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I know that your comment is directed at cortex, jessamyn and mathowie, kalesssin, but let me take a stab at answering one part of your argument, that of whether pla and Crabby Appleton should be banned. We don't know whether Crabby Appleton is a thread-shitter or a wind-up-merchant or just a guy who's swallowed a few too many bitter pills in his time. Same goes for pla. He's articulated some views I think are morally reprehensible, but I don't think they're very well thought out and I do think... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Kattullus at 8:26 AM on April 23, 2010

why is he allowed to post?

Because we don't ban people just for being cranky. Is this a serious question?
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 5:32 AM on April 23, 2010

Flat-out gay bashing does get deleted, but a lot of the more insidious and sublty nasty bigotry doesn't currently fall under JUST NOT OK territory

I agree with you generally. The reason it's easy to say "I'd hit it" is no longer okay is because it's clearly identifiable and whether someone meant it as a joke or meant it as casual sexism sort of doesn't matter. Same for using racial epithets, we sort of don't care if you mean it as a joke.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:03 PM on April 22, 2010

including but not limited to Ethereal Bligh and jennydiski.

EB came out with a manifesto on Thanksgiving Day basically telling all the women on the site that they needed to engage in civil disobedience to get Matt to change the site's approach to dealing with sexist language and rhetoric. He sent it to all the women who had posted in the sexism thread except for me. He was at odds with the community idea of the site and couldn't sit comfortably with... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:21 PM on April 22, 2010

I would point out yet again that in this case, OC got spanked for personal attacks against me, not me for making a suggestion that other people's baggage twisted into the second holocaust.

Let's be super clear here: OC got a couple comments deleted because of an administrative issue orthogonal to your own behavior, and your own behavior in this sort of arguing-hard-and-tonedeaf thing is something you have done before, and that is a problem that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:52 AM on April 22, 2010

And as for OC, nice guy IRL or not, let's speak honestly here, he's taken to outright threadstalking me just to post links to my past transgressions.

pla, I'm right there with litleozy for what it's worth. There's an importance to being able to read the room here. We'll deal with it if someone is threadstalking you. It would be nice if you were a little more aware at how some of your more out-there comments might be perceived on this website.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 5:49 PM on April 21, 2010

I realize you take these things on a case by case basis, but it seems problematic that he has been allowed to now state his case and defend it twice, but if he tries to defend himself a third time, that somehow will be a bridge too far. This seems like an arbitrary line in the sand to me. Can you please explain?

It is kind of arbitrary, any reactive dealings with a developing problem tend to be, but the determining factor is at this point we've had a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:14 PM on April 21, 2010

if a user has a consistent history (good OR bad), other users should be allowed to reference it.

They can and they do. What we object to is the comment trawling where a user's history is dragged up where it's not relevant to the thread at hand just to remind everyone "hey user x is an asshole" and/or people using people's past histories as an excuse for their own behavior. This sort of thing is fine if it's relevant, in MeTa.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:47 PM on April 21, 2010

it's a place where we talk about people's behavior and whether or not it's against the rules of the site or, if not, whether there should perhaps be other rules that take this sort of thing into account.

Jessamyn and cortex since pla's comment is still up I'd like to ask a question about it:

Is it not hate speech?

As Allan GordonM and Optimus Chyme said in thread, pla is proposing the brutal suspension... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by zarq at 12:46 PM on April 21, 2010

Are the mods going to respond to how pla posts

What is the question that requires our response?

We're not going to let the thread become pla vs everyone. The way OC responded in-thread was not appropriate. pla is advancing an unpopular and I might say stupid opinion but it's not like he's the only person on the planet who feels that way. If his behavior on the site is such that he's antagonizing other users, having a totally... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:05 PM on April 21, 2010

We don't want the blue to be some kind of no-hold-barred thunderdome where it's okay to make an extra-big mess of a given thread because you don't like someone's opinions or posting history.

Regarding this, thank you (or Jessamyn) for deleting valkyryn's comment in this thread. Sincerely appreciated. I do realize that my response was inappropriately rude, but his comment bothered the hell out of me.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by zarq at 12:03 PM on April 21, 2010

Thank you, jessamyn. While I understand the existing issues with OC, I feel that myself or almost anyone could have run up against the same rules here in trying to deal with pla.

