but the only ones that are considered to be harassers, or subject to moderation, are the non-members.
In addition, there is no visibility into does the moderation, how long it might take, what would be filtered, and for what reason.
Therefore the forum's use of moderation is at best, suspicious, and can easily become a tool for abuse.
There should be a record of who filters what, when, and why.
And this should be made public also (although people should not be forced to subscribe to them).
In any case, people are better of spending their time on stuff that is actually supported, and can get them employment.
If you've got specific messages in mind, email me the message numbers. Ex-post-facto moderation relies on someone letting us know of a problem message. The alternative is pre-moderation, which you've said you don't like.
> well known members of the community
Note that the troll I referred to would sock-puppet well known members, including myself.
How would you suggest dealing with such a disruptive person? (The volume of his postings, all with different pseudo-accounts, was pretty large for a while.)
> for no reason
We've posted several times that professional demeanor is expected.
I doubt other HN'ers are interested in this exchange, so I'd prefer taking it offline and you can email me. See walterbright.com for the address.
Here the list of traits that could be observed in the private complain thread:
- Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from other people - Fixated on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc. - Self-perception of being unique, superior, and associated with high-status people and institutions - Needing continual admiration from others - Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others - Exploitative of others to achieve personal gain - Unwilling to empathize with the feelings, wishes, and needs of other people - Intensely envious of others, and the belief that others are equally envious of them - Pompous and arrogant demeanor
A comment like this would not raise the attention of D moderators though.
So who's the real sockpuppter, troll, narcisist, that makes all the post like these (that you'll see all over the D forums, in response to anyone that says negative things about D).
Hardly, or half the posts would be gone :-)
What we do moderate is posts where one person harasses another. This happens only rarely, except we had a recent large volume of such coming from a Tor node. So posts coming from the Tor node need approval from one of the moderators for the time being (until that person goes away).
You can also use the NNTP interface to access the forums, which doesn't moderate in advance (that only happens if you use the web interface to post).
The web forum software is a shell around the NNTP interface. It's a bit difficult to make a HackerNews/Reddit style moderation system work on it because of the way NNTP works.