There's been a long and colorful history in the mud community of misrepresenting communications. Spoofing logs, email, retro-active editing, deletion, and more. Anyone who has been active in the mud community is certainly aware of incidents that turned into flame wars involving what was said or not said on muds, intermuds, fora, PMs on fora, or email. A couple of technical and process modifications might ensure a higher degree of both public and private transparency in handling these issues.

Public transparency:
1) Don't prevent web spiders from crawling forum posts.
2) Don't include browser nocache directives on post pages.
Private transparency:
3) Users sending complaints or discussing mod issues in PMs would be advised to address their PMs to "mods". All of them.
4) Moderators replying to these private discussions should send replies to "mods; user". More eyes.
5) Don't allow negative moderator actions to occur based on what just one of y'all claims they received in a PM.

You may or may not already do these things. Food for thought.

Web spiders all have the same access level as guest. Guest is able to view everything not in the moderator or admin forums.



Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0

That is apparently being done despite us not having any such directives asked for in QSFP. If there's somewhere else we should look for this, we'd appreciate a pointer or two.



Agreed, this is what we advise already. Always best to address any such issue to the "mods" address, that goes to the entire moderation team and the admins as well.



Also agreed, and what we'd prefer. Once the bug in the PM system gets worked out to where "mods;user" doesn't throw an error.



If the subject of the PM is in reference to a public post, then moderator action will be based on the contents of that public post. I don't think anyone here has suggested we start moderating based on the contents of PMs, though that doesn't mean they aren't subject to the same policies.

I would like to officially dub this opinion the "Benevolent Dictator" approach to community building.

http://rule14.net/forum/index.php?topic=...

I'll just second what HK has said. We're all of us aware of the issues which have been raised in this thread and I am keen for us to establish a culture of moderation by consent where site policy reflects the concerns of the users.

Now that you guys are moderators you get to carry the weight of public disapproval. I know you don't get to write policy, but by your willingness to enforce it you effectively are endorsing it. You've all been very courteous thus far. For that you have my thanks. However, rule 14 was a bad rule. It's where I personally have to draw the line with the type of moderation I'm willing up to put with. I was under the impression that when the rules got revised it would be phased out. And now instead of being a rule it's some type of enforceable disclaimer. Why have rules anyways? Just use a big disclaimer. "We may do whatever we want no matter how unfair. We'll cover each case based on how much we like you in private messages." That covers it all. It's no surprise to me that now you find yourself on the precipice of losing contributors to this site. Now, weeks later, cooler heads still haven't prevailed. I for one will continue to make myself scarce on this site until fundamental changes happen in this area.

Alright, I think that we've all said everything there is to say on this matter and now all we can do is let the mod team and admin team discuss it amongst themselves. Then if that talk doesn't result in change then we all have only one more choice to make, leave mudbytes or stay and bite the bullet. I for one am not sure which direction I'll go if the rule isn't removed but I know I won't be as frequent of a contributor if I do continue at all. I'm one of the top posters here but I don't take kindly to being silenced. I personally love this forum and would hate to have to find a new place.

Anyway, I suggest we all stop posting in this thread and let the moderators discuss this as they promised. We're doing nothing now except repeating ourselves anyway. I hope the decision they come to will be announced immediately as soon as it is made.

So apparently, it's ok to publicly chastise somebody for something that:
(a) is not actually against the rules (as per the admission in the chastising)
(b) was not even expressed beforehand (as per the admission in the chastising)

Is this policy, or have I misunderstood what the staff's view on the matter is? I ask here, because I think that the rules/policy should be made clear – everybody needs to understand what they're allowed and not allowed to do, after all, and if this is policy it should be clear. (Discussion of policy being separate from discussion of a particular action.)

(By the way, whatever happened to simply asking people to not do something before calling the police?)

This was not the place to do this DH come on, you're making yourself look bad here.

I am very confused by something that happened recently.

I cannot discuss it, since doing so would break a rule.

I cannot post a link to a discussion of it.

I am very confused by something that happened recently.

Again I say, this thread is NOT the thread to discuss that other thread in. You guys are just giving them more ammo to use against us in this debate. I don't disagree with DH or Cratylus in the least but I do disagree with where they voiced this opinion.

But…. elves DO suc.... If they sucked any more, every Walmart in the country would be totally out of stock in the garden hose department.

Thank you, Davion, for abolishing rule 14 and making moot the
vast majority of the complaints.

It wasn't just me.

I'm sure he thanked only you cause you're the one that made the post.

Considering recent events, my post has been rendered moot, so please feel free to ignore it as I cannot delete it. I am pleased that we were able to put this particular bit of policy behind us. I am glad that the policy against "bad policy discussion" is the same one against any form of bad discussion: no trolling, flaming, etc. It's very reasonable, and allows for people to be reasonable themselves.

I am glad things are looking up.