As to what the point of this MeTa thread would then be, I simply think it's important to have something on the record that shows how destructive, unnecessary, and unwelcome these sorts of contributions from pla can be. They should, and probably will, continue to be called up in MeTa.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by hermitosis at 11:59 AM on April 21, 2010

people have been responding to pla in-thread. He's also not welcome to continue whatever his "look at me" campaign is over on the Blue either. I don't know if he's just trying to rile people up or if he really believes those things, but the thread isn't going to turn into pla vs everyone.

That said, Optimus Chyme knows better. We've talked to him about doing this repeatedly, and it's not okay, nor are his follow-ups protesting his innocence in-thread. cortex... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:48 AM on April 21, 2010

"For which I sincerely thank you. But at this point, I don't need another explanation of why my words hurt some people; I need to narrow my audience to exclude those so fragile or already damaged that they allow a random internet comment to hurt them."

Cut this shit out, Pla. You're not some Socrates being condemned for your contrarian wisdom. Your idea that AIDS victims should be quarantined was moronic for about six different reasons that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by klangklangston at 10:54 AM on April 24, 2010

Are you kidding? pb gives all these powers. Mathowie's has something to do with bicycles.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:42 AM on April 23, 2010

Not only does it only work on the internet, I don't even control it. It just retroactively zaps me to where the danger lives. It's damned disconcerting. cortex got the Venn diagram implant, and I got this.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:53 AM on April 23, 2010

Venn diagram.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:09 AM on April 23, 2010

I thought the "self linking" rule only applied to FPs

There's self-linking and there's spamming, and formally speaking they're two different circles in a Venn diagram. You can self-link in good faith in comments, doing that now and again is generally not a problem (always good to clearly disclose what you're doing, though).

Self-linking in a post to the front page is a no-no and will get you banned.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:57 AM on April 23, 2010

in-thread callouts get deleted without a word?

What? Callouts belong here, not in-thread. I'm not sure why this is confusing.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:50 PM on April 21, 2010

Your entire comment was this:

And Mr. Pileon again chimes in with his gracious and broad-minded commentary on political issues.

Typical.

That's not useful. If you have a problem with what he said, address it substantially, but don't drop random drive-by turds in a thread like that. Deleting such stuff "without a word" is not unusual.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 12:46 PM on April 21, 2010

That the moderation at metafilter seems to inspire frothing Metatalk posts from both sides of the ideological divide along with accusations of preference for one side or the other (viz. this thread and the one a few posts down) makes me realize that jessamyn, cortex et al. are doing a superb job at maintaining a very difficult balance while eliminating unnecessary drive-by douchebaggery from all ideological perspectives.

My hat's off to you guys-- I... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by Nothing... and like it at 12:59 PM on April 21, 2010

infini, you haven't been making a lot of sense at several points over the last month or so. I appreciate that this is some sort of "appreciate the mods" gesture, but I hope you can also appreciate that an open lulz/nonsense thread in MeTa may not be the best way to go about that.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:34 AM on April 19, 2010

Unconditional apology, and immediate self-sanction. I'm taking a short break from posting.

Thanks. Please consider this a polite "we'd like to see this sort of thing not happen again" note from us as well.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 4:47 PM on April 14, 2010

sixcolors is one of the few people who have been on this site in the past who are not actually welcome back. There are very very few people on that list.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:41 PM on April 13, 2010

No, we're not ending the policy. And people can't shed their usernames at will. If people leave of their own accord, they can come back more or less when they want. If people get banned for something specific, we'll often let them back under a new username if they lay off the specific stuff. I'm sorry you didn't know St Alia was here previously, but it's pretty much an open secret around these parts.

The problem we have, of course, is that enough people know so it's hard... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:27 PM on April 13, 2010

Eh. Which I think is kind of silly, but you have to wait a week on AskMe so "number of days" for the truly forgetful might be a more useful benchmark than "number of hours" for the blue, setting aside the utility issue of askme vs. the posting-something-cool nature of the blue. But, yeah, I think it's a little silly in any case, personally.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:20 AM on April 12, 2010

Our feeling is that no one needs needs needs to make a post on the dot; for the folks who are enthusiastic enough about posting promptly that they need to know when, it's not hard to click through to their own profile and do a little bit of arithmetic.

