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Jnyusa
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Posted: Mon 07 Feb , 2005 4:40 am
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The other thing we could think about for Admin rotations (sorry, I'm returning to the earlier topic) is to have the terms last for six months, but to have more admins so that a six-month term won't be a burden. Then we would only have to vote every three months.

How do people feel about that? (Especially those who have been admins)

Jn

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*Alandriel*
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Posted: Mon 07 Feb , 2005 12:42 pm
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6 months is a loooong time - but if there are more admins to spread the load, then I don't see why not. Two teams a year - it makes matters certainly easy for those that are not admins ;)

Say, perhaps 2-3 admins per 'major' timezone ... that could work quite well :mrgreen:

Another thing. I don't remember anymore if its in this thread or not :oops: where we discussed possible bannings. (please don't bash me over the head now .. ;) )

Apart from obvious trolling I think one big issue here is also to make it very clear that multiple IDs are only allowed for RP purposes and should a member violate this... they'll be banned! :Q
:halo: yes! I'm quite adamant about that.
Another instant for banning should be registering a bogus email address.

Now if this totally disrupts the thread then please yell at me and I move it to where it belongs to. Monday mornings are not my best times :oops:
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Dindraug
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Posted: Mon 07 Feb , 2005 1:38 pm
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Jnyusa wrote:
The other thing we could think about for Admin rotations (sorry, I'm returning to the earlier topic) is to have the terms last for six months, but to have more admins so that a six-month term won't be a burden. Then we would only have to vote every three months.

How do people feel about that? (Especially those who have been admins)

Jn
Quite frankly, no. I think it would be a bad move, possibly a very bad.

Being an Admin is dull, really. You lose heart quite quickly and it's a lot of additional stress. The thought of that dragging on for six months would probably mean I would not want to do it again. It takes too much time, and really saps your community spirit.

I would also point to the darkness we have seen on TORC with over mighty admins. Six months is a huge period to admin, and you can get away with a lot. And it would be harder to dig out an entrenched admin :P

So I would say not six months. 3-4 is more than enough, and will incerase the skill circle as more people do the job.

Just my opinion, and may be tainted by how recently I have got away from the role ;)

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Jnyusa
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Posted: Mon 07 Feb , 2005 5:12 pm
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Alandriel - tying the admin function to time zones is exactly what I was thinking about, too! I have some thoughts about how to do this and to coordinate it with the staggered terms, but I have to write it down first and make sure it makes sense before posting it. ;)

edit to add: thoughts about banning are fine here ... all those issues posted near the beginning are fine anywhere in here. I'm thinking I should cross-post some of our admin discussion (as we get into that) in the other thread about admins.

Din - thanks for weighing in on the six month term. I feel that we should rely heavily on the advice of those who have done it so far because the rest of us don't know really what's involved. In know Eru feels pretty burned out right now, too.

We do need more admins, just to spread the work.

Jn

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*Alandriel*
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Posted: Mon 07 Feb , 2005 7:58 pm
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I felt burnt out.... after only 2 months :Q - so I can definitely sympathize with both Eru and Dindraug :hug: (But then again... one bounces back.. and all too quickly as some have told me... stop 'pretending' to be an admin here ;) )
'Socializing' and 'having fun' as well as even attempting an RP post... it goes quite down the drain while you're on the 'job'.

But, if we're wise then maybe it is possible with a bigger spread, ok - forget the 2-3 admins... let's make it 4-6 :cool: per 'major' time-zone (and maybe on/off duty days :Q OMG! I'm tying myself in knots again)

It's just - well, first of all obviously I'm thinking 'aloud' again but secondly and more importantly - there must be a way to have less change-overs (I think it takes about 3-4 weeks for an Admin to feel truly 'comfortable'.. not that we want them to get too comfortable =:) ;) ) yet without burning people out.

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Jnyusa
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Posted: Mon 07 Feb , 2005 10:42 pm
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Well, I'm thinking maybe four month terms are good ... about the time zone thing, let me just say this real quick, even though I haven't drawn an actual table in my mind yet...

I think it will be useful to conceive of the world as having three time zones, each one eight hours long. Think of them as work shifts.

