Moderator(s) needed here....

Drizzt80 said:

I added my name to the list for both of your reasons . . . I honestly hope I lose the "popularity contest", but IF noone else wants to be a mod, WHO will take on the charge to help get the site back to some semblence of normal?! It's obvious Rich can't necessarily do it all by himself, and is looking for help.

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I'm very much in line with your view of this, Brent. I have a paying thankless job; the possibility of acquiring a non-paying thankless job isn't such a rosy prospect. But I haven't asked for my name to be withdrawn for the reasons you cite.

Joejr14 said:

Honestly, I'd like to see the mods on this website already be contributing members who have been here for quite a while.

Some of you may ask why?

Because contributing members feel enough for this website to kick $25 (or in some cases $75) a year to him. They have a vested interest in this website and the direction it takes. I'd also like it to be someone who has been here for a while---because they know what it was like a year ago when everything was fabulous and are less likely to decide one day that corns just aren't for them.

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I definitely agree with this. I don't think you have to contribute monetarily or be here for a long time to be a great asset to this community, but these ARE at least a couple of indicators of a member's committment to this site.

Fenderplayer108 said:

Joe; Why don't you be a mod?

I think you would make a good one for many reasons. You have been here for a long while, pretty much everyone on this forum knows you. You vest a interest in this forum, and I think thats what the mod spot needs.

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Ha. I'd love to and I think I'd do a good job, but I'm viewed as 'controversial' because I don't sugar coat things and fluff it all up. That 'chat thread' didn't do much good either. And in a 'popularity contest' I don't think that would exactly secure me many votes. :shrugs:

Like I said, there are some good names up there that at least are in line with that I think we should have. So I won't have any problems voting for those people.

Well, anyone who has never been a moderator will be in for a surprise, I think. Most people voting to have moderators will be under the impression that everyone will be subjected to moderation EXCEPT for themselves. Seen it time and time again. On some of my other sites, people would complain that moderators were needed. So when I did so, and the moderators determined that those people asking for moderation were PART of the problem, well that pretty much shocked them. THEY wanted ONLY the other guy to be moderated. But they themselves wanted free reign to do and say whatever they pleased.

Doesn't work that way. Matter of fact, it better had NOT work that way. A moderator needs to be impartial. If your best friend is acting like a jerk, you have to call a "spade" a "spade". If you can't do that, then you should not be a moderator. It also puts quite a burden on the moderator to lead by example. You cannot be credible as a moderator unless you act the part WE need for everyone else to act as. So yes, if that is a part of your persona that you do not wish to give up, again, this is not for you.

When I have had to wear that hat, I try hard to treat everyone the same. Doesn't matter if you are my biggest customer, a steady advertiser on one or more of my sites, or just someone who blundered their way in here, not having a clue about common courtesy. I try to treat you ALL the same based on what you DO, not who you ARE. So if you cannot do that, then no, this job is not for you.

Speaking of which, I will also put a "none of the above" vote when I make up that poll. The purpose of that will be to give everyone the opportunity to plainly state that one of two things: (1) They don't want anyone on that list to be a moderator, or (2) They don't want ANYONE at all to be a moderator here, and wish things to remain as they are now. If that option in the voting gets the majority of the votes, then I will consider that as a clear signal to just drop this whole idea.

I am putting this into your hands here. You all can make or break this site. I certainly have no intention of sitting here 24/7 playing the "daddy".

And yes, I am FULLY cognizant that moderators can make or break a site as well. Which is why I am putting THAT decision in your hands as well. Choose wisely, please.

Oh, one other detail. "Moderation" does not give anyone the force of their "powers" here to enforce their opinion on another person. In other words, if someone disagrees with your genetics understanding, husbandry practices, or the way you incubate eggs, that contrary opinion is not a concept subject to moderation. Moderation is to keep the discussions civil, regardless of the topic matter and your part in the opinions on such matters.

Joejr14 said:

Ha. I'd love to and I think I'd do a good job, but I'm viewed as 'controversial' because I don't sugar coat things and fluff it all up. That 'chat thread' didn't do much good either. And in a 'popularity contest' I don't think that would exactly secure me many votes. :shrugs:

Like I said, there are some good names up there that at least are in line with that I think we should have. So I won't have any problems voting for those people.

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Wow, I really didn't think you had any interest in it. I guess I shouldn't have assumed. I also thought that you didn't have time for it at this point. Had I not made these assumptions, I would have nominated you. In fact, I'm going to go nominate you right now. I hope that people are objective, and that the voting doesn't turn out to be a popularity contest. If the "voters" look back on your contributions here, Joe, I think they'll see that you're as qualified as anyone, and more qualified than many. And there's no question regarding how much you care about this site. :cheers:

Rich Z said:

Speaking of which, I will also put a "none of the above" vote when I make up that poll. The purpose of that will be to give everyone the opportunity to plainly state that one of two things: (1) They don't want anyone on that list to be a moderator, or (2) They don't want ANYONE at all to be a moderator here, and wish things to remain as they are now. If that option in the voting gets the majority of the votes, then I will consider that as a clear signal to just drop this whole idea.

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Maybe you should split that into two selections. The difference between those statements is more than just one of nuance. :shrugs:

Roy Munson said:

Wow, I really didn't think you had any interest in it. I guess I shouldn't have assumed. I also thought that you didn't have time for it at this point. Had I not made these assumptions, I would have nominated you. In fact, I'm going to go nominate you right now. I hope that people are objective, and that the voting doesn't turn out to be a popularity contest. If the "voters" look back on your contributions here, Joe, I think they'll see that you're as qualified as anyone, and more qualified than many. And there's no question regarding how much you care about this site. :cheers:

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Well, there's only 40 hours during the work week, so that leaves plenty of time. And quite honestly, most of the time I'm not at work I'm either downstairs cleaning tubs and feeding, or up here online. And a very big portion of that time is spent on this website--and that will only increase as breeding season gets closer.

Funny that you bring up prior contributions. Slighty off topic, but I was copying and pasting all of my FAQ threads into my personal forum and it appears that the 3 FAQ's have been viewed about 10,000 in combination. I was genuinely surprised about that. Enough in fact that I'm going to go back later tonight and finally finish them off with appropriate links and even tackle a Breeding FAQ.

I certainly don't expect to get squat for votes, and that's fine. I just hope that the addition of a few moderators can get this website back to where it belongs.

Rich Z said:

Speaking of which, I will also put a "none of the above" vote when I make up that poll. The purpose of that will be to give everyone the opportunity to plainly state that one of two things: (1) They don't want anyone on that list to be a moderator, or (2) They don't want ANYONE at all to be a moderator here, and wish things to remain as they are now. If that option in the voting gets the majority of the votes, then I will consider that as a clear signal to just drop this whole idea.

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thank you Rich............i was wondering if i was even going to be able to vote on this issue, but it looks like now i can. is there any time-frame on when you think the poll might go up.

thanks
galen

I might have missed this, but...

Are we going to vote for one, or more than one? Seems like it would be a good idea to have back ups. Maybe something like 1st, 2nd, 3rd choice? That might give Rich a better selection if the first person gets too tired, busy, etc.

The poll we be put up sometime in the next few days. I wanted to make sure all nominations were in, as they will not be added after I start the poll.

The poll will be multiple choice so you can vote for as many of the candidates as you feel is warranted. The one or more with the highest votes will be the ones YOU ALL choose to be moderators here.

The vote will be anonymous so there will be none of that "why didn't YOU vote for ME?" stuff.

The voting itself will run for a week or so, depending on the turnout.

Rich...I just want to say that I applaud you for deciding to place some moderators here. I think it has been needed for a long time. I honestly hope it helps. I miss the old CS forum family atmosphere!

Well, I'm not really sure this will fix that problem at all. It may just wind up changing one problem into another. Some people are thinking that trolls were the cause of the problems. Others are thinking it was something else, I guess. Personally, I'm not sure, as the REACTIONS to trolls are what really make trolls successful at reaching their goals.

I had hoped that I could let this forum evolve on it's own without my direct involvement with it's direction. Maybe ALL forums just reach a point of potential self destruction no matter what you do........ :shrugs: Question is, is it accidental or by design from external influences? Certainly I have seen enough incidences of malicious attacks by trolls to know I can't rule out any possibilities. To what end, though? Probably just because they CAN.....

Unfortunatley, you may be right. There are a lot of malicious people in this world. Think of all of the people who create viruses that damage who knows how many computers each year. While I am sure there are some that are created with a specific purpose in mind, other are created for the fun of it. There are so many other horrific things happening in this world. I guess it would be dreaming to think that bad things won't happen on the net.

http://www.cornsnakes.com/forums/showthread.php?t=46670
It seems like every time I click on a post with a lot of replies it's one like this one. It feels like people are just so adamant about making their point and being right that they don't realize what it does to the site. I don't think there were really any trolls in this thread but it left a bad taste in my mouth just the same. I wish more people just knew when to walk away. like Kathy Love and Susan. (I'm adding them to my list of good potential mods)

shed'n my skin said:

http://www.cornsnakes.com/forums/showthread.php?t=46670
It seems like every time I click on a post with a lot of replies it's one like this one. It feels like people are just so adamant about making their point and being right that they don't realize what it does to the site. I don't think there were really any trolls in this thread but it left a bad taste in my mouth just the same. I wish more people just knew when to walk away. like Kathy Love and Susan. (I'm adding them to my list of good potential mods)

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For those who don't feel like trudging through that thread (and I can't blame you), I'll give you a summary. The O.P. was on vacation and received word from the person taking care of his snakes that his under-aged female had laid eggs. The female had been cohabbed with a male. The O.P. wasn't going to be home for a week, but wanted advice to pass on to the person taking care of the snakes. Some members gave incubation advice (though no one knew if these eggs were fertile, least of all the O.P.), then mike17l offered this advice:

mike17l said:

you could always place the eggs in a brown paper bag, and place the bag in a plastic trash bag, and then place that in a dumpster.

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He was immediately jumped on. Some people jumped on him because they felt that his advice was inhumane, and others because they felt that he didn't use sufficiently sensitive language to present his opinion. In my opinion, which I'm not only entitled to have but to express as well, both of these views were B.S.. Some agreed with Mike and me, and others did not. Some resorted to name calling, of which I was guilty at one point too (but if you see it in context, you may agree that it wasn't the most egregious breach of debate etiquette). Then Kathy comes back and praises the discussion in general, while condemning the name calling, and bows out of the public discussion. I agreed with her 100%. The last post I saw was Susan's, which I can't categorize as merely "walking away". As is her right, she expressed the opinion she is entitled to and then said good-bye. From that perspective, my last post in that thread was a "walk away" too.

What I'm having trouble with here is the concept that people shouldn't be adamant about making their points on an open discussion board. Argument and debate are legitimate forms of discussion. If discussion is hurting this board, and people don't want discussions to be held here, then why don't we just shut down the posting capabilities and make this an archive? God knows that 99.5% of all possible topics have already been discussed.

And let's remember that this is a community. I saw my friend mike17l attacked for semantics and content, and I defended him. In my "real world" community I would have done the same for a friend whom I thought was being treated unfairly. Another thing I'm having trouble with is the concept that members should word their opinions in such a way that they don't offend ANYONE's sensibilities-- from the coldly objective to the hyper-sensitive. How the heck do you do that? Maybe we should institute hyper-courteous pre-formatted replies, and we can fill them in like mad libs. Or better yet, we could appoint a huge "post modification" team, whose job it would be to make sure that all posts conform to a strict standard so that no one ever feels that their little piggies are in danger of being stepped upon. I nominate me for the team. I'll start with Mike's post:

mike17l as modified by Roy Munson said:

May I humbly, and with all due respect suggest another option to your most excellent and honorable person? Gently and lovingly place each egg in its own little paper bag. On each bag compose a little poem of love and deep respect for the tiny life that may be nestled inside. With utmost respect and care, place each little bag into a larger bag while uttering a few words of compassion and respect to the contents. Drive that bag to a secluded spot of beauty and peace where the little cell clusters that may or may not reside in those eggs may be afforded the opportunity to again join the benevolent ALL. If you would rather attempt to incubate the eggs, please don't bother researching the methods on your own. I know this is a trying time for you, so please PM me, and I will gently and tactfully hand you any and all answers that you may need.

Peace and Love,
Mike

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uke01:

Hee hee hee. That made me laugh. I agree with you 100%, Dean.

I actually considered posting in that thread asking if anyone had ever made a snake egg omelet. 1) I was genuinely curious and 2) it would be a way not to waste the eggs but not to incubate them either if the person was unprepared for that. If that happened to me, I'd probably make scrambled snake eggs, take a teeny taste, and then feed them to the dogs, who'd eat them if I didn't like them. But though I was genuinely interested in this idea, I didn't float it in that thread because that thread wasn't very welcoming of ideas. The O.P. only wanted to hear certain ideas and certain reponses, and so did many of the later posters.

The way Mike was jumped on was pretty ridiculous. He wasn't talking about smashing kittens' heads and dumping them in a dumpster. He was suggesting not incubating eggs. All of us who buy eggs from "happy chickens" probably do the same, though I don't actually recall if free-ranging chickens actually have physical access to a rooster.

It's interesting that people get jumped on for jumping on lazy, practically unintelligible posters, or for people who refuse good advice and really only post to hear what they want to hear, but it's OK to jump on people for being insensitive? Doesn't make sense. Of course, I think it's ok to express your opinion strongly and articulately about anything you want, but I could be in the minority in that feeling. Oh, and I draw a distinction between expressing your opinion strongly and articulately and name-calling. The former can sometimes include the latter, but the latter doesn't include the former, and that's the problem with it.

My beef with that thread was that I couldn't care less who was right or wrong. I saw valid points made by both sides. It was the name calling (I recall A-hole) by both sides. In a perfect world we would all express our opinions and everything would just be hunky dory and Rich wouldn't be asking for a mod in the first place.
Kathy Love and Susan both made positive posts which expressed the way I felt pretty well and my main reason for bringing the thread up was because their attitude was exemplary of what I'd like to see in a moderator.

Dean mentioned the following..

In my "real world" community I would have done the same for a friend whom I thought was being treated unfairly. Another thing I'm having trouble with is the concept that members should word their opinions in such a way that they don't offend ANYONE's sensibilities-- from the coldly objective to the hyper-sensitive. How the heck do you do that?

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Hey welcome to the PC culture, this not only happens here Dean, but is very relavent in the real world.. Problem is most people are to damn self centred as opposed to being centred..

I have said it before and I will say it again, one of the must reads is Dale Carnigie's " How to win friends and Influence People".. We also have to know when enough is enough, leaving us with the only option of just walking away.

Regards.... Tim of T and J

Just asking, Dean...have you gone back to the beginning of that thread and read it again down to mike171's "offensive" response? I don't think it's his response, as such, that was the problem, for me anyway. I found the sort of off-topic nature of it more the problem, as well as it's wording in that instance, plus all the nastiness that resulted from it further along in the thread. Had the O.P. asked about all the options available about what to do with the eggs, or had mike171 gave some sort of an "intro" to his remark, perhaps it would have sat better with me. The O.P. already knew that the eggs may or may not be viable, but he was still hoping. That remark basically told the O.P. that he shouldn't even bother hoping, and that he's an idiot for even thinking it.

shed'n my skin said:

My beef with that thread was that I couldn't care less who was right or wrong. I saw valid points made by both sides. It was the name calling (I recall A-hole) by both sides. In a perfect world we would all express our opinions and everything would just be hunky dory and Rich wouldn't be asking for a mod in the first place.
Kathy Love and Susan both made positive posts which expressed the way I felt pretty well and my main reason for bringing the thread up was because their attitude was exemplary of what I'd like to see in a moderator.

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I'm guilty as charged, Jen. But I can't really say that I feel all that regretful. Here's the exchange:

PosterX said:

I think Mike's comment was uncalled for and harsh, he came on here asking for help and some jerkoff tells him to toss them in the trash. I mean seriously how is that constructive?

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Roy said:

I gave you conciliatory rep for your bread and cheese joke. I wish I could take it back. You're just a confrontational a-hole. Calling another poster a "jerkoff" for presenting opinions that are 100x more informed and consistent than your own is uncalled for. You should stick to regurging info in the husbandry sub-forum.

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Reason I probably SHOULDN'T be a mod #234: I'm not always against name-calling. Sometimes the shoe fits, and the poster's already wearing it. Do I pretend it's not there when my friends and I are being kicked with it? Maybe profanity, implied or spelled out, isn't really such a good thing. I feel the slightest twinge of regret over that word choice of mine. Maybe I should have just written confrontational hypocrite. I mean, that poster obviously IS one in that thread. But I don't know, I'd still have been calling him a name. I see lots of name-calling around here, but without even the slightest link to the profane, these names fly under the radar. But I take notice when confrontational hypocrites call my well-meaning friends "jerkoffs". People who conduct themselves this way are-- all together now-- A-HOLES!

Another point about profanity: some profane words/phrases are more or less offensive than others, and this can differ relative to time, place, and company. Of course, this hierarchy is subjective, and each of us probably has a different idea of where and when lines should be drawn. You could reasonably assert that the word PosterX fully spelled out is a synonym of the word I implied. I find his word much more inflammatory, but maybe some members here don't see a difference, and I don't have a problem with that. When I was a kid, "this sucks", or "you're a scumbag" would have been considered profane (if you don't know what a scumbag really is, go look it up), but today they're generally accepted as non-profanity. But I will not accept that I was as "out-of-line" as PosterX, as some have implied by lumping all of the "name calling" together.

And if anyone wants to call ME an a-hole for any of the statements I've made, I won't mind.

Susan said:

I found the sort of off-topic nature of it more the problem, as well as it's wording in that instance, plus all the nastiness that resulted from it further along in the thread. Had the O.P. asked about all the options available about what to do with the eggs, or had mike171 gave some sort of an "intro" to his remark, perhaps it would have sat better with me. The O.P. already knew that the eggs may or may not be viable, but he was still hoping. That remark basically told the O.P. that he shouldn't even bother hoping, and that he's an idiot for even thinking it.

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1) The nastiness that ensued after Mike's post cannot be blamed on Mike.
2) Mike's post did NOT say that the O.P. shouldn't even bother hoping, and that he's an idiot for even thinking it. This is what you chose to INFER from Mike's post, and it's really not fair putting what you infer from what someone says on that person. Your inferences could be wrong. Inferences often are. It's always best to ask someone directly if they meant to imply what you have inferred, just to be clear.

To make my point, I inferred from Mike's apparently calculated and completely emotionless "tone" that he was making the point that in that particular situation, there were other, possibly more rational choices that were being overlooked. The tone of his post made me think long and hard about what the most rational choice really was, instead of getting carried away in the emotion of needing to "save" the eggs. Since this is how I took his post, his tone was spot-on, because it was part of the point he was making.

BUT, I don't really know if that's the point he was making with his tone, and neither does any of us. And it's certainly not fair to Mike to get upset with him for what we think his tone implied if we don't check to see if we were right. I agree--things got out of hand in that thread, but none of that can be rightly pinned on Mike's original post.