"Nope, not yet" is sufficient for what that page is supposed to do, which is to say "you need to wait some yet".

That's not to say it like bad to be curious... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 8:14 AM on April 12, 2010

Have mods ever considered an automated email for people whose comments are deleted? Granted, it might risk stirring up arguments with presumably more-troublesome-than-average MeFites, but on the other hand there's a learning opportunity missed when someone's comment is deleted without them knowing.

We're really reticent about pushing out extra email/mefimail at people, is one thing. Another thing is, as you say, the risk of stirring up arguments that... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 7:57 AM on April 11, 2010

We pretty much never edit except for the short list of reasons on the FAQ page. There have been one or two occasions I've seen where I did an edit that I thought could save an AskMe question [someone put in an inadvertent slur or something similar] and wrote the OP and said "look, I did a quick fix to this, if you want me to revert it to how it was I can, but your question might get flagged out of existence"

Other than that, there are more jokes about comments... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 2:51 PM on April 10, 2010

Not generally, no, though if it's an unusual or potentially confusing situation we may.

Note that we rarely edit things, generally tending to delete, and what edits we do make are generally typographic in nature, e.g. to fix a botched link or close a runaway tag, or sometimes fix a glaring and distracting spelling error in a post, or on occasion throwing more of a post below the fold if it's too large on the front page.

Editing for content... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 2:46 PM on April 10, 2010

Kinda like most Apple fans.

Kinda like the Apple fans who do this, more to the point, which is a small subset of all Apple fans. I can think of maybe 2-3 people on this site who do this regularly which seems par for the course for any well-liked thing.

As mods we try to model decent "how to reply to criticism" behavior. I don't think it's so much that people are defensive as just plain old irritable, and that comes... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 10:05 AM on April 10, 2010

What he means is that MetaFilter is moving to a paid subscription model.

Well, not in the traditional sense. We're actually moving to a quota-based "push content" model.

Basically you won't be allowed to read the site on any given day until you provide video evidence of having physically pushed some minimum number of people on the street to the ground while shouting Metafilter-related information (cool posts, things... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:03 AM on April 9, 2010

Are the mods considering removing these comments?

We remove them sometimes. Depends on the question. Sometimes the question really is yes/no and so it seems dickish to remove a yes/no answer. Sometimes it's a really complicated-seeming relationship question to which someone answers DTMFA and yeah we'll remove those. And maybe it's me being peevish but when someone comments "I think I remember something like that I'm on my phone so can't look it... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:40 AM on April 8, 2010

I don't think we're going to get much better than Cortex's "No. Really, really no. Extremely no."

Well here's my "No. Really, really no. Extremely no." statement, if that helps. And it's not that this is a bad idea, actually. It's more that we really want to keep the utility of AskMe high and if you agree with someone, we'd like you to take the time to say so, and say why. I've been seeing a disturbing [to me, easily disturbable]... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:09 AM on April 8, 2010

MeFi makes money from people clicking on ads, yes, but even though barely 1% of people click on ads, that's enough to keep things running. Clicking on ads unnecessarily to try and help me could backfire since it might tip off the ad placement people's stuff as fraud. Just continue using the site as-is, it all works out in the end.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 6:29 PM on April 5, 2010

You totally totally deserve every bullet you get in your collective faces.
We're only going to blow away brown people with oil and you know it.

Putting on the oversimplified voices of racists so you can in some way show that you are not a racist or that the situation is complicated is a backfiring strategy.
posted to MetaFilter by jessamyn at 9:32 AM on April 5, 2010

Maybe don't think of the questions as being directed to you

Yeah, this is a useful idea. Mefi is a place where conversation happens, and there are all sorts of people who can take a query and run with it. If it's not a question that you, exclusively, are capable of answering, you don't necessarily have to be the one to tackle it and it may be better for the natural development of the thread (and the avoidance of any stink of Steering The Thread) if... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 4:29 PM on April 3, 2010

I got accused of threadsitting in the iPad thread when I was just excited about the things people were saying.