Pretend that a 'shift' starts at twelve noon and ends at 8:00 pm. If we have two-three mods who span that shift in each of the three time zones, then all they have to commit to do is to check their PM's and their email near the beginning of their 'shift' and before they sign off. That way, because our members are spread out a a bit within each of those 8-hr zones, the board will be 'checked' for problems every two-three hours during a shift without any one admin having to be on call all the time.

Now, whether the person who catches the problem is able to solve it - that's a different question ... but in terms of catching spam and ads and such, or knowing that some member has a problem and is trying to reach an admin ... nothing like that will go more than a few hours without being caught.

Jn

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Areanor
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Posted: Mon 07 Feb , 2005 11:31 pm
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Jnyusa wrote:
Pretend that a 'shift' starts at twelve noon and ends at 8:00 pm.
LOL. Then I can't get onto that shift. My shift would start at around twelve midnight and end at 7am :P

Oh, and I'm on GMT + 1 hour

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Eruname
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Posted: Mon 07 Feb , 2005 11:44 pm
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I'd say no to the 6 month term. Let's keep it at 3 to 4 months.

Din's right when he says it's dull. It sucks the fun out of this place. You feel like you need to read everything pertaining to business and put your two cents in and that leaves practically no time for the fun side of the board. I think that's why I'm feeling a little burnt out...I haven't had much time for fun. That's the kind of posting I like doing. Coming here feels more like a job than for pleasure.

Thinking about how much effort one must exert as an admin, I've been thinking that we really ought to have more than three....especially as the board grows. I agree with the odd number idea and I'm thinking we should bump it up to 5 admins.

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Jnyusa
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Posted: Tue 08 Feb , 2005 5:14 am
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Do the admins need to be an odd number?

I'm not sure they have to be ... it depends on the dispute-resolve system that we put in place ... rather, I think we can design dispute-resolve around the number of admins we're able to sustain, so that if we had an even number and a decision had to be made, we could pull another poster in for the deliberation.

Also, I put together a table of how the times zones and elections would interact if we had four-month terms ... but I want to sleep on it before posting. You guys are going to think I'm crazy when you see it, although if you have patience to think about it, it's rather simple ... just complicated to look at the first time.

Based on the three-time zone, 4-month term concept, we would need six to nine administrators at all times, and we would be voting for two- three administrators every two months.

Areanor, you raised an interesting point ... I've been thinking about 'shifts' and time zones in terms of countries, but of course not everyone is on the same daily schedule. Someone from Europe might easily fill the 'Oz' time zone if they usually post during the night!

The other thing about elections ... if we have three month staggered terms, we really will need to hold elections nearly every month. We'll always be either nominating or voting or having new admins going through an orientation of some sort. If we have four month staggered terms, the voting will be every two months; if six-month staggered terms, the voting will be every three months.

One way to reduce the voting frequency is, as I said above, to run several voting threads simultaneously and vote for two terms at a time. I'm thinking that we may end up having to do this because people will get fed up having to vote all the time and they'll just not vote.

Jn

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Jnyusa
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Posted: Tue 08 Feb , 2005 2:36 pm
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Eru, one reason that the admin job has been so taxing up until now is because the board has been going through a period of enormous growth and change.

Also, while the board was small, decisions were made by conversation and it was easy to remember what those decisions were. For those of us who are new, it's difficult to extract the 'how' of the board from those conversation threads, so ... for myself, for example, I feel I need an orientation period before volunteering for duties.

As we decide governance issues and terms of office and when votes will be taken and how we want to cover time zones, etc., and put the system through a few test drives, and post summaries of these things where new people can read them and orient themselves, the duties of an admin will become much more routine and will not interfere so much with the poster's enjoyment of the board.

edit in: The other thing I am thinking about B77 is that once we have a governance system in place, this board won't remotely resemble Torc in character. When you require people to fulfill civic duty on a board, and there is a stable, public dispute resolution process in place, people view their role on the board differently. When you have an authoritarian structure, as Torc does, the game becomes a gate-breaking game, and the headaches of modding and administering proliferate. There's no sport in admin-baiting if you're going to be the next admin, no pleasure in cussing out your fellow poster and getting in a fight about it with an admin if the resolution of that is going to be a public mediation where you have to state in all seriousness just what your problem is.

People behave differently when they are accountable to one another, as opposed to being accountable to some secret society with arbitrary powers. My vision for this place ... besides eventually having some of the coolest content on the web ... is a place that is so lightly governed we would only need the admins looking in once or twice a day to either solve minor problems themselves (like ad deletion) or to refer larger problems to the appropriate member-moderated process.

