Our Approach To Moderation
1. We don’t have hard-and-fast rules that people aren’t allowed to violate; we just have a goal for the discussions we’d like to have, and we’d like people to move us towards that goal rather than away.
Here’s a (non-comprehensive) description of the discussion we’d like to have:
- Debates are conducted in a manner that shows respect even for folks we disagree with.
- Comments are funny, critical and vigorous, but not mean-spirited.
- Obvious racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, fat-hatred, antisemitism and other bigotries, are avoided by everyone. Subtle forms of these bigotries inevitably creep in, but are subject to analysis and criticism.
- Thread-jacking and wandering away from topics isn’t allowed, except when it is.
- If a blogger wants to set special rules for their thread, everyone respects that.
2. If in the subjective opinion of the moderators, your presence is bringing us further away from the conversation we want to have, then you’ll be asked to change your behavior. Or to depart.
If you’ve been banned.
If you’ve been banned on “Alas,” you can still submit comments, but each comment will need to be individually approved by a moderator. If you impress a mod with how smart, interesting and civil your comments are, they could appear. But they won’t appear right away, and they might not appear at all. And even if some of your comments are approved by moderators, that doesn’t mean we’ll approve any more comments from you.
Alternatively, we might just set up your comments to be automatically deleted, without even being seen by a moderator. In which case no comment of yours will ever be approved.
Related posts:
3. Any post that fails to adequately praise the awesomeness that is Ampersand will be spanked with a cat of nine tails. Especially if you like that sort of thing.
Isn’t this, like, at least the sixth post about this in as many years? Is the policy evolving or are people simply not getting it? Or is this a, let’s say, subtle way of yelling at someone ?
It’s an evolving policy.
And people do get it, by and large, but it’s nice to have an official “policy” I can point to. I was describing the policy to another blogger, and I couldn’t find a statement of our current policy to point to. So I wrote something up, emailed it to the “Alas” moderators, and they rewrote parts of it, and now here it is.