Not to give you a hard time, Rory, but this post could have indeed been about the iPad thread and to some extent is more on point there than it is on DoublePlus'. Not that you were, by far, the only person being obnoxious or abrasive in that thread, but it was actually a lot more problematic than much of anything that went on in the Lifesaver... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 10:39 AM on April 4, 2010

I guess the general question I have is whether I am an equal part of the conversation as anyone who decides to read the post.

If I am then I feel I can respond to any question, statement, or whatever like anyone else can, in whatever way I want.

You're a mefite among equals as far as what you're allowed to do: you can comment, respond, rebuke, etc within the general (and in most respects very lax) confines of... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 4:44 PM on April 3, 2010

As a specific-case thing, I'd say, yeah, you were being probably over-responsive in that thread. Not like cuckoo-nutso over the top or anything, but after one or two comments in the early stages of your own post it's probably time to evaluate whether you're contributing to the discussion in a substantive way or just either defending the post or its contents (what I feel like was going on here a little) or using the post as an excuse to talk about something you wanted to get on your soapbox... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 3:51 PM on April 3, 2010

What do you think are the problems it creates?

Teaching 40000-ish people how to use a new feature, mostly. Explaining why we implemented a new feature for something about the site that arguably wasn't broken.

I'm not trying to needle you here, but a change to the UI and especially something as sacrosanct as the posting box really needs to be something that's being clamored for [edit window, to name one feature] and not... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 11:57 AM on April 3, 2010

I dropped a few people a note in that thread that this was the last time we were going to have a thread about BB/Doctorow [or just in general really, but a few people in that thread have done the same thing in other threads] that turned into such stupid namecalling. Totally not okay and we would have pruned it earlier if we had seen it earlier. People can hate who they hate, but using MeFi as a platform to stage a take-on-all-comers hatefest is pretty clearly not okay.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:27 AM on April 3, 2010

Well, there's this. Maybe why you couldn't find it?
posted to MetaTalk by cj_ at 4:33 PM on April 1, 2010

If this is someone's idea of an April Fools joke I will kill someone.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:08 AM on April 1, 2010

I'd prefer if people didn't link to stupid stuff without saying that they thought it was stupid in some way. I'd prefer if people were making a single link post they'd somehow say or imply why they thought it was going to interest the MeFi community.

We get too many posts that are like "well the link/quote speaks for itself!" and I think that's so context-dependent in almost every case as to pretty much be an untrue statement. As MeFi gets bigger it's even less... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 12:37 PM on March 31, 2010

Correct. The thread hangs from the post. And can be used to tell the weather: if the thread is wet, it is raining.
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 9:10 AM on March 28, 2010

I thought there was a new moderation rule that that sort of first comment facile thread-shitting got deleted?

If we're deleting the whole thread anyhow, we don't take extra care to remove early thread shitting. The rationale behind early threadshitting removal is so the rest of the thread can continue on without the doomsaying.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 9:19 PM on March 28, 2010

I meant it and I stand by it.

Well don't do it again, please. Saying "fuck you" to other MeFites does not solve problems and just generally raises the level of bad feeling around here.
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:36 PM on March 28, 2010

Funny how the rest of the world seems to care about US issues but it doesn't work the other way.

Which is, yes, an interesting topic. However when it's presented in a "fuck you" way it doesn't inspire thoughful discussion. Again, I'm sorry this didn't work out and I'd like to encourage you to try this again. However you may need to detach your strong feelings on this subject somewhat in order to make a post that is condusive to people here,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 8:02 PM on March 28, 2010

I'm frustrated that a post that does involve emotion but goes straight to the point is deleted as "ranty" so quickly. It seems to have hit the privilege of most of the Mefi readership (and the mods) and it seems really suspect.

I work to get people to face up to their privilege and make this place hospitable to people from other countries, gender preferences, whatever. It's hard to have a lot invested in a post and have it go badly here. I... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by jessamyn at 7:15 PM on March 28, 2010