Jn

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Jnyusa
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Posted: Mon 14 Feb , 2005 6:45 pm
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The discussion on governance has died away so I'm resurrecting it. :)

I'll start two new threads this afternoon - one to discuss terms of office and the other to discuss disputer resolution.

We had reached a partial consensus, and these were two issues that had not been addressed, so I'll start with them. I've got to compose offline, so both might not appear right away, but will appear before the end of the day (EST).

Jn

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Ethel
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Posted: Tue 15 Feb , 2005 2:44 am
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How to choose mods (etc)
I think we can get along without them. I always thought one of the most useful things I did as a mod was to jump into a thread that was getting overheated, and just say - hey, let's all cool off, okay? And remember to attack the argument rather than the person. (insert smiley) But there is no reason posters cannot do that, and in fact I have often seen it done here. I think it should be an expectation here that posters, especially longer term ones, will perform this useful service.

Once the board is open, assuming it eventually becomes so, I believe there WILL be a need for 'authority actions'. I was a mod too long to have any illusions about (some) people's behavior. But surely the rotating admins can take care of the really outrageous and inflammatory stuff.

And what do I mean by that? Well... suppose an otherwise good citizen has, say, a substance abuse problem. And under the influence of that substance one evening takes to posting obscene and offensive stuff in every thread. (It happened at TORC, friends; it can happen here.) In that case I would suggest that the admins might want to quickly, but temporarily, ban the offender. Maybe just until morning. The idea is to staunch the bleeding. And then the conflict resolution process could be invoked, if it appears that further action is needed. If it seemed to be just a one time thing, though, perhaps they could be unbanned in the morning without further ado.


Should there be a conflict resolution process?
There should and there must. And it's better we know what it is in advance. Here are some ideas:

If it were a case of flagrant and outrageous abuse (see above), the current admins might need to invoke the process. Otherwise, it would be up to the offended party (or parties) to do so.

I think it's a mistake to make the process too complicated, or to give people too many choices.

If it is simply a case of a heated conflict between two individuals, perhaps we can simply ask them to take their argument 'outside'. Outside could mean IM or email - or perhaps we could have a forum called 'Outside' where two individuals could go to thrash things out - no holds barred.

If it's a case where a number of posters have a problem with an individual, I think it might be better to invoke arbitration, or mediation, or whatever we want to call it. This would be done only at the specific request of one or more of the offended parties. I like the jury idea. The current admins would only be the facilitators of the process. I suggest we develop a jury pool of people willing to do the work, and who are generally respected in the community - perhaps they might need to be voted on. When arbitration/mediation is invoked, a number of this jury pool - three, maybe - would be selected at random, subject to availability. They would hear the concerns of all involved and make a unanimous judgment. (If it's more than 3, requiring unanimity might be tough.) And then they would retire from the fray, until or unless they were called on again. Perhaps the 'offending' party should be allowed to designate an advocate or buddy to help support him/her in the discussion.


Banning
There has to be such a thing. Probably not necessary as long as this is a closed board - but assuming we open it up some day, I promise you that people will arrive here who will create so much mayhem that we won't have any other choice. People who want to push a product or website or whatever, and fill every forum with commercial spam. People who register as Fuck_Tolkien (or some such) and do nothing but bait people. There are people so obnoxious that ignoring them will never make them leave. They can overwhelm a community. I know what I'm talking about, friends. Trolls of this sort would show up several times a month at TORC. B77 won't be immune.

I don't think we need to agonize about trolls who just show up and start being obnoxious. I think the current admin rota should ban them without further ado. The problem will come when it's a long-time poster. I would love to think it would never be necessary to take such an action against a long-time poster - and of the community currently present, I'm sure it won't. But... suppose a previously respected poster has some kind of breakdown, and it caused him or her to start stalking someone - making offensive and/or baiting posts every time their stalkee does? It can happen. (I have seen this happen.) In that case I would expect the conflict resolution process to be invoked, and I think that banning has to be one of the possible outcomes of that process. It should be very rare. But you can't rule it out, I don't think. Someone who is doing real harm to the community can't be permitted to continue.

