Unfair locking of topic by emotionally involved moderator

[klange]

Rule 7: … Don't provoke fights or participate in fights started by others.

Who broke rule 7?

As there is only one subject in this sentence and the subordinate clause can not logically apply to the object, I believe I’ve already answered that question:

I locked one thread for violating rule 7.

If you think that I am denying personal culpability, you are mistaken. That’s not to say I don’t also believe that vvaltchev provoked and continued things, but as the community seems to agree it is not my place to make that call. Which brings us back to why I locked the thread - to preserve both sides, rather than burning the evidence of my own mistakes - because, I again, I do not want to repeat Brendan’s - and to prevent further escalation from both parties.

[iansjack]

Well, I appreciate your motives but I’m afraid that I still think you made a mistake by not referring it to another moderator. And, like you, I find it significant that no other moderator has replied to this thread.

I apologise if you think I was accusing you of acting like Brendan. What I said (or certainly meant) was that any suspicion of moderators acting in an interested manner was the start of the slippery slope that leads to that sort of situation.

I accept that your motives were entirely above board, but I think that they could be misinterpreted (and the OP has misinterpreted them), which means that it would have been more sensible to defer to a disinterested party.

Please don’t think that the work that the moderators do is not appreciated.

[vvaltchev]

I believe there's a problem with the lack of (active) moderators on this forum. No other moderator other than klange himself wanted to even comment here. The list of moderators for each section is long, but most of them didn't login in years and the few ones that do, don't want to deal with such "moderation problems".

For this specific case, I didn't expect the other moderators to (necessarily) unlock the topic, but at least to share their opinion here. Silence is a bad thing, IMHO. It doesn't spread a feeling of fairness or freedom to express ideas. It's always possible to (unintentionally) hurt someone's feelings by expressing an idea. Does it mean that we are forbidden to talk about that? Also, why hurting my feelings is OK while hurting the feelings of a moderator is not?

How could one even express the idea that "some project-goals objectively do require 1000s man-years of work to reach production-quality" without offending somebody? To me, offending is something very different from saying something that hurts. Offending implies an intention to insult the other person, to diminish them. Saying something that it hurts is different, because it could be an attempt to state an "objective fact", believed to be true by the speaker. Even a close friend with the best intentions to help could say something that hurts: would you stop talking with them for that? That doesn't make any sense to me.

In conclusion, the current moderation is definitively not OK for me. But.. whatever it works for you, guys.

[kzinti]

I am not ok with this either. And I am not a moderator. Klange shouldn't have locked the thread, he should have asked another moderator to look at the thread and decide if it should be locked or not.

If Klange wanted to move away from the discussion, he didn't need to lock it. He could just have stopped replying. The point of locking a thread is prevent further replies. This ability was already in his hands.

[klange]

The list of moderators for each section is long, but most of them didn't login in years and the few ones that do, don't want to deal with such "moderation problems".

Note that we don't actually have per-forum moderators, the moderator list is global and the listings next to individual forums are a side-effect of how phpBB manages moderation access. As you say, of the users in that list, only a handful are active - and none of us has the necessary access rights to grant moderator privileges to more users. As we have had difficulty in the past with getting the forum's administrator to respond to inquiries on a timescale shorter than "years", our best bet would be to convince more of the former moderators, who still have that access, to return.

For this specific case, I didn't expect the other moderators to (necessarily) unlock the topic, but at least to share their opinion here.

Same. I very much do not want to push the argument that I did what I did because no one else could have stepped in (quite the opposite!). That should not be the case, and seeing the lack of response from other moderators is disheartening and defeats the purpose of what I tried to do. I am not a good candidate to be the only person with power (and willing to use it) around here - I have a short fuse and a propensity for reading ill will where none was intended. That no one else (with the ability to do so) wants to step up and engage in these affairs puts the entire forum in a difficult position.

To me, offending is something very different from saying something that hurts. Offending implies an intention to insult the other person, to diminish them.

Offense can be had without intent, and at least by the common dictionary definition offense is literally saying something that hurts whether you meant it or not.

I accept that it was not your intent to offend me, and that there is value in the question you were posing. My main issue was with how you phrased your critique: the particular words you used like "unrealistic" and "not particularly useful". This is what I was trying to express in my posts, while becoming increasingly irate to the point of exploding.

In conclusion, the current moderation is definitively not OK for me. But.. whatever it works for you, guys.

Clearly it doesn't.

I am not ok with this either. And I am not a moderator. Klange shouldn't have locked the thread, he should have asked another moderator to look at the thread and decide if it should be locked or not.

If Klange wanted to move away from the discussion, he didn't need to lock it. He could just have stopped replying. The point of locking a thread is prevent further replies. This ability was already in his hands.

That's a fair critique. It is difficult to disengage, particularly as a moderator as I still have a need to monitor threads, and the "grin and bear it" approach can be interpreted as endorsement for negative behavior. Normal users have tools like ignore lists at their disposal (though I believe you can't add a moderator to an ignore list?), but I can't go around ignoring regular users at the risk of blinding myself to potential future infractions.