Aa
A queston for Medhelp
I have been reading this forum for many years and posting for two. I see a noticeable increase in deleted posts and the marked absence of many of the most helpful posters. I had disagreements with some of them, but their absence is my loss.
Why are you doing this? A forum can be moderated or not, but this forum seems in between and uses arbitrary rules.
Most of us take mind altering drugs; we need guidance sometimes when we are out of line, but threatening and banning are not helpful. This is a support forum for adults. Sometimes we are so overwhelmed by the drugs that we do not behave as adults, but that is rare.
If you apply arbitrary rules and let trolls post at will and you ban the people that complain about the trolls, you lose the respect of the forum members and you, medhelp, will lose in the end.
If you feel the forum has to be moderated, then supply a moderator that understands the forum and the problems of the participants.
Why are you doing this? A forum can be moderated or not, but this forum seems in between and uses arbitrary rules.
Most of us take mind altering drugs; we need guidance sometimes when we are out of line, but threatening and banning are not helpful. This is a support forum for adults. Sometimes we are so overwhelmed by the drugs that we do not behave as adults, but that is rare.
If you apply arbitrary rules and let trolls post at will and you ban the people that complain about the trolls, you lose the respect of the forum members and you, medhelp, will lose in the end.
If you feel the forum has to be moderated, then supply a moderator that understands the forum and the problems of the participants.
It's a start at the least to implement SOME of these suggestions - the warning post, the transparency, a note that a post has been pulled/edited (or pull one instead of editing it - with a comment indicating as such). If we can see what posts have been deleted and it doesn't have to take the whole thread with it, it at least gives someone the opportunity to take it up with MedHelp and it gives someone the opportunity to post differently.
You're talking about people being on treatment drugs and the impact it has on them. Well, removing a post might cause someone to do that double-take that Ricky suggests people do before posting and perhaps a post by someone with a cooler head will do just as well.
It will be very hard to define "just" and "unjust" moderating. We can't even decide that amongst ourselves. Expressing my opinion on something very strongly may seem entirely appropriate to me but someone else may take great offense to that. Some people ARE very easily offended and sensitive and others are not so much. Some people have a hard time with others having a dissenting opinion from theirs. Others not so much. We had the one guy posting that he's thankful he has Hep C. I think it was important that people were allowed to respond to that. It got pretty heated.
We've had a number of debates on this forum on precisely that...how just or unjust we felt someone's post / thread and subsequent responses are. It will be hard to nail that down. So do we wait until we have it perfect or start taking at least the steps that make sense and keep working at it? I vote for the latter.
What would be important is consistency and transparency, in my opinion, as a starting place Even consistency will be hard to define as it comes back to a moderator's opinion of just or unjust.
At the least, I would ask that MedHelp not pull posts solely on the basis of the amount of anonymous reports they get when they have no tracking mechanism to determine if they came from one or two sources hitting that mouse button repeatedly. They will have to read the thread before pulling it or not pull it at all until they have time to assess it or someone actually WRITES. That's my viewpoint on that.
Trish
You're talking about people being on treatment drugs and the impact it has on them. Well, removing a post might cause someone to do that double-take that Ricky suggests people do before posting and perhaps a post by someone with a cooler head will do just as well.
It will be very hard to define "just" and "unjust" moderating. We can't even decide that amongst ourselves. Expressing my opinion on something very strongly may seem entirely appropriate to me but someone else may take great offense to that. Some people ARE very easily offended and sensitive and others are not so much. Some people have a hard time with others having a dissenting opinion from theirs. Others not so much. We had the one guy posting that he's thankful he has Hep C. I think it was important that people were allowed to respond to that. It got pretty heated.
We've had a number of debates on this forum on precisely that...how just or unjust we felt someone's post / thread and subsequent responses are. It will be hard to nail that down. So do we wait until we have it perfect or start taking at least the steps that make sense and keep working at it? I vote for the latter.
What would be important is consistency and transparency, in my opinion, as a starting place Even consistency will be hard to define as it comes back to a moderator's opinion of just or unjust.
At the least, I would ask that MedHelp not pull posts solely on the basis of the amount of anonymous reports they get when they have no tracking mechanism to determine if they came from one or two sources hitting that mouse button repeatedly. They will have to read the thread before pulling it or not pull it at all until they have time to assess it or someone actually WRITES. That's my viewpoint on that.
Trish
All of these comments work well when the post or thread is being justly moderated and don't work at all when it is not.
Emily,
Thanks for elaborating yet more, participating in a discussion on how to make things better and for responding to our questions.
I agree with Great Bird's suggestion that there should be an indication that a post was edited or removed. On other forums I have seen the moderator include a line similar to "XYZ's post was not consistent with our guidelines and has been removed." A moderator gets to make that call.
Posts shouldn't be edited with no indication that they are not the writer's original words. An edit would potentially change the meaning of the post entirely. Not sure if posts ARE being edited but seems better to simply remove them with a notation as such.
If someone chooses to re-post only more appropriately (subjective sometimes) then well and good.
As Willing said, I think transparency is important.
Trish
Thanks for elaborating yet more, participating in a discussion on how to make things better and for responding to our questions.
I agree with Great Bird's suggestion that there should be an indication that a post was edited or removed. On other forums I have seen the moderator include a line similar to "XYZ's post was not consistent with our guidelines and has been removed." A moderator gets to make that call.
Posts shouldn't be edited with no indication that they are not the writer's original words. An edit would potentially change the meaning of the post entirely. Not sure if posts ARE being edited but seems better to simply remove them with a notation as such.
If someone chooses to re-post only more appropriately (subjective sometimes) then well and good.
As Willing said, I think transparency is important.
Trish
I'm under the impression that you may have edited one of the posts on this thread. If that is the case and it is something that you intends to do from time to time, I would like to respectfully suggest that you include an [edited] notation or a line at the bottom of the affected posts that indicates it was: edited at a [time] by the moderator.
Thank you for discussing these issues with us.
Thank you for discussing these issues with us.
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