)
Comments are closed on this story.