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Jnyusa
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Posted: Tue 15 Feb , 2005 3:17 am
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Ethel - this thread became rather hard to follow because of all the independent issues.

The following is the point we had reached on the previous page, which is in agreement with many of the points you made.

*********

B77 is a member-moderated board.

We have x administrators who serve three-month terms and are selected from among the members by nomination and vote. Admins have the power to edit or delete posts, ban posters for certain offenses (to be defined), and propose banning for other kinds of offenses (to be defined). In all other kinds of disputes they will intervene only at the request of members affected by the dispute.
• Administrative positions are voluntary
• Members become eligible for administrator after being on the board for x months or x posts, whichever comes later
• The same person may serve as administrator more than once, but not in two consecutive terms.
• Administrative terms are staggered. These are the terms:
Feb-Mar-Apr ..... Mar-Apr-May
May-Jun-Jul ...... Jun-July-Aug
Aug-Sep-Oct ..... Sept-Oct-Nov
Nov-Dec-Jan ..... Dec-Jan-Feb

Terms beginning in Feb. and Mar. are voted on in January; terms beginning May and June are voted on in April; terms beginning Aug and Sept are voted on in July, and terms beginning Nov. and Dec are voted on in October.

The three-month term of office will be reconsidered at the end of 2005.


Offenses on which Admins may take immediate action without consulting the members:.

Members cannot be banned for any reasons other than those listed here. (Sounds like some things should warrant immediate banning, like spamming porn, whereas others emerge from unresolved disputes and need a different mechanism, on which I'll offer my opinion later.)

******

I would appreciate your comments in the Resolution of Disputes Among Members thread. It seems most people are thinking along the same lines, and want the process to be simple.

Jn

Last edited by Jnyusa on Thu 24 Feb , 2005 7:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Ethel
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Posted: Tue 15 Feb , 2005 3:28 am
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Jnyusa wrote:
Ethel - this thread became rather hard to follow because of all the independent issues.
Thank you, Jn. That was about the nicest way of saying, "you're stoopfid!" I have ever come across! :mrgreen: Because I actually did just read to the end of the first page, and somehow - I blame my cat - thought I was making a meaningful response.

D'oh.

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Rodia
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Posted: Tue 15 Feb , 2005 10:38 am
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Hey, was meaningful to me. :D

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Nin
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Posted: Tue 15 Feb , 2005 11:03 am
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I still think that if the boards are open to read only, when a person whom nobody knows registers with a name like "Fuck_Tolkien" he/she/it should be refused or kindly asked to change to another username.

I know I have expressed this idea before, but even on TORC you have to wait for an e-mail back to register and I still think we could send people who register once the boards are open (which means readable for all) to tell in one sentence why they want to register.

A little answer back like: I like Tolkien and laughed at several at your posts when reading my way through the boards" without too much netspeak... would do it for me and still maybe filter a bit.

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Rodia
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Posted: Tue 15 Feb , 2005 12:05 pm
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The email on TORC is automated, though. You can register as anything you like and it will send you a link. I'd still like for admin approval to be necessary here, to avoid such users slipping past the guards. And prevent them coming in to cause trouble.

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Dindraug
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Posted: Tue 15 Feb , 2005 1:43 pm
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Admin approval may also help to cut down on the number of spammers who try to join just to advertise their own sites or products.

The other problem when or if we choose to open the boards to anybody is that anybody can join, including the sweatshop hackers who join such places just to get information or advertise, and who can do it many times. We need some kind of basic security or we may be hacked to bits.

Again, asuming we open up to all which has yet to be decided on.

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Nin
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Posted: Tue 15 Feb , 2005 2:09 pm
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I know the e-mail is automatic on TZORC, but it does not have to be here.

I don't think it would be a big security, but someone who is really only interested in trolling might be disgusted by the effort to write a reason to join.

Of course, only if and when we open the boards, which I really hope will happen.

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Jnyusa
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Posted: Tue 15 Feb , 2005 3:48 pm
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Ethel - any response that contributes to the consensus is meaningful. :)

I have to be kind because I go through the same dilemma every time I see a long thread and don't feel up to reading all of it. Which page should I read? - the first page or the last page? :mrgreen:

I would like your input in the dispute thread because you've actually done facilitation and know how things are likely to pan out in practice. (I've only watched it done on a few occasions.)

